the cuban opposition says dozens of activists have been arrested since sunday — when thousands of people joined the biggest protests in decades against the island's communist government. many were detained at the demonstrations, others were picked up from their homes. president diaz—canel has blamed the united states for the unrest. at least a0 people have been killed in a fire at a iraqi hospital treating coronavirus patients, in the city of nassiriya. health officials say the fire is now being brought under control but dozens of patients are said to be missing. south africa's governing anc party has warned that continuing violent demonstrations will have a devastating economic impact on the country. troops have been deployed to protect property, as protestors set buildings on fire and looted shops. the violence was triggered by the jailing of the former president, jacob zuma. now on bbc news: the media show.

hello. join us in the world of tiktok. if you don't know what it is, well, where have you been? it has more than 800 million users worldwide, including 1a million in the uk — and the rest of the media are now taking note. hollywood studios are casting tiktokers, record labels are snapping up tiktok singers, facebook and youtube have jumped on the short—form bandwagon with features that look strikingly similar. but tiktok is not without its critics — they say it's been used to the spread disinformation and violent content. remember how the trump administration accused tiktok of spying on us on behalf of the chinese government? well, today i'm trying to understand how this newcomer on the block has endeared itself to millions and provoked such fear in others. let me introduce

you to my guests. richard waterworth is tiktok�*s boss in europe. before that, he worked at itv and at youtube. rich, hello. hello. what is the big trend in uk tiktok today? is it the euros, maybe the new series of love island? tell us, tell us. 0h, you've hit the nails on the head. i think it's all about the euros today, england playing this evening. there's a video from the england football team that has been incredibly popular on tiktok today. if i tell you it's of them messing around in a pool with an inflatable unicorn, i think that gives you an idea ofjust how brilliant and surreal it is. so, it's wonderful to see. but that's been a big thing today. well, i also mentioned love island — so your old bosses at itv have just announced a deal that will let viewers buy things they see on the programme directly through their tv remote control.

so, if you have a particular brand of tv, you can buy cosmetics and other items from an on—screen list that changes as different competitors appear. so, is this merging of entertainment and shopping something that tiktok knows all about? should we be fearful of advertising by stealth, or embrace it? i feel i know what you're going to say. well, i hadn't seen that announcement, but i think it's clearly a trend across media, we see this a lot in magazines and media where there's a huge amount of commerce going on through those brands. and it's certainly something that i think is very interesting and popular online with huge e—commerce brands like asos, which is a big client of tiktok�*s. understanding it's a great way to support a retail business, e—commerce business. so, i think the connection between content and e—commerce is really strong. joining us also today is rhiannon williams, tech correspondent for the i newspaper. rhiannon, there are an awful lot of tech companies for you to keep on top of. how much of your day is spent legitimately scrolling through tiktok? legitimately is a very interesting term. i spend more time than i would ever care to admit. it's so compulsive and so easy

to lose 45 minutes — you're waiting for a train, passing time, ad breaks in between love island is a great example. it's just very compulsive, that thumb movement that tinder helped popularise, that single gesture, and you just find yourself doing it again and again, finding yourself immersed in certain trends. and of course, the way that tiktok's algorithm is geared, the more kind of videos you watch in a certain genre, whether that's comedy, love island, or you're following the england team, the more of those it presents back to you as it learns and grows from your interests. so, i find myself presented with more and more love island memes. oh, it's deliberately more—ish. well, last but not least, liza lin, china tech reporter for the wall streetjournal joins us. liza, you're actually joining us from singapore, where it's very late at night, so thank you very much for coming on. i know you've had a very busy news day.

