TikTok > YouTube&Instagram
Ofcom’s latest report on UK news consumption reveals that the just for fun app is the most used news source across all platforms for teens, followed by YouTube and Instagram.

Why is it the most popular in the digital world?
TikTok’s popularity is due to a powerful algorithm that selects what people see on their screen, as well as an effective search function that has made the app a compelling platform for users of all ages. But is TikTok really useful, and why do scandalous cases with it persist?

According to the study, for kids aged 12-15, TikTok is now the most used single news source across all platforms at 28%, followed by YouTube and Instagram at 25% each. However, the BBC still has the largest reach of any news organization among this age group when all its news channels are taken into account – across BBC iPlayer, radio stations, websites and TV channels – 39%.

Traditional news sites now old fashioned?
According to Ofcom, 16 to 24 year olds are 30% more likely to consume news via social media on their phones than adults, and more likely to consume news online than adults. That is, young people in this age group are also less likely than adults to choose traditional news websites as their news source (6% vs. 26%) and more likely to turn to social media. For example, Instagram is the most used single news source for young people at 44%, although BBC One is tied with Facebook at 33%.

But that’s not all. The survey shows that TikTok as a news source has become more popular with adults, with one in 10 adults using it to follow the news, beating rivals BBC Radio 1 and Channel 5 for the first time.

A minute of fun in TikTok – more desirable than a minute of happiness in the real world?
For adults, the survey reveals that TV news is the most popular source, used by 70% of UK adults. For now, BBC One remains the most used news source across all platforms, followed by ITV. Both channels have declined over the last five years – BBC One by 62% and ITV by 41%. Similarly, Facebook has also declined over the same period. TikTok’s rapid evolution seems to be beating the competition, even if the original idea for the platform was just for fun. Today, TikTok is the dictator of the new generation, and despite the many scandalous cases around the world, it continues to conquer the digital world, and along with it, it is taking over the daily lives of users in the real world.

In order to get a more holistic view of who will win the 2022 World Cup, the prediction model estimates the probability of each match outcome – win, draw or loss – using betting market odds and Stats Perform’s team rankings.

The odds and rankings are based on historical and recent team performances. The model then takes into account the strength of the opponent and the difficulty of their path to the final, using match outcome probabilities taking into account the composition of the groups and the distribution of places in the knockout stages.

According to the model, England has a 60% chance of topping the group and the fifth highest chance of winning the tournament overall (9%). Wales’ match with the USA looks key to their chances of getting out of Group B. Their chances of progressing to the last 16 are 41%, while the USA’s are slightly higher at 45%. The other countries which have chances to win according to the model are France, Brazil and Argentina.

Log4Shell was called one of the most serious security vulnerabilities during the past decade. Jen Easterly, who is a CISA head, called it “a severe risk”. Not only that but Microsoft also warned that some of the hacking groups are using Log4Shell.

The company explained that most of the tracked nation-state activity groups which are originating from China, Iran, North Korea, and Turkey, were using the vulnerability for different kinds of activities such as doing experiments or targeting attacks.

CISA even added it to the “Known Exploited Vulnerabilities Catalog”. It is a list which contains the most common security flaws that carry significant risk to the federal organization. That’s why the agency set a deadline (by December 24) for the federal civilian executive-branch to do its best in order to mince the problem with the IT systems patched with new softwares.

John Graham-Cumming, who is Cloudflare’s chief technical officer, told BBC:

“For example, when you buy something online, your username might be written to a log file for later processing. Unfortunately, a flaw in Log4j meant that by using special characters in data that is logged, it is possible to get a machine inside a company to run code that an attacker controls. This gives them a foothold inside what would normally be a secure, protected computer.”

Measures to protect its users from the vulnerability were taken by Cloudflare – a company that provides internet security and other services which are meant to help online businesses operate smoothly.

Experts were reported “estimated months to years of finding new instances of this vulnerability across enterprises and vendors” by security news site SC Media.

Companies were called on to install the latest updates immediately wherever Log4j is known to be used, by The UK’s National Cyber Security Centre.

In their opinion, Facebook promotes violence against the persecuted minority and that’s why they are demanding more than $150bn (£113bn) in compensation. However, the platform did not give an immediate response, even though it is accused of allowing spreading hateful and dangerous misinformation for years.

A British law firm which is representing some of the refugees has written a letter to Facebook. Www.bbc.com gave some information about it. The letter is said to contain accusations of failing to invest in moderators and fact checkers who actually knew about the political situation in Myanmar. Also, the company is blamed for not taking down posts or deleting accounts that incite violence against Rohingya. Furthermore, in their words it did not take appropriate and timely action, even with all the warnings from charities and media.

As for the US lawyers, they field a legal complaint against Facebook. They accuse the media of being “willing to trade the lives of the Rohingya people for better market penetration in a small country in Southeast Asia.” In an investigation by the Reuters news agency, there were posts that appeared, stating: “We must fight them the way Hitler did the Jews.” Another one said: “Pour fuel and set fire so that they can meet Allah faster.”

The platform has more than 20 million users in Myanmar, and it is the main or even the only way of getting and sharing news.  In 2018 Facebook did admit that its efforts to prevent the incitement of violence and hate speech against the Rohingya were not enough.

The social media site was hugely popular there. It seems, however, that the company was not aware of what was happening on its own platform. That’s why they didn’t actively moderate content in local languages like Burmese and Rakhine. But if they did, they would have seen anti-Muslim hate speech and disinformation about terrorist plots from the Rohingya.

Meta, however, which is now Facebook’s parent company, is trying to turn the focus away from the social platform.

Facebook is largely protected from liability over content posted by its users, under the US law. However, the new lawsuit argues the law of Myanmar, and it has no such protections.

For example during the US Election, the BBC News website received visits from over 165 million unique browsers from around the world.

“During the election week the Web Core stack averaged 80,000 requests per minute, peaking at 120,000 requests per minute to our platform. Those requests are the ones which made it past the traffic management layers (caches) in front of us. At its peak our edge traffic managers and CDNs saw 2.5 million page views per minute (around 41,000 requests per second),” writes Ishmael.

BBC engineers use serverless for two high CPU intensive areas of the application that require unpredictable scaling. The first is the React app that server-side renders the HTML, and “the second is the business logic layer, which transforms data from many different BBC systems into a common data model”. They are running over 100 million serverless function invocations per day.

Caching is done between the Lambda layers. It is performed to reduce function chaining, where one Lambda calls another Lambda and then waits for it to complete. This chaining incurs additional costs as Lambdas are charged proportionally to their execution time, even when they are idle. Another reason is to allow the backend serverless function to refresh the cache in the background without a user request having to wait for it.

“As an example, let’s take the breaking news story around the London Bridge attack in November 2019. The traffic profile at our edge cache for this page resulted in a 3x increase in traffic in a single minute (4k req/s to 12k req/s) followed by a near-doubling of traffic a few minutes later (12k req/s to 20k req/s).

These key moments are critical for the BBC, and they are the moments in which the audience turn to us. We must not fail. Any technology we choose must be able to respond to these traffic patterns.”

You can read Ishmael’s full blog post HERE.