TikTok and disinformation: a new social network wants to change the codes!
TikTok and disinformation: a new social network wants to change the codes!
Social networks are great and terrible tools at the same time. Between misinformation and information, the barrier is (sometimes) very thin, and it is this assumption that prompted the two creators of Instagram to launch a new kind of application.
Leaving Instagram to create a text-based TikTok
You don't know them, and yet, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger are the two geniuses behind Instagram, a social network that needs no introduction and which in the space of ten years has become an absolute success! For those who are not familiar with the history of the sharing service, it is important to remember that in 2012, Instagram was bought for several million dollars by Facebook (now Meta). And even if the two men remained in charge of their baby for a few years, the two stooges finally left the ship, in 2018, after alleged disagreements with the big boss Mark Zuckerberg
But now, today and five years later, the two men are getting back to work and officially launching their new application called Artifact! The idea behind it: to offer a personalized news feed boosted by machine learning. Since the announcement, some even lend themselves to saying that this feed aggregator is “a kind of textual TikTok” (The Platformer). If we are talking about it today, it is simply because the application has finished its test phase and is now available in most countries on iOS and Android.
A feed aggregator mixed with a social network
Beyond being an app with a personalized news feed, Artifact also offers a social feature that allows users to sync their contacts to see if a certain article has sparked a friend's interest. You should also know that the two men at the head of the project also plan to launch a feature allowing users to share and comment on articles that come up on the application. These last two features no longer leave much room for doubt; yes, Artifact is a social network and will be even more so in the future!
In terms of pure operation, the application asks, during your first visit, what are your interests. From there, the latter adapts to everyone's taste thanks to machine learning. The more you use Artifact, the more the application learns about what you like and don't like.
In a certain sense, artifacts follow the evolution of the current world. In the beginning, social networks showed us things that our friends shared. Then they showed us things based on the people we were following. And now we're in the phase where they're showing us things that the algorithm thinks we might be interested in, whether they're from people we follow or not. This trend was launched with the TikTok algorithm revolution, and so Artifact wants to do the same for text and news. It remains to be seen whether the application will succeed in creating a place for itself in people's daily lives in the midst of social networks and feed aggregators by offering a mix between the two.