what were you reporting on today? there is a different large chinese tech company i called didi, and it runs . a ride—hailing app similar to uber, and it's got. them into some trouble with the chinese - internet authorities. so, today was like - a mad scramble trying to figure out how... because it's under- investigation now, so today was a mad scramble trying to figure out how- the investigation would hurt its business. - ok, so we're providing some variety for you. so, let's go back to tiktok, surely the biggest media success story of the past year. rich waterworth, how helpful was the pandemic in turbo—charging your user base? so, tiktok is coming up for three years since it launched in europe, and we've seen really strong growth throughout that whole period. it's really true that we were astonished when we went into lockdown in many countries, including the uk last year, we were astonished to see how families took to tiktok as a way of connecting and having some fun. i think maybe some people will

remember the blinding lights dance trend which took over tiktok in around about may last year. it was a huge kind of outpouring. we also saw nurses and doctors on the front line battling covid and supporting patients, taking part in tiktok challenges as a way of having a bit of relief from the pressures of that situation. so, it's really been an extraordinary year, of course, more than a year now, and certainly, tiktok has been growing and we hope bringing joy and an ability to express themselves creatively. that's what we're all about and that's what we hope we've been able to do. well, you mention doctors and nurses dancing. for a lot of listeners who might not know what tiktok is, they might think it's

purely people dancing, mainly teenagers, lip—synching along and other teenagers watching. is that fair? is that what tiktok is all about, singing and dancing? no, i'm really glad you mentioned that because it sometimes is the perception, but the breadth of content on tiktok now is incredible. we've seen explosions in categories like learning content over the last year, which has been a huge growth area. food and cookery has been an enormous content area, and we've seen the tortilla trend, the feta pasta trend. these things have really, i think, become huge parts of the things that we're eating. so, the content is spanning a whole range of categories. music has always been a huge part of the tiktok content ecosystem, and that's something we see going from strength to strength. just this year in the uk, there have been three major number one singles which have

been debuted and discovered by tiktok. so, probably, people have heard of nathan evans or seen the wellerman sea shanty. but then, just very recently, ed sheeran came back into the industry and debuted... played the first... the first time he played his new single, bad habits, live, that was on a tiktok livestream which went out globally and overfive and a half million people saw that. so, we're seeing... massive numbers of views. incredibly broad ranging categories, that's right. rhiannon williams, tech correspondent at the i paper, what does it mean to go viral on tiktok? how famous does it make you? how many views are we really talking about here? it's an interesting question, really, because the way in which the algorithm works, it's not always terribly opaque. you don't really... you don't understand why

sometimes certain clips take off and others don't. quite often, it's very common to come across videos with the caption, "please don't let this flop." that's because users want it to get on the for you page, essentially the tiktok home page, the best chance of racking up those views. sort of hundreds of thousands of views is a metric that any average tiktok user in the uk would be incredibly happy with, but they can easily reach millions and millions of people, depending on what it is and how it captures the zenith, the zeitgeist of people's interest at any given time. sometimes there doesn't seem to be a rhyme and reason behind why something really takes off. other times, it's fairly obvious. it's linked to an event, a particular meme, world politics, a lot of stuff related to matt hancock going around the last few weeks, tiktok has been a very creative output. the fun and intimate sense that the videos can engender is really unique in that sense.

that's why we're seeing all the other tech companies racing to kind of replicate that sense of initimacy and fun. we're talking about people who have gone big on tiktok in the western world, but bytedance and tiktok also have a chinese version, which i'll attempt to say... douyin? right? you're nodding along, yes! laughter. that has the same branding as tiktok — give us a sense of how big a deal influencers in china are. yeah, you know, that's a really good point. - this is how i would describe douyin — it's almost - identical to tiktok, but it functions -

by chinese rules. so, douyin is a smash hit in china, just like tiktoki is a smash hit globally. i guess the difference between douyin and tiktok is that - in china, if you are a social media platform, you havel to play by the government's l censorship and filtering rules. so, the content on douyin is a little bit different - from what you see on tiktok, and this is particularly- when you get close to - politically sensitive occasions or, you know, a certain big government event. | so, for example, i'llj give you an example of what happened last week. last week, the chinese - communist party celebrated its 100 year anniversary — and that's a huge deal- in china, you know, it's one - of those days where the crowds are gathering around - tiananmen square, there's celebrations and parades. and when you open douyin and flipping through - the for you page, which is very similar to the tiktok for you i page, you'll innovatively flip onto a chinese state medial video of a party member or politician speaking - about how proud he is of china. so, i do think that's - what makes douyin stand out from its global sister,

