Sophia Smith Galer
@sophiasgaler
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Writer & creator. Ex BBC & VICE. Won a British Journalism Award, Georgina Henry Award & Xmas Uni Challenge. For 📺📻: @NoelGay19. For 📚: Wylie.
your FYP
Joined May 2011
🚨 I am over the moon to share I am writing my second book, How To Kill A Language - about linguicide and language loss. From language death and endangerment to the disappearance of languages in your family, it’s been a very moving experience writing this 1/
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positively phenomenal use of the BBC News theme tune. Little does she know this is actually how we make the news
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outrageous scenes on TikTok as a tourist discovers what Wetherspoons is
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If you’ve been targeted ads from Israel’s foreign ministry on YouTube this past fortnight, you’re not alone. I’ve learned, using Semrush, that they’ve spent nearly $7.1 million on YouTube ads, including some horrifying videos. Here’s what I found out 1/.
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The Wes Anderson trend is the best thing to happen on TikTok in a long time. This is my favourite so far. Two incredibly creative scenes here.
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Last night Meta sponsored drinks at the Edinburgh TV Festival and here’s the survey they had outside the bit where you could try out the Metaverse. Notice how…you can’t say you hated it
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BREAKING: MPs have voted for buffer zones to protect abortion clinics in England and Wales. Ayes 297, Noes 110.
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This has been one of the most "you're kidding me" stories I've ever worked on. But it happened – and is happening – around the UK. Women in the UK are being denied healthcare because they're 'virgins' 🧵 .
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Exclusive from our newsroom. Police took four years to pass their investigation to the Crown Prosecution Service – at which point the CPS declined to prosecute.
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I used to be a religion reporter. This is hardcore mimesis. Catholics imitate/emulate the suffering of Christ. Trump supporters here are imagining themselves as also suffering from his wounds. Incredible video.
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45% of male university students said they’d feel confident labelling the nubis on a diagram of the female reproductive system. The problem? I made the nubis up. Now I have your attention. I’ve got brand new data out about young people and how they've been failed /1.
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news media: people are making AI deepfakes of Rishi Sunak! This is awful!!!. teenagers on fortnite:
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The framing of this is so dangerous - let me show you what children age 3 and up will actually be introduced to in the Welsh Relationships and Sexuality Education curriculum when it comes to sexual health and wellbeing that's conveniently been misnamed here.
Should we be teaching sex education to three-year-olds?. A group of parents is suing the Welsh Government over its plans to teach children as young as three about sex and gender identity. Do you think that's an appropriate age to be learning about that kind of stuff?
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BREAKING: MPs have voted to keep the at-home early abortion service in England, known as telemedicine abortion. It was 215 votes, against 188.
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not even a global pandemic can stop naughty grandmothers! 💓
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from 1 September to 31 December, all short and medium distance trains in Spain are going to be free - free! - funded partly by newly announced windfall taxes on banks.
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RE Tate & Big Brother. What the public didn’t know, and what VICE World News can now report, is that the real reason Tate was removed was due to the sexual assault and physical abuse investigation that had been shared with producers five days prior.
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Last year’s #loveisland was about voting for the perfect love story - this year viewers instead voted for retribution. I stan the narrative arc of a girl being fucked over and, like a phoenix rising from the ashes, running off with a hot solicitor into a twinkly sponsored sunset.
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it is one of the biggest, easiest myths in politics to spread the false idea that sex education sexualises children. it sounds true because most of us are smart & sensitive people, terrified of kids being vulnerable to harm. but it's this myth that's hurting them instead 1/.
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it only took nearly a whole year since the BBC news rave theme - but now a BBC news rave dance has gone viral on TikTok at 135k views in under a day
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Andrew Tate said all of these things in voice notes he sent.
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Semrush is an analytics platform that estimates what accounts have spent on ad campaigns. Together with Google’s ad transparency center, we can see they've heavily targeted France, Germany and the UK, then some others, with 88 ads Oct 7-19. 2/.
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Update: Spoons Girl went to ANOTHER Spoons, this time put cheese on the beans on the toast, then COULDN’T FIND THE LOOS
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not a single British news outlet picked up our story that a London hospital has awarded a contract to a group set up to stop abortions, with *financial* links to crisis pregnancy centres and anti-abortion groups. This is part of the problem.
