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What TikTok’s impending ban has to do with you

What TikTok’s impending ban has to do with you

Michael Dwyer
March 24, 2023

Good morning, this is LGTM, the best part of tech besides the paycheck 😉

Here’s what we have for you this week:

Cash App Criminals
TikTok & You

Is Jack Dorsey for real?

Jack Dorsey’s Block, Inc. (Cash App and Square) is being accused of fraud and aiding criminal activity by activist short-seller Hindenburg Research.

Hindenburg Research documented the company’s alleged “willingness to facilitate fraud against consumers and the government, avoid regulation, dress up predatory loans and fees as revolutionary technology, and mislead investors with inflated user metrics.”

Hitters were singing alright

The company claimed to use their “frictionless” fintech apps to empower those traditionally left out of banking, otherwise known as the “unbanked.” Well, maybe this population was unbanked for a reason… they were conducting… uh crimes.

Hindenburg claims criminals thrived on Cash App due to the company’s “Wild West” compliance which made scamming very easy. Block would simply backlist an account when fraud was detected, instead of banning a user.

Now comes the inflated user metrics, as a backlisted account owner would just make a new account and continue using the app. Apparently, many active users were just duplicate and fake accounts.

Hindenburg even made a music video compilation with all the references to Cash App.

Block also reported a pandemic surge in usage, but allegedly this had a lot to do with Cash App being used to commit Covid relief fraud.

Block is planning to explore legal action against Hindenburg for this report, as it claims these statements are misleading.

Here at LGTM, we’re thinking it might be best to think twice before signing up to work for the next Jack Dorsey related project…

What TikTok’s impending ban has to do with you

This week we learned that: the average TikTok user is ‘well past college age’.

This was part of a statement from ByteDance intended to convince US lawmakers not to ban TikTok. This news is actually not too surprising as I’m sure we all know plenty of 30+ year olds who lurk on TikTok when they should be closing out tickets.

Beyond claims that the data is not being used to poison the brains of America’s youth they are also defending the platform as being educational, citing the “BookTok” community as an example because, as we all know, reading books makes you like, really smart.

Using TikTok as a programmer is the best way to guarantee that you never leave the house

Have you heard of TechTok?

The educational claim also applies to TechTok, a community where you can go watch people fantasy role play as tech workers. This is the hub for all the “day in the life” and “what people think my life is like as a [tech job] vs. what it’s actually like” videos that teach you absolutely nothing.

Though some of these videos might have value for career path discovery, there is a lot of misinformation like over-hyped promises of high pay and little work that make people want to switch careers for a tech role.

So if TikTok is actively causing a gold-rush to the tech industry, would it actually be that bad for those of us genuinely interested in tech if it were banned?

Also, would there not immediately be a market gap for replacement apps that we could take advantage of? Ignoring all this screaming about privacy and Chinese psychological warfare, let’s just admit that TikTok is not doing the tech industry too many favors right now. We’re eager to see how this story develops and if TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew ever manages to give a straight answer. In the meantime, check out one of the few funny TechTok-related videos we found.

What TikTok’s impending ban has to do with you

Is Jack Dorsey for real?

What TikTok’s impending ban has to do with you

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