or cousin, however. you want to put it. douyin plays by chinese content rules. - so, in many ways, it's very different from the tiktok that everyone else sees around the rest of the world. it truly is. yeah. rich, let's talk about the most famous feature of tiktok, because it's infamously short — it started off originally at 15 seconds, now you can go up to 60 seconds, and you've now upped the video length to three minutes. why abandon your usp? well, so we are constantly testing different features. what tiktok is all about is allowing people to express themselves creatively. we have a whole series of tools and effects, augmented reality, gifs, music and sounds — and video length is one of the parameters that people create around. and so, we're constantly testing and developing those things, and we've worked with creators and asked what it would look like for you to be able to create videos that are over a minute long, over 60 seconds.

and the response from creators was incredibly positive. they were really excited about having that opportunity — just in some cases, if you're doing a cookery tutorial, you might want a little more time to be able to demonstrate something. if you are telling a story — we have a lot of comedians with sketch comedy, sometimes people are creating other storytelling — some of those really benefit from having a bit more space. one of my favourite longer videos that's been released recently is actually a history explainer, it's a creator called taylor cassidy, produced a brilliant video about spies in the american revolution using green screen. and just having that bit of extra time allows that creator to go into a bit more detail into what is an amazing historical event. so, that's what it's all about for us, how can we enable users and creators to be creative. rhiannon, where do you assess that tiktok has had the greatest impact?

we're basically spending the whole show talking about it because of its enormous influence on other parts of the media. yeah, i think it was research released by ofcom a few months ago. it found that tiktok's audience in the uk was something like 3 million users in march last year, up to 14 million users just 12 months later. that means that roughly out of everyone in the uk that has a social media profile, about 21%, one in five people has tiktok. that's crazy reach, and the influence that it is exercising, like you mentioned the charts, music is being propelled by tiktok, people are picking up like lil nas x, "old town road" was a smash hit because of tiktok — initially didn't do that well, but people do come to it to look for new trends, and that births new trends. and it's really interesting in a way that youtube helped pioneer, to elevate what would've traditionally been a blogger, pivoting to vlogging. so, it became more about video, it changes the medium. tiktok forces people to be

creative in a more concise way, like in terms of shorter formats, but also longer ones can play into that. but i think it's so interesting and grabs especially younger people's attention so much because they like the fact that you can just flick through and you're not presented with a grid of videos and you have to choose. it's presented to you, algorithmically tailored to you based on your interests. and that's either a little bit creepy or incredibly useful, depending on how you look at it — maybe a bit of both. we've been talking a lot about music, but there's also film studios looking now at potential casting of actors on tiktok. i mean, that is a great example of how influential it can be. the way that entire industries which operate in fairly traditional ways, they're the ones producing this stuff that millions and billions of people around the world see — they're looking to this app specifically to see what is popular, what's holding people's interests. and it really is driven

by younger users as well, who are traditionally under 24 years of age. so, in that respect, we're seeing a massive shift in what these huge studios and record labels, etc, are putting out because it's a more direct, metric way of measuring what younger people who are a very, very lucrative and desirable demographic to tap into are interested in. and that is invaluable to these companies. so, huge growth in tiktok, then, but let's delve deeper into the business side of all of this. liza lin, china tech reporter for the wall streetjournal, we've said tiktok's had a strong year, but what has that meant for bytedance, its parent company? can you give us a sense of scale involved here? so, before i go into sense.

of scale, i think it might be useful tojust give a bit of a primer— on bytedance itself. bytedance is, i would say, this hotshot chinese tech. unicorn that's possibly one i of the most valuable privately held companies in the world. and to give you a sense of scale, at its last - funding round it was valued at 180 billion us dollars, i which is quite an amazing - amount if you think about uber. uber in 2019 was 75 billion, so bytedance is effectivelyl twice that right now and it's not even listed. _ bytedance is valuable| for a very big reason — it's great at producing these fun and addictive _ apps like tiktok. the whole show has been - about how addictive tiktok is, but tiktok isn't just only an addictive app. - it has douyin and it- has today's headlines, which is a news aggregator, and they have also - other social media apps as well in their fold. - and currently, they're pushing into new areas of growth such|