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I gathered all the countries ads have been directed to. In total, that spend of nearly $7.1 million = nearly a billion impressions. 3/
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Two women told VICE World News they were violently abused – one raped, the other repeatedly strangled – by Andrew Tate, and that UK police and the Crown Prosecution Service mishandled their case, leaving him free to rise to global fame on the back of his unchecked misogyny.
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The UK has had an estimated $1.1m spent on it alone. This is what the past fortnight’s ad campaign looks like, next to a pie chart of how that total spend was divided. Viewer’s discretion is advised for the rest of this thread; I’m hiding stuff, but it’s still a lot. 4/
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young journalists who entered the industry in the last three/four years don't even know what slow news days are. we've never seen one. they are mythical, like unicorns and floppy disks.
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you’ve heard of the bbc news theme dance - now here’s the antiques roadshow dance
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The comments are simply an Ode to Spoons from brits
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I found the gatekeeper to Welsh TikTok and I was found wanting
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Two of the women who were denied a transvaginal ultrasound to tdiagnose them were instead offered laparoscopies - keyhole surgery into your abdomen. So to emphasise, a probe the size of a dildo - unthinkable! Invasive! Painful!.Invasive surgery - absolutely fine /8.
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I’ve noticed some videos have been appearing and disappearing from the ad center. Some are poss violating YouTube ad guidelines. Last week @politico reported Google removed 30 ads after they reached out for comment. For context here’s their piece 5/.
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Cut through the noise: here’s a 🧵 thread 🧵 on the things I’ve learned covering the viral spiking posts this week, and from the experts @Narcomania and I have spoken to for it - who say ‘this has not been adequately investigated’ 👇.
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These are what Spare's title translates to in all the languages it's been published in. English is the only language that has the 'heir and the spare' phrase, hence Portuguese resorting to 'what's left over'. Spanish did a far better job with en la sombra - in the shadows.
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The healthcare in question is a transvaginal ultrasound, which uses a probe 2-3 inches into the vaginal canal and helps medical professionals examine female reproductive organs to find the cause for conditions such as pelvic pain, unexplained bleeding or cysts /2.
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Personal news…. After 2 years as a senior reporter at VICE News, I’m off to freelance and make docs and podcasts - including a bunch back at the BBC. Very grateful for the commissions that are making this possible. Here’s what else I’m up to 1/
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a man tried to chat me up last night in Soho with the truly incredible opening line of 'you look cute so I thought I'd say hi. I work for JP Morgan'.
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Losing It is ✨ out today ✨ after a really lovely launch. I couldn’t be happier. A lot of people have been asking me why I wrote a book about sex…so here’s a thread with 8 reasons why! 🧵
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An important tech point re: the woman sentenced to 28 months in prison in England for procuring abortion pills to end a pregnancy beyond the legal limit. She said she didn’t know how long she’d been pregnant. But police gathered web searches and messages which disputed this.
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@politico Google told them they don’t allow ads containing violent language, gruesome or disgusting imagery, or graphic images or accounts of physical trauma. Here is what it says on YouTube itself which is a useful read. But ads like this keep being uploaded and activated. 6/
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The woman emailed me the same day to tell me about it as she'd read my book which has chapters on virginity & the hymen, and misinformation around both (that leads to harms like this!!). When I interviewed her, she shared this. /6
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*checks notes* yes I can confirm this is why TikTok exists. To use art history to ascertain whether Italy really were naughty or not.
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“When I saw that he was arrested in Romania I was shocked and didn’t know how to react. I cried. Everything I read is what I told the police [at the time of the complaint]. If the CPS had just pulled their finger out, none of this would’ve happened,” Sally said.
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This one in particular keeps appearing and disappearing, I managed to catch it yesterday in the ad center when it was live and screenshot it. It disappeared a second time on my watch later in the evening. It claims to show the autopsy of a child burned alive 7/
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That’s all for now. I’d never seen YouTube ads like this and wanted to find out the journey that they had been on to get to me. The figures here are all from 8pm yesterday. If you want me to look at anything else on Semrush, I’ll have access for the rest of the weekend - lmk 10/.
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The effect that this OnlyFans ban could have on so many people for whom the platform has been their only way to pay rent over the pandemic is disturbingly absent from news coverage today.
