After Instagram and Snapchat, the well-loved platform for teenagers and young adults TikTok added a new “TikTok Now” feature on Thursday, which takes up the logic of BeReal with its dual front and rear cameras.
From now on, Chinese app users will get a notification every day at a certain time to capture the moment of a day.
This logic takes up that of BeReal, an application launched by two French people in 2020 which has seen its popularity ignite in recent months thanks to marketing aimed at spontaneity and regularity. At BeReal, the idea is to take a photo in mode selfie and in landscape mode to share it with a small circle of close friends.
However, this new feature does not follow the guideline of the TikTok application, which does not consider itself a social network like Facebook, centered on interactions between people who know each other. This new feature comes just a few days after the release of the survey of the start-up American NewsGuard on the misinformation posted on the Chinese application.
Fake news is pouring in
NewsGuard, an organization created in 2018 to counter misinformation, unveiled a survey on Wednesday claiming that “nearly 20% of videos that appear in search results contain misinformation”.
However, the application says it has put in place an artificial intelligence that sifts through the videos posted on its news feed. The TikTok company also reminded NewsGuard that its policies “make it clear that we do not allow dangerous misinformation, including medical misinformation, and that such content will be removed from the platform.”
In the United States, TikTok is in the crosshairs of many elected officials because of its parent company, the Chinese group ByteDance. They accuse the group of giving the Chinese government access to US user data, which it has always denied.
Allegations that raise questions about the influence that Tiktok and its competitors can have on misinformation, but also the mental health of its young audience.
Applications that are racing
According to web marketing consultant and lecturer Stéphanie Ouellette, this new feature is not surprising. “We see it, Instagram is trying to become TikTok and everyone wants to take the features of the others. It becomes a race for the social network that will be used the most, so features that are popular with others will be taken over by their competitor. »
Last July, Instagram introduced its users to its “Dual” feature, which copies BeReal’s idea of capturing images simultaneously with the lenses on the front and back of your phone.
A marketing trend that is not likely to calm down according to Mme Ouellette, since the functions are only flourishing so that these social networks can keep their users at their fingertips.