Tiktok & Roblox Are Evil! Dispatch #2

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Hindenburg Research dropped a report on Roblox last week. It was damning. And legal redacted filings leaked in cases being brought against Tiktok, revealing some uncomfortable internal comms.

Further ahead, I expand on both and sample some perspectives. First, some more entertaining stuff.

‘The Amazing Digital Circus’ comes to Netflix from Youtube

If you have not heard, this YouTube hit was licensed to Netflix in a unique deal where the show will continue to be on Youtube while also making its way to the premium streamer. Last week it broke into Netflix’s Weekly Global Top 10, days after releasing on the platform.

The Amazing Digital Circus follows a cast of humans who have become trapped in said circus, a virtual reality game; it is a “psychological dark comedy about cute cartoon characters who hate their lives and want to leave“.

Just about one year ago, Glitch Productions uploaded the pilot of this show by Gooseworx to YouTube. It came with a call to the ether, to get funding for a full season of The Amazing Digital Circus. Months later, in May, they released a second episode. Both amassed close to half a billion views (and very much counting). Now, Netflix has launched the first three episodes on October 4, the same day that the show’s third episode premiered on Youtube. While the details of the deal are not public, its unique aspects were underscored by the statement from Glitch,

“And to be clear; We’re still independently funding everything, we still get full control of the show, and episodes will continue to ALWAYS come out on YouTube first.”

This is in line with their previous stated aims of being a Youtube-first endeavour with the clarity of owning their IP. In an?interview with CartoonBrew.com - Animation News last year, Glitch’s GM Jasmine Yang said,

“We are a Youtube-first company. We believe very strongly in the future and potential of Youtube for long-form animation. Control of the brand is essential to us. Having control of merchandise, marketing, and licensing under us, who work directly with the showrunner, lets us translate the artists’ visions more accurately.”

Emily Horgan has more breakdowns here.

More Entertainment+

• HBO Max announces its launch in Southeast Aisa, Hong Kong & Taiwan.
• Meanwhile, Mike Darcey has a clear-eyed breakdown of the potential standoff between HBO/WBD and Sky in the UK, which has been the home of all HBO content in the country for about 15 years now.
• In India, Amazon and MX Player have integrated. MX Player is a leading AVOD streaming platform. Amazon has announced its acquisition of ‘select assets’, including the MX Player app. They have now merged with Amazon miniTV, to create Amazon MX Player.
• Streaming of K-pop has surged 362% globally over 5 years, Spotify says.
• In a move that might have surprised many, Apple and Amazon have cut a deal to bring the Apple TV+ streaming service to Amazon’s Prime Video channels. Rich Greenfield / of LightShed says this is "Game over".
• In India, the airline Indigo and Spotify have teamed up to offer travellers customised Travel Playlists. There’s an “in-app gamified journey that personalises playlists based on their travel destinations, mood, and genre preference, through a dedicated microsite”, plus a 4 month free subscription to Spotify, by booking tickets via the IndiGo website.
• Bad Streaming? John Malone, media investor & mogul recently called streaming “a terrible business”. “In Dr. Malone’s view, ‘There shouldn't have been a Netflix’. This prompted a good take on that here from Ryan Faughnder at the LA Times, including a bit of a Netflix analysis.

Me? I think calling streaming a rank disaster sounds very odd indeed. The problem is, streaming is very different things for different people. The likes of Netflix and Prime Video (and if we must, Apple TV), and regional players like Viuu , for example, have streaming as their raison d’être. Many other streamers are in reality the survival arm of legacy media players. As such, it has been much harder for them to build a streaming business free from the pull of traditional media assets and burdens.

LOOK! Curated/Cuts.

• ‘Its Always Burberry Weather’ comes to us with some very autumnal vignettes for an outdoor line, from a luxury brand that here eschews loud luxury for warm, moody and gently quirky pieces. These are filmed around London and the British countryside with a diverse set of (celebrity) ambassadors- actors, musicians and footballers, all treated with a sort of familiar idiosyncrasy. Here is a playlist. · Burberry · Frosty ·

• PARI is the People's Archive of Rural India . Here, their photographer and journalist Palani kumar people writes on the footwear he’s encountered in both life and work, touching on what stories they might tell of their wearers.
• High fashion typography? If you like fonts and you like fashion, you’re in luck. Well, kinda. Wisdom Kaye is a model, stylist and creator who has crafted some very cool looks to match with the ‘personas’ fonts have. Two short videos, here & here.
• ‘Captured’ from Apple showcases cinematic slow motion on the iPhone 16Pro. Some beautiful visuals, but is there much else? by SMUGGLER .
• BBC Studios’s ‘ASIA’ with David Attenborough released a trailer. The interesting bit? K-pop band Seventeen perform the song. Check it out.

TICK, TOCK.