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“I can’t do it because it’s painful for some women and if I penetrate you with this tool, you’ll no longer be a virgin," replied the gynae. A back and forth begins that leads the woman to lie and say she is sexually active just to get the scan /5.
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got a bit of a surprise this weekend as I opened the lid on my dessert course…!
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🚨 Personal news 🚨 .After four wonderful years, I’m leaving the BBC. More news coming soon 👀 .I leave you with pics of me on my first and last work trips - the first in Beirut, and the second at a witch rave in Brooklyn.
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According to one woman VICE World News spoke to, whom we’re calling “Sally,” Tate used a similar method of emotional and physical control in his UK webcam business back in 2015, before relocating to Romania, but the CPS declined to prosecute the case.
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Before I tell you what's happened, I'm going to tell you what the guidance from the British Medical Ultrasound Society is. "The concept of virginity plays no part in the clinical decision making for a TVUS" just as it doesn't with say cervical smears /3
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I hadn’t heard this - from today’s abortion sentencing: . “This offence was committed against the backdrop of the first and most intense phase of lockdown…forced to stay at home, you moved back in with your long-term but estranged partner while carrying another man’s child.”.
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I pitched a World Service Instagram account in my job interview & when I got the job I strategised & led it. Just over 18 months since I launched it it’s reached 100k 🥳 🎈 proof that digital content on faith and well-being can be 🔥
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6,000 trees were planted in King’s Lynn by the council to tackle climate change. But they were poorly planted in species-rich grassland with rare wildflowers. In April. *90% of them* have died. I went to this ‘tree cemetery’ with @CharlieJGardner.
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Now that Huw Edwards has been named, I can share these. TikTok has *a lot* to answer for after this week. I monitor their search recommendations and this was the mess coming up every time there was a video about the BBC presenter scandal - it was suggesting names.
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A woman in Leicester told me she was refused because the healthcare professionals "beliefs don't allow her to even risk breaking my hymen.” Please read this. Imagine feeling this way /9
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VICE World News is withholding the woman’s identity to prevent harassment and trolling by Tate’s supporters.
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The Transparency Center doesn’t show us removed ads – but Semrush shows some. I can still see the Crimes Against Humanity vid now in Semrush where it was active on 14th Oct for UK audiences + others, featuring a half-naked, unconscious hostage and body bags. 8/.
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Sadly, this was not the attitude taken last week in a hospital in Croydon. "Are you a virgin?" asked the gynae before proceeding with a TVUS for a 30-year-old woman. "Why does that matter?" the woman replied. /4.
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tell me you had bad sex education without telling me you had bad sex education
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🚨 Personal news 🚨 very excited to share that I have joined @VICEWorldNews as Senior News Reporter covering Europe, the Middle East and Africa. More info here on what I’ll be doing from @pressgazette 🥰 .
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All of the videos can be viewed as organic videos on their YT page, where only some of them have been monetised to become ads. What you can see on the channel is some videos with strangely inflated viewcounts - those are the ones that have been ‘ad-ified’. 9/.
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'Sally' is one of them, 'Helen' the other who said: “I have been very frustrated by the British police and court system for a long time, they could have stopped him from doing the exact same abuse to these women in Romania.".
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With stories like this it's hard to picture scale; people will often not share that something like this happened to them publicly. She is, however, the 5th woman I've spoken to in the past year who it has happened to. I've heard stories from London, Leicester and Glasgow /7.
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The angle missing here is officers *actively* targeted her, most likely using the profile share feature Tinder has had since 2016. When I had Tinder I can't remember swiping on any police officers in London - so how did *fifty* find Patsy? .
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@RCObsGyn At this point (I hope) you've noticed how heteronormative and myopic this line of questioning is. A few years ago, @DeenahAlAqsa wrote about this brilliantly from a lesbian perspective. 12/
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This is the kind of robust curriculum that's in accordance with UNESCO international guidelines, that with high quality training is going to help teachers help young people be and stay happy and safe.
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The @RCObsGyn's President, Dr Edward Morris, told us: “Every woman deserves to have control over their own sexual and reproductive health, and no healthcare professional should perpetuate harmful myths regarding virginity.” /10.
