Anonymous TikTok accounts under the Blocus label promoted an October 24 gathering in Barcelona styled as a French-inspired student protest, but QR codes linked to private chats pushed looting instead of organising. The event turned violent, with masked youths smashing shop windows and clashing with police, resulting in 130 arrests—76 of them minors—and 14 injured officers. Mayor Jaume Collboni confirmed there is no evidence tying the unrest to the actual French student movement it claimed to echo.
theconversation.com
· 2026-10-28
TikTok introduced Must Eat, a new in-app feature that compiles restaurant recommendations from roughly 40 million posts, reviews and comments shared on the platform. The tool lets users browse 'everyday eats' and 'elevated dining' categories, filter by rating, distance, cuisine and open hours, call or reserve restaurants, and view a map of nearby spots. It launches first in New York City, Los Angeles and the Bay Area, and TikTok says restaurants cannot pay for placement in the lists.
theverge.com
· 2026-10-28
A new guide details how to identify smart glasses by their thicker frames, lens-housing bulges near the temples, and recording indicator lights. It also warns that some low-cost smart glasses sold on TikTok Shop and Temu lack recording lights, making them harder to detect by that method alone, while audio-only models like Ray-Ban Meta Audio Glasses have no cameras at all.
engadget.com
· 2026-10-27
Surfshark reports that a counterfeit TikTok Shop site generated over 320,000 phishing blocks between May and September 2026, accounting for 19% of all global phishing domain blocks tracked by its web content blocker. The VPN provider says the fake site remained the most-blocked phishing domain into October and is still active, with overall monthly phishing blocks rising 524% from April to September.
zdnet.com
· 2026-10-27
On October 2nd, as MLB's Division Series began, the league's Instagram and TikTok accounts posted a playoff highlight video scored to Olivia Rodrigo's album track 'My Way.' The clip, featuring players from the Brewers, Dodgers, White Sox and other postseason teams, has drawn more than 2.1 million views on Instagram and 615,000 on TikTok, with fans commenting on the unexpected pairing of baseball and the pop star.
theverge.com
· 2026-10-27
Entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuk, CEO of VaynerMedia, told attendees at Entrepreneur's Overcoming Impossible event that his businesses publish 900 pieces of social media content per day, a figure he says he wants to grow to 100,000 daily by next year. He urged business owners selling physical products to use AI tools to mass-produce images and video content and distribute it across YouTube Shorts, TikTok, Snapchat, LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter, while also recruiting TikTok affiliates to sell on commission.
entrepreneur.com
· 2026-10-26
A growing group of TikTok users across multiple languages are posting videos of themselves stripping copper wire from appliances and cables to sell as scrap, often showing the process in visually dramatic detail. Participants range from electricians and hobbyists to teenagers, with at least one seller offering hand-cast copper ingots on Etsy. The trend coincides with copper prices hitting record highs this year, reaching roughly $14,473 per metric ton in September, according to IMF data cited in the report.
wired.com
· 2026-10-26
A CNET writer tried the TikTok trend of simmering bacon in a skillet with a quarter cup of water before frying it in its own rendered fat. The method is meant to cook the meat evenly, reduce grease splatter, and slightly lower its sodium content. The tester reported the bacon came out crisp with a slight chew, and found it worked better than expected at preventing grease from popping.
cnet.com
· 2026-10-25
TikTok USDS Joint Venture, which runs TikTok in the US, has been exploring deals to secure several gigawatts of computing capacity over coming years, according to two people familiar with the matter cited by CNBC. One source said the target is around four gigawatts by the early 2030s. TikTok's spokesperson said the company runs primarily on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and that Oracle will remain its primary cloud provider.
cnbc.com
· 2026-10-23
Change.org has redesigned its petition platform to emphasize local political wins rather than broad national campaigns. The company says the overhaul aims to counter widespread skepticism among Americans about whether elected officials listen to them, citing survey data that more than 80% doubt their voice matters to officials.
fastcompany.com
· 2026-10-23
Current and former TikTok employees told NPR that internal reports flagged minors appearing in sexual content that viewers paid to access, with TikTok profiting from the transactions. They also said staff raised concerns about underage users evading age restrictions and blocking parental oversight, and about TikTok avoiding age-verification surveys to dodge FTC scrutiny. Employees say senior leadership knew but responded inadequately, and that concerns about suicide and self-harm content shown to minors were similarly unaddressed.
9to5mac.com
· 2026-10-21
Researchers at Copyleaks found TikTok videos that use AI to alter genuine arrest footage, often sourced from reality shows like TLC's "D.U.I.," to depict police officers kissing and groping real arrestees, mostly women. The fabricated clips are spliced before longer original arrest videos, and some carry disclaimers calling the content AI-generated entertainment with no harmful intent.
futurism.com
· 2026-10-21
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