After documents from still pending legal proceedings around TikTok were leaked, internal TikTok communications have been made public that show “a company unconcerned with the harms the app poses for American teenagers. This is despite its own research validating many child safety concerns.” Some extracts from Tiktok documents/their own internal quotes:

• “Minors do not have executive function to control their screen time, while young adults do.”
• “As expected, across most engagement metrics, the younger the user, the better the performance.”
• Allegedly, the success of this tool was gauged by how it was “improving public trust in the TikTok platform via media coverage,” rather than how it reduced the time teens spent on the app.
• Indications the algorithm favours 'beautiful' creators.

Of course, these were meant to be sealed and are from the prosecution’s filings only.

A reminder that TikTok has until January (less than 100 days now, check out Jim Louderback 's ticktock countdown there!) to divest from its Chinese parent company, 字节跳动 , or face a nationwide ban in the US. Those of us concerned by these, should view them also in context of other platforms, their powerful impact on young people as well, and their measures (with their likely efficacy or lack of), such as Instagram ’s recent efforts for Teen accounts.

AI

1. OpenAI announces a Singapore office. “These plans reflect Singapore’s leadership position in technology and AI”. Relatedly, Singapore’s literary community has been hesitant about generative AI. Writers pushed back earlier this year against a plan by the government to train a regional LLM on published works.
2. Mark Zuckerberg ruffled some feathers when he recently suggested that creators’ work is not as valuable as they think, “I think individual creators or publishers tend to overestimate the value of their specific content in the grand scheme”. The Verge has a good lay of the land piece on this here.

• In some ways, you can understand the instinctive rising of hackles of those who create, make, craft their content. Not just for the dismissive tone of the comment but the casual deployment of ‘fair use’ in the same interview. But, this is also a sobering perspective and a reality of sorts (and in some ways, the truth in our corporation-controlled world).
• Having said that, I found Kris Holland ’s comment here on-point, “Any one person's data is statistically inconsequential. That's why it should be opt in, not opt out. All of our data is what makes the difference. Just like 'one vote matters', our cumulative voice is what makes AI work.”
• Elsewhere, Rafael Brown was less gentle in his take. “Why is Zuck intentionally bullshitting about IP law he knows? Because it is useful from a corporate perspective. Fair Use does not allow unlimited commercial exploitation.“

3. Daron Acemoglu, Prof at MIT has been a sharp commenter on AI. He has recently said that AI can do only 5% of jobs. Acemoglu envisions three ways the AI story could play out in coming years.

• The most benign scenario sees the hype cool and investments move to “modest” uses of the technology.
• A second scenario sees the frenzy grow for maybe another 12 months , leading to a tech stock crash. “AI spring followed by AI winter.”
• The third is the most extreme- the mania goes unchecked, companies cut scores of jobs, pump hundreds of billions into AI “without understanding what they’re going to do with it,” then find themselves scrambling to rehire when the technology doesn’t pan out.

He figures it’s some combination of the second and third scenarios. “Inside C-suites, there’s just too much fear of missing out on the AI boom to envision the hype machine slowing down any time soon.”

And so to ROBLOX.

Hindenburg Research dropped a report on Roblox last week. It was damning. This is, of course, the standard MO for Hindenburg that releases exposés as it also shorts the stock, standing to gain from the companies’ loss.

Some quick highlights from their detailed report- they accuse Roblox of:

1. Inflating the number of uniques- “consistently overstating the amount of people on its platform by 25 percent to 42 percent or more”
2. Failing to account for alternate and bot accounts, despite internal tracking.
3. Overstating engagement hours by 100%.
4. Compromised child safety- “in-game research revealed an X-rated pedophile hellscape.”

Expectedly, there has been much chatter on this. A flood of voices have taken the opportunity to bemoan these known issues, especially around child safety.

While there is the clear caveat the Hindenburg stands to profit from this report, there seems to not be a lot of actual disputing of what the report contains- deception in numbers & a swathe of unsafe content for minors, with guardrails that are persistently insufficient or ineffective.

The stock fell & recovered. Some say this is the market recognising the criticisms as “foundational problems of how we operate online”, the general thinking being that ”Hindenburg is not wrong to question the viability of Roblox, but their mechanism for doing so misses the mark.”

This is part of the wider argument that goes something like, “this is the internet, so get real guys. Yes its not great, but hey why aren’t you going after other platforms?”.

I have viewed Roblox with much positivity from afar (and am teetering on the edge of my kids entering its world). So without any preconceived bias either way, my take: wide ranging or systemic problems cannot absolve individual players. The problem becomes more acute when it is a platform specifically for children, with a large percentage below 13 years. With that demographic, expectations are (and must be) different.

“Everybody else is also screwing up” doesn’t quite cut it.

As for the ‘everybody else’? The Hindenburg report itself tellingly states, "Overall, we think Roblox has adopted the Silicon Valley approach of ‘growth at all costs’”.

And over at The Information, Martin Peers says a reckoning is coming- “after years of cashing in on social media’s popularity, tech companies may find the bill is coming due.”.

{ Hindenburg Research has established itself as one of the most powerful voices in public activist short-selling, hammering the share prices of multiple big name companies in recent years with its blockbuster reports. It has also developed a reputation for its fearlessness, regularly launching big public short bets and serious allegations despite the potential minefield of litigation. }

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