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If you really wanted to make women safe in hospitals you’d fund a lot more research on our bodies and you’d stop maligning people who are also overwhelmingly undersupported by medical research.
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I downloaded this app for a muck about as a video journalist - now it’s a daily part of my toolkit in journalism as a senior news reporter. Can’t believe I’ve won a national award for it?!? #BritishJournalismAwards @pressgazette thank you!!!! @tiktok_uk
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rip to whoever is one the BBC breaking news account tonight and who fancied a quiet evening.
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the absolute art that has gone into this TikTok is delightful
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🚨 Excl 🚨 A British anti-abortion group has received over £70,000 in the last two years from an anonymous US donor to use in schools + with medical professionals. In a world of unclear funding, it’s a big find linking US anti-abortion activity to the UK.
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Handy tools and ideas to collect your Twitter data, a thread 🧵.
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There’s an insightful report about TikTok journalism that is out today from @risj_oxford. Here are my takeaways from it - and hello! If you have no idea who I am, I'm a VICE World News reporter + TikTokker who has had more than 130 million views. Ok, let's go 🧵 1/
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When it comes to Relationships and Identity, this is what they'll be introduced to:
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Data privacy around reproductive rights, health and information is often a conversation limited to the United States, especially after the overturning of Roe v Wade. This sentencing will raise awareness of it happening in England, a country with comparatively liberalised laws.
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@Savanta_UK This is one of the standout results for me:. 26% of male university students think their university is doing TOO MUCH to tackle misogyny amongst students. 33% of female students said their uni wasn't doing enough /6.
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This is a healthy reminder that newsrooms could do with Relationships and Sex Education training….
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I have had two DMs since publishing the story saying that the same thing happened to them – one of the people who messaged told me they are asexual. This experience, amongst many, has stopped them being open with medical staff 13/.
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On average it takes 8 years to get a diagnosis for endometriosis, one of the conditions where a transvaginal ultrasound can help spot the signs. No wonder it might take so long with treatment like this for some people 14/.
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It’s been hard keeping this quiet and even harder believing it’s actually real…I’ve written a book!.🍒 LOSING IT, out next spring with @HarperCollinsUK, will dismantle virginity + other sex myths that continue to rule our lives. Pre-order here:
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hey world - we heard you needed cheering up . so we wanted to let you know that @EmmaLBentley and I have a public service remit to inform, educate and renegade ✌🏻
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While Tate was released under investigation by Hertfordshire Police following the women’s complaints, meaning he was suspected of a criminal offence and a police probe was ongoing, he appeared as a contestant on reality TV show Big Brother in 2016.
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@RCObsGyn Read my story to see the rights of reply from the different trusts and healthcare providers involved, and how they answered. NHS England declined to comment despite this being nationwide, and told me to approach all the individual trusts. I did. 11/.
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The survivors’ interviews will be included in an upcoming VICE World News documentary about Andrew Tate. Reporters Matt Shea and Jamie Tahsin visited Tate’s compound in Romania in the summer of 2022, and gained access to the Tate brothers’ so-called “secret society,” the War Room.
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Ok - thanks to another DM (really, keep them coming) I've had 2 sources confirm Croydon hospital send out a form in advance of a TVUS saying if you haven't had sex that they can't do the scan and to call them immediately. This contradicts national guidance 16/.
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To a news editor of the past who refused to run this story because they weren't convinced of the scale - I am being deluged with DMs. This is the latest. Keep them coming. /18
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TikToks to the BBC’s apocalyptic rave music are doing the rounds atm - here’s another
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the delivery guy just said 'can I take a picture', I said 'sure', posed, and then he said 'no. I mean of the parcel'.
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Thank you to @bethanymrd who has done some digging and found patient information from several hospitals telling them they can't have the scan if they've never had sexual intercourse. STOP ASSUMING EVERYONE HAS *PENETRATIVE* SEX aside from everything else /19
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This is a letter Woolwich Queen Elizabeth hospital send out before TVUS - thank you very much to the person who has sent it to me /17
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One of TikTok's biggest news creators, Dylan Page, was interviewed by ITV about news on the platform and his view of how it went (not well) has had 6.2m views. Vid is slightly longer than the Twitter 2:20 limit, it ends with him unfollowing ITV. It's had 1.2m likes.
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