Tiktok (formerly Musica.ly) is the massively popular, $75b social media sensation primarily used for short lip-sync clips with high-precision choreography and endlessly inventive special effects and video techniques.But it's not without its problems: the company was censured and fined by the FTC for violating the privacy of its youngest users, and added insult to injury by summarily deleting those users' creations with little or no warning. It has also become a favored vehicle for Chinese state propaganda.But despite that, the service's Chinese videos have become a vital and candid window onto the Chinese genocide of Muslim Uyghurs in Xinjiang province, especially among Uyghurs in exile, who rely on phones with Chinese SIMs to give them access to videos that hint at the extent of the abuses, from seemingly forced Uyghur-Han marriages to rare glimpses of their own stolen children in Chinese orphanages, chanting patriotic slogans. Tiktok is coming under tighter Chinese state scrutiny though, driven in part by a drive to censor videos from the Hong Kong uprising, and a Guardian report on a leaked set of the company's internal censorship guidelines reveals that the company has instituted its own "shadowban," through which some controversial videos are silently made visible only to the person who posted them, as well as rules banning "criticism/attack towards policies, social rules of any country, such as constitutional monarchy, monarchy, parliamentary system, separation of powers, socialism system, etc" and "demonisation or distortion of local or other countries’ history such as May 1998 riots of Indonesia, Cambodian genocide, Tiananmen Square incidents" and "highly controversial topics, such as separatism, religion sects conflicts, conflicts between ethnic groups, for instance exaggerating the Islamic sects conflicts, inciting the independence of Northern Ireland, Republic of Chechnya, Tibet and Taiwan and exaggerating the ethnic conflict between black and white."Also blocked for Chinese users on the service: memes about the "Momo" urban legend, as well as commentary on "Kim Jong-il, Kim Il-sung, Mahatma Gandhi, Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, Barack Obama, Kim Jong-un, Shinzo Abe, Park Geun-Hee, Joko Widodo and Narendra Modi" (Xi Jinping is not on the list). Read the rest

Thomas Cook is one of the oldest travel agencies in the world, operating their own flights, ships, hotels, etc, whose founders effectively invented modern tourism (listen to this excellent Stuff You Missed in History Class episode for the fascinating and fraught tale of how that happened) but a consolidation in the travel industry combined with private equity chicanery that loaded the company up with $2.1b in debt in order to pay out investors drove the company to its knees, and, last week, it finally died.The collapse stranded 150,000 passengers and resulted in the cancellation of 600,000 paid-for future holidays, and the UK government has had to dig into its own pockets to pay to bring 16,500 British stranded passengers home (the largest peacetime repatriation in UK history!), leaving it to the British taxpayers to clean up after the financial wizards who crashed the firm.But those financial wizards aren't done yet: Chief Executive Peter Fankhauser has pulled in GBP8.3m since he took the job in 2015, and other execs drew fat checks -- even as the stranded aircrews were left to fend for themselves (some say they were quoted GBP10,000 for flights home).It's a story that's familiar to anyone who followed the looting and destruction of Toys R Us, right down to the employees being turfed out with nothing while the sociopaths who engineered the destruction took home millions.Thomas Cook was brought down by a $2.1 billion debt pile, built up by a series of ill-fated deals, that hobbled its response to nimble online rivals. Read the rest