Reverse engineering the obfuscated TikTok VM

There is no legitimate reason for a social media platform to employ this much obfuscation.

If you believe this you underestimate how adversarial the software world really is. TikTok will be on the receiving end of botnets by everything from commercial entities, state backed groups and criminals.

They won't be betting that this stops that entirely, but it adds a layer of friction that is easy for them to change on a continuous basis. These things are also very good for leaving honeypots in where if someone is found to still be using something after a change you can tag them as a bot or otherwise hacking. Both of those approaches are also widely used in game anti-cheat mechanisms, and as shown there the lengths people will go to anyway are completely insane.

Nah..I agree with the parent comment, there is simply no legitimate reason for a social media app to employ this level of obsfucation.

If you ran a social media site and app, and had a problem of many different groups employing bots to post tons of content for nefarious purposes to your site, what would you do?

I guess Id probably be doing something similar to what all the other social media apps are doing (unless of course, I had something to hide...)

What are the other social media apps doing? Are you sure they're not using obfuscated VMs as well?

I'm guessing a lot of them use reCAPTCHA, and according to this comment, reCAPTCHA uses an obfuscated VM:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43748994