as e—commerce and gaming, so all very lucrative areas. i but to give you a sense of how much bytedance as a parent . company made last year, - they made in revenue 34 billion us dollars, and out of that, it was 19 billion of profit. i and how much of that was down to tiktok? bytedance actually didn'tl break down the numbers, so i am unsure. but i can tell you that - tiktok's advertising revenue is definitely growing. and when we spoke about how many users they have - in the uk right now, - in the us, they have a couple million, so you can imagine that they're a very lucrativej and a very attractive i outlet for advertisers. 0k, well, let's go to rich. rich, tiktok videos are almost all user—generated, so people are making them for free, they're uploading them. i mentioned at the start of the show how successful you've been at blurring the line between entertainment and shopping, but when you break it down, how does tiktok make money? so, tiktok's business model is primarily based on advertising. so, we work with major brands

and a growing large number of small and medium—sized businesses, and they can advertise. on tiktok, we have different ad formats within the for you feed, which is the main source, but not the only one. so that's the main business model that tiktok has. and what about the data you collect on users? now, do you sell that? because that is a big criticism of tech companies. you give us a free product, but in return, you're gathering huge amounts of data on us and use that to make money, so are we really working for you? so, the thing that advertisers really value about tiktok is that you can very easily see what people are interested

in because people are posting content and responding to content with specific hashtags, specific music, specific content themes. so, it's very, very clear what kind of audience, what kind of community you're talking to. one of the really popular things that advertisers like to do is to create their own sponsored hashtag challenges. so, beats by dre created a sponsored hashtag challenge which users but also artists, music artists get involved with. so, ashnikko got involved with that. so, when they do that, the advertiser can very clearly define this is the content type and the audience we want to talk to. so that's a yes, you are selling our data, then? we're not selling data, no. but we are working with advertisers so they can communicate to users of tiktok, and that's very normal online advertising business practice. what about tiktok creators? these are the people who make the actual videos. i'm presuming the majority

of them actually make very, very little money and that you are profiting off their endeavours. what do you say to that? well, tiktok, we absolutely love our creators. we're very lucky that they love tiktok. making money for creators is extremely important. it's not the most important or the only important thing, so it's very important for creators to be able to express themselves. use creative tools and find audiences. but making money is important. so, we provide tools and services where they can do that. one of those is the creator marketplace, so that is effectively a matchmaking tool where creators can sign up to that and brands can sign up to that. brands can come in and say they want to do a campaign through tiktok, and through the creative marketplace, creators will be selected to be part of that advertising campaign with the brand and they would be paid for that. how profitable is it for most

creators on your platform? because it does almost sound slightly like indentured labour. can you imagine if itv didn't need to pay for love island, or any of their programmes, yet they could still sell the advertising around them? as i say, we have a series of tools like the creative marketplace where creators can make very good money from the content they produce on tiktok. we also launched a pay programme last year called the creator fund, which was a commitment, three—year commitment of $300 million in europe, $1 billion globally, which is paying money to creators on the basis of their success of their content on tiktok. those are two big programmes now. we're also continually working on a lot of other programmes to enable creators to monetise their activity on tiktok. that's the really important things for creators and for us. we will continue to focus on that.

and how do you monitor what's going on in tiktok? presumably, almost every single person in the world can upload a video to tiktok if they wanted to and if they were able to. how do you monitor what's in them? we have a trust and safety team, over 10,000 people globally, and very sophisticated technology. that team is headed up in dublin. the global team is based out of ireland. that combination of technology and human reviewers allows us to moderate and ensure that any content that violates our community guidelines, we have very detailed community guidelines on what is and is not allowed, those guidelines are published very transparently so everyone is clear on what they are. any content that violates those community guidelines is removed from tiktok. that's the process.

