The balance of evidence suggests otherwise. If they cared about spam bots they would take action when spammers are handed to them on a silver platter. The kinds of spammers who will leave 30 identical comments advertising illegal services, not some weird moderation corner case.
If you ever end up on a video that's related to drugs, there will be entire chains of bots just advertising to each other and TikTok won't find any violations when reported. But sure, I'm sure they care a whole lot about not ending up like Twitter.
A large company is much less cohesive than you realize. You can't reliably reason about the goals of one part because another part isn't consistent. This particular difference could easily be explained by insufficient funding to moderation, which is endemic in social media.
So you're saying that TikTok's support team doing a poor job of handling reports is proof that the engineering team wasn't tasked with reducing spam by writing code obfuscation?
TikTok is a huge company, evidence of what the support department does or doesn't do has only minor bearing on the whole company, and basically none on the engineering department.
The thing that seems most likely to me is that they care about spam, the engineering department did this one thing, and the support department is either overworked or cares less. Or really efficient which is why you only see "a lot of spam", not "literally nothing but spam".
dns_snek|10 months ago
If you ever end up on a video that's related to drugs, there will be entire chains of bots just advertising to each other and TikTok won't find any violations when reported. But sure, I'm sure they care a whole lot about not ending up like Twitter.
wpietri|10 months ago
TheDong|10 months ago
TikTok is a huge company, evidence of what the support department does or doesn't do has only minor bearing on the whole company, and basically none on the engineering department.
The thing that seems most likely to me is that they care about spam, the engineering department did this one thing, and the support department is either overworked or cares less. Or really efficient which is why you only see "a lot of spam", not "literally nothing but spam".