TikTok confirms that its own employees can decide what goes viral

  • TikTok has confirmed that some of its employees can boost selected videos onto the platform’s ‘For You’ section using TikTok’s “Heating” button.
  • This enables the video to override the algorithm that supposedly tailors individual’s personalised feeds.
  • A spokesperson for TikTok has said that another reason for heating videos is to “promote some videos to help diversify the content experience”.
  • These videos are not labelled to show that they are boosted by TikTok and they make up “around 1-2%” of “total daily video views”.
  • For more on this story, please visit the Verge website.

Children seeking asylum were ‘kidnapped from Home Office hotels’

  • According to an Observer investigation, children seeking asylum are being abducted from Home Office hotels.
  • They are allegedly being abducted from the streets outside their hotel, with reports finding that 136 children who have stayed in the hotel over the last 18 months have been reported missing.
  • They found that 79 children remain unaccounted for.
  • A whistleblower said, “Children are literally being picked up from outside the building, disappearing and not being found. They’re being taken from the street by traffickers.”
  • For the full story, go to the Independent’s website.

School uniforms are meant to foster a sense of belonging and raise achievement- but it’s not clear they do

  • Research conducted on school uniform wearing at all 357 publicly funded secondary schools in Scotland has found that 96% had a compulsory uniform; the justification being that it was in the pupils’ own interests.
  • The most common reason given by schools for this was that uniform provides an ethos, sense of belonging, pride and an identity.
  • Schools have stated that uniform was beneficial in terms of the school’s reputation and that it would improve the pupils’ standard of work.
  • In a previous review of research studies, the Education Endowment Foundation did not find a link between wearing a uniform and improvement in learning.
  • For more on this story, please visit the Conversation’s website.