[HN Gopher] One App - Two Worlds: This Is TikTok in Russia and U...
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One App - Two Worlds: This Is TikTok in Russia and Ukraine
Author : mmgu
Score : 1010 points
Date : 2022-04-05 11:03 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nrk.no)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nrk.no)
| karencarits wrote:
| I like the systematic approach they have used, and am a bit
| scared by the results. In one way, it is not that surprising that
| a social media app is so tightly controlled and used as a tool by
| the Russian government to hide unpleasant parts of reality. But I
| think it is a bit surprising that TikTok hasn't met more
| criticism and resistance on this
| rvz wrote:
| Well thats what you get with a glorified _' recommendation'_
| algorithm and now it can be used by governments and other
| unpleasant people in power to hide and control what is seen and
| unseen from its users. Hardly surprising there and expected.
|
| > But I think it is a bit surprising that TikTok hasn't met
| more criticism and resistance on this
|
| If the users are liking their new digital crack / cocaine on
| the platform and as long as the algorithm is happily
| manipulating them, then they will never criticise or complain
| about it, nor will they be able to distinguish between fact or
| fiction.
|
| Hence, I think many jealous governments, three-letter agencies
| and even ancient wizards want their reality distortion spells
| back from social networks like TikTok.
| Fervicus wrote:
| I think everyone should also take a moment and question what we
| are seeing on our screens. How much of our social media apps
| are tightly controlled and used as a tool by our governments?
| philliphaydon wrote:
| I don't find it surprising at all. It's basically a propaganda
| platform. Can't decide if its worse than Twitter or not.
| pphysch wrote:
| Does TikTok mark Washington's enemies with big "X-state
| affiliated media" warnings while omitting them for American-
| state affiliated media?
| creato wrote:
| I can't speak for twitter, but every American publicly
| funded news organization I know of has that label on
| YouTube (PBS for one)
| antattack wrote:
| It's a social media app. No one should expect news or hard
| facts from tik-tok.
|
| With that said - it would interesting so see what tik-tok looks
| like in China. Based on reports, Russian invasion is also
| heavily censored in China[0]
|
| [0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jf55gMvwc00
| htrp wrote:
| Except for a certain demographic (somewhere around 22 and
| under), TikTok is news, entertainment, TV, and Socialization
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| Kids have tictoc while the geneatrics have fox news
| aaaaaaaaata wrote:
| Tool of the _Chinese_ government, and secondary tool of other
| governments because they want to remain dominant to push their
| own agenda(s).
| bduerst wrote:
| TikTok doesn't even exist in China.
|
| The parent Bytedance does, and their Chinese equivalent is
| Taiotao. Even the TikTok data servers exist in South Korea.
|
| This is an important distinction because there has been zero
| proof that TikTok is spying or is a tool for China, despite
| clickbait articles, memes, and accusations existing. This is
| the first time TikTok is being used observed to be used for
| government political censorship... And in Russia of all
| places.
| beebmam wrote:
| If a company refuses to open source its software that it
| operates as a service, you should assume the absolute
| worst. The burden of proof is on the companies, to prove to
| us that they aren't spying or using their software as a
| tool for a government to spy. This applies to all services,
| including cloud providers.
|
| It's the same with governments. Non-transparent governments
| which do not make its reports and internal statements
| public should be assumed to be committing massive crimes.
| It's up to them to prove to us that they aren't.
|
| Why should I trust an organization that hides reality from
| me to not abuse its power?
| futhey wrote:
| Douyin (TikTok's brand name in the PRC) adds server-side
| search censorship, and the ability to remotely execute
| arbitrary code for a specific user.
|
| Study: https://citizenlab.ca/2021/03/tiktok-vs-douyin-
| security-priv...
|
| Original Twitter thread:
| https://twitter.com/RonDeibert/status/1374010176534118400
|
| This is ongoing government political censorship in the PRC.
| RyanShook wrote:
| TikTok is available in China. The app is called Douyin. And
| the content being shown to Chinese citizens is very
| different from what is being shown to Americans. Social
| media apps are the Trojan horse of politics today used by
| all sides.
| qaq wrote:
| China has being pushing Russian narratives on the war
| internally in state media. So I think you might be
| disproving the "is not a tool for China" part.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| I think the assumption was that it spies on users or does
| something more interesting that just pedestrial
| propaganda
| qaq wrote:
| The fact is it's verifiably used as a propaganda tool
| increases the chance it's used for other "special" needs
| too.
| dncornholio wrote:
| How can we criticise a platform that picks content for you?
| It's doing exactly what it's supposed to do, pick content for
| you. Also it's a Chinese app. Working as intended!
|
| We did not need this war to make this obvious.
| jabbany wrote:
| I mean this is exactly what you'd expect a capitalist company
| like TikTok (Bytedance) to do: cave to any local regulations in
| order to make more money, even if that means bowing to pressure
| of a dictatorship.
|
| What's truly unsettling is that in the world today we must
| contend with the conflict between achieving capitalist goals
| (more money) and ideological ones (democracy).
| not2b wrote:
| Every company has to comply with local regulations or not
| operate in a country. The same applies to a nonprofit, non-
| capitalist collective. The alternative to that is fines, or
| in the case of more authoritarian governments, arrests and
| jailing of local employees. The choice is to either comply or
| leave the country, though in some countries it's possible to
| appeal to the courts.
|
| Though it's so bad in Russia now that it seems the only moral
| choice is to shut down services.
| globalise83 wrote:
| Excellent production: right length, fabulous graphics, very
| creative approach overall: A grade from me.
| yosito wrote:
| I already kind of knew intuitively that this would be happening
| in some form, but seeing it examined like this really puts it
| into perspective.
|
| I've noticed that on Snapchat and Instagram, I'm not able to see
| any new public content coming from Ukraine. On the Snapchat map,
| Ukraine is completely empty. I have a few Ukrainian friends, and
| I still see their content, but public stuff seems to be filtered
| or censored somehow. I'm a US-based account, and I've been in the
| US and Dominican Republic lately.
|
| I think this phenomenon is related to filter bubbles (but also
| more than that). I've already been noticing for years that my
| connections with different political views, or different
| interests, are being fed completely different realities.
| Sometimes it's benign recommendations, other times it's creepy
| advertiser-driven manipulation, and this example of
| Ukraine/Russia shows that there is clearly some blatant, wide-
| scale censorship going on. The narrative is being controlled by
| powers operating in the shadows. It really is an unseen
| information war.
|
| As someone who has been traveling for 10 years, my friends are
| incredibly diverse. So I often hear news from outside of my
| country and my filter bubbles. And my go-to source for trying to
| peek outside of the filter bubbles is Wikipedia's current events
| portal.
|
| I've got a few Russian friends. Most are outside of Russia, but
| one who I regularly talk to is in Russia and stays on Instagram
| using a VPN. I've had some conversations with her about the war,
| and while she's certainly not a fan of Putin, and knows there is
| a war going on, she seems to be completely naive about the
| severity of it. When we talk about it she says things about how
| truth is hard to know because the media lies. She is hearing
| stories from the West but having a hard time knowing what is
| really happening.
|
| There really needs to be some new form of leaflet drops to get
| real information to Russians despite the Information Age Iron
| Curtain.
| throwaway2474 wrote:
| This is unsurprising. _Every_ tech company does this. Pretty much
| all maps apps redraw boundaries of places like Taiwan and Crimea
| to suit local sensitivities. Search engines selectively censor
| content, etc.
| dirtyid wrote:
| Govs get to determine propaganda/narratives within their borders
| via legal instruments. TikTok follows domestic laws to continue
| operation. As it should be versus Twitter/FB caving to US foreign
| policy pressures / propaganda world wide.
| [deleted]
| sdfhbdf wrote:
| This article is well made and uncovers very interesting thing. I
| love how it was technically put together, browsing it on mobile
| was a great experience, chapeaux bas, i love how great new
| formats are available to publishers in the digital era outside of
| serving autoplaying ads.
|
| On thing that caught my attention was the supposed USCentric
| approach since it counted a distance in miles. I also wonder
| whether it was translated into russian so it can be shared with
| russian citizens that they're being lied to by TikTok
| [deleted]
| cinntaile wrote:
| 1 Scandinavian mile = 10 kilometers. Only used in Sweden and
| Norway by the way.
| WelcomeShorty wrote:
| I thought you where joking, but you are not:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scandinavian_mile
|
| TIL.
| kreddor wrote:
| As a Dane, that really surprised me.
| elygre wrote:
| As a Norwegian, I have never seen the Norwegian word "mil"
| translated into English, because there is no English
| equivalent. Instead, we always convert into kilometers or
| miles, depending on the audience.
|
| This was a first, and I blame someone else.
| [deleted]
| tokai wrote:
| Something went wrong with the distance. As there is ~80km
| between Kharkiv and Belgorod and not 80 miles. If they meant to
| use Norwgian miles eight would have been correct.
| karencarits wrote:
| You are right, the original says "Fra russiske Belgorod til
| ukrainske Kharkiv er det rundt atte mil" which is 80 km
| Symbiote wrote:
| AI-powered translation tools (Google Translate) can be
| terrible with this situation.
|
| Naturally, I can't get Google Translate to do this now, but
| I see text like "Vi kjorer 100 km. Det koster 30 kr"
| translated to "We drive 100 miles. It costs 30 SEK" --
| km/miles is obviously wrong, and I think kr-SEK (even when
| it's either kr, kronor, crowns or NOK in English) is
| because there's more Swedish than Norwegian on the
| internet.
|
| (I get unreasonably annoyed when people convert metric
| units into American when translating text into English. The
| English is used by a far wider audience than Americans, and
| outside the USA it's reasonable to expect Americans to
| understand metric units.)
| RugnirViking wrote:
| Google translate isn't even consistent in how it
| translates "kr" - I have seen it go into SEK, NOK, ISK
| and DKK at various times, seemingly random even when it
| correctly tells me which language it is specifically
| translating from.
| vages wrote:
| > outside of serving autoplaying ads
|