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Fast Company
07-07-2025
- Fast Company
Here's how far-right extremists hide in TikTok's earworms
Far-right extremists are exploiting TikTok 's 'use-this-sound' feature as a Trojan horse for hate speech, with most of the offending videos staying online for months, according to new research published in arXiv, Cornell University's preprint server. Marloes Geboers of the University of Amsterdam and Marcus Bösch at Heinrich-Heine University in Düsseldorf scraped thousands of clips from German, British, and Dutch TikTok feeds. They found that over three-quarters of videos using extremist audio were still accessible four months after they were first captured. Bösch says the project began when a familiar synth-pop loop transported him 'straight back to the 1990s.' 'Friends had a Nazi song on an actual tape,' he says. 'Thirty years later it was on TikTok, and kids were filming their walk to school to that soundtrack.' Tracking that song through TikTok led the researchers to dozens of trends in which seemingly harmless memes—such as users guessing what comes next in a song—masked what Bösch describes as 'brutal, racist, misogynist and death fantasy lyrics.' The researchers then set up new, clean TikTok accounts trained to follow right-wing content in the three countries and began scrolling for extremist posts. Their research uncovered extremist creators attaching hateful messages to everything from club classics by Gigi D'Agostino or Aqua to folk songs and even AI -generated tracks designed for niche audiences. 'There's Nazi techno, Nazi pop, Nazi folk—something for everyone,' Bösch explains. The goal was to lead users toward off-platform content intended to indoctrinate them into Nazi ideology. The team later checked the flagged videos two and four months after detection to see if they were still live. TikTok's moderation appears to struggle with audio-driven hate content. While the platform's data indicates that text-based slurs are often removed promptly, 86% of videos featuring a racist song the authors call 'Türke' remained online months later. Even overtly offensive material can evade detection: Bösch says he 'stumbled upon a Hitler speech' reused in over 1,000 videos, often accompanied by visuals from Nazi propaganda. 'You can't argue that's hard to see, hear or feel,' he says. 'It shouldn't be too hard to actually find these.' In a statement to Fast Company, a TikTok spokesperson says the company employs a combination of technology and human moderation to detect and remove content that promotes hate speech or hateful ideologies, and says 94% of such content is taken down before it's ever reported. 'We continuously strengthen our enforcement by updating our detection tools, consulting experts, and partnering with local organizations,' the spokesperson adds. Though Bösch acknowledges the challenges of moderating a platform at TikTok's scale, he believes more can be done. 'If a German court has banned a song, it shouldn't be too hard to try and ban this song,' he says.
Irish Times
21-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
The Mona Lisa is on the move and staff at the Louvre are not happy
The Mona Lisa is bound for a new part of the Louvre, which if she were alive she would presumably be very happy about, even if no one would be able to tell for sure. Her eyes have been following people around the room for so long that no one has stopped to think it could be the walls she's looking at with that hint of disgust. Maybe she's long fancied a change of scene. Unveiled by Emmanuel Macron, the French president, earlier this year, the plan to give her a room of her own at the Paris museum seems wise on paper, though I fear the comings and goings will seed the kind of confusion that makes perfect heist-plot material and risks bringing Danny Ocean and his crew out of retirement for one last job. As for that hint of disgust, researchers from the University of Amsterdam used emotion-recognition software in 2005 to quantify that the expression of the Mona Lisa, aka the Florentine noblewoman Lisa del Giocondo, nee Gherardini, is 9 per cent disgusted, 6 per cent fearful, 2 per cent angry, less than 1 per cent neutral and 83 per cent happy. READ MORE [ Potential new names for the Department of Arts: Smacc, Cacs, Scam and – my favourite – DoSac Opens in new window ] I don't have a precise breakdown of how staff at the Louvre feel, but this week's abrupt work stoppage suggests they are not quite 83 per cent happy and are somewhat more than 2 per cent angry. The museum failed to open for several hours on Monday morning because a scheduled staff meeting turned into what one union representative called 'a mass expression of exasperation'. The source of this exasperation isn't complicated. The Louvre is overcrowded, understaffed and crumbling, and workers aren't the only ones to have noticed. Visiting it has become 'a physical ordeal', with 'no space to take a break' and 'insufficient' toilet and catering facilities, its director, Laurence des Cars, warned in a memo to France's culture minister, Rachida Dati, in January. Even its architecture is conspiring against it. The glass-and-steel pyramid entrance, completed in 1989, creates a 'very inhospitable' greenhouse effect on hot days, while some areas suffer temperature variations that endanger the preservation of the artworks. And parts of the building are 'no longer watertight'. Soon after Le Parisien newspaper published this leaked memo about the leaky Louvre, Macron sprang into announcement mode, emptying the Salle des États – the room where the Mona Lisa currently resides – to reveal a renovation and expansion project dubbed its Nouvelle Renaissance. [ You might think it's Your Friends & Neighbors, but And Just Like That... is the only true aspirational show on TV Opens in new window ] The €800 million vision includes the addition of underground rooms, the construction of a new entrance near the river Seine and the relocation of Leonardo da Vinci 's masterpiece to a dedicated room accessible via an add-on to the main ticket. I saw the Mona Lisa in January 2005. A few months later it was moved to a different spot and placed in a sealed enclosure made of bulletproof glass. This was unconnected to my visit. What I remember about that trip to the Louvre is that Paris was freezing, so my expression by the time we reached the painting was likely 83 per cent relief just to be indoors. Another 10 per cent was probably fatigue from contemplating what felt like the majority of the Louvre's 33,000 less-famous artworks along the way, and 7 per cent was weirdly prescient regret that proper smartphones hadn't been invented yet. The great thing about the Mona Lisa is that it's small enough for a selfie. I'm confident I could have fitted my big Irish head and the whole portrait into one frame. I'm not now in the habit of taking selfies beside paintings, but a significant number of the near nine million people who visit the Louvre each year like to try. It doesn't necessarily lessen their appreciation of 16th-century art. They might not have had any to start with. And if you're paying €22 in, or €30 from 2026 if you're a non-EU visitor, it is perhaps not entirely daft to want a record of your 'ordeal'. As for those who snap only the painting, they may have concluded that the Mona Lisa's smile is enigmatic mainly because she is so tiny and far away. If they use their phones' zoom function, they can get a closer look. So don't blame the customers, blame the infrastructure, and adjust your expectations accordingly, because unless the Louvre's daily visitor cap is tightened, congestion and frustration seem inevitable for a while yet: the glaring flaw in Macron's ambitious plan for a roomier museum is that it will take up to 10 years to complete. My advice for anyone keen to absorb some Leonardo genius in the meantime is to choose Milan. Book well in advance and see The Last Supper instead . It beats the elbow-sharpening and neck-craning required to glimpse the Mona Lisa through a sea of screens – or, if you're my height, a selection of armpits that elicit at least 9 per cent disgust.