liza, china has a very strict moderation policy. the content is essentially censored there. we mentioned that bytedance runs a parallel version of tiktok in china. do the big silicon valley giants operate there? most of them don't. i would describe the trade—off . for western companies this way. for western social media and tech companies. - if you want to operate i in china, then you have to operate by chinese rules, and that means content - filtering of political events, - events sensitive to the chinese government, such as. the tiananmen square incident in the 1980s. or, you know, to censor out content involving xinjiang, i which is a western region - of china which has really kind of hogged headlines recentlyl because the us says genocide is happening there. so, in order to operate in china, you have to l

play by these rules. at some point in the past, . google, facebook and twitter have decided they are not i going to play by these rules, and that's why they're out. in effect, it's created a bit of what i call. a "splinter— net". so for example, i'm i in singapore right now. but when i used to be based in shanghai, i and i was there for seven years, in order to go- on google or to go on youtube or facebook or instagram, - i would have to have certain software in my phone that l would allow me to jump i the great chinese firewall in order to access that. so a splinter—net basically . means you have two different internet ecosystems with two j separate sets of apps for very similar applications. rich, very briefly, president trump was sufficiently worried about tiktok that he banned it in america. it never actually came into practice but presumably that would have made people like you very nervous. we engage with governments in the us and all around the world, and that's constantly something we are doing.

we are very happy to engage constructively and transparently with governments and address any and all concerns that they have. so that's a kind of a normal part of our operating practice. thank you very much. that's it for today. thanks to all my guests. richard waterworth, tiktok's general manager in europe. liza lin, china tech reporter for the wall streetjournal. rhiannon williams, technology correspondent for the i. the media show will be back at the same time next week. thank you for watching. hello there. we had some pretty impressive downpours across different parts of the country on monday. the radar picture shows one of these bands of heavy rain working into north east england, particularly north yorkshire, and then we have this second band of rain across the west london area. now in kew, in west london, we picked up 46 mm of rain from the shower band.

that was pretty much smack bang on a whole month's of rain and the majority of that fell in just the space of two hours. if you were wondering what that looks like, it looks like this. three miles down the road in twickenham the roads flooded, and there were reports of flooding elsewhere as well. now, over the next few hours, those showers that we have seen by day will continue to very gradually fade away. the majority of us will eventually become drier over with just an odd patch of rain still lingering into the east. temperatures around 12 to 14 celsius, feeling a little on the muggy side as well, particularly across parts of eastern england. now, for tuesday, we've got much more in the way of dry weather and sunshine with fewer showers, and for most of us, it's going to be a dry morning. the early morning cloud breaking, sunny spells developing widely and there should be quite a lot of that sunshine. but into the afternoon, we're likely to see some showers develop. look at this line of showers forming across parts of northwest england, the midlands and perhaps another one affecting wales down towards parts of dorset as well.

now, those showers could be fairly heavy at times, but away from those shower bands, there should be a lot of dry weather to take us through the rest of the afternoon. temperatures pushing into the low 20s quite widely. it will feel warm in the sunshine. now, wednesday, we see a little weather front working into the far northwest of the uk. that's bringing some thicker cloud. might get a few patches of rain just skirting into the north and west of scotland. but otherwise, probably a bit more cloud around, but still some bright or sunny spells developing. the best of those towards the east of high ground and those temperatures still into the low 20s. it's going to be another day that will feel pleasantly warm where the sunshine breaks through the cloud. now, beyond that, it was the end of the week, the weekend and next week. this area of high pressure is going to be dominating our weather picture, and that means we've got a lengthy spell of dry and sunny weather. temperatures on these charts pushing into the high 20s. well, it wouldn't be surprising to see temperatures into the low 30s in some places next week.

welcome to bbc news — i'm david eades. our top stories. in cuba, the biggest protests against the communist government in decades — president biden says the protests are a "clarion call for freedom". at least 40 people have been killed in a fire at a iraqi hospital treating coronavirus patients, in the city of nassiriya. dozens of patients are missing. south africa's president appeals for an end to days of violence and looting, sparked by the jailing of his predecessor. the wildfires rage on, the heat intensifies as millions struggle amid record—breaking temperatures in the western us. the best way to describe it, which is the way my friend described it, is that moment when you open the oven and that gust of heat

hits you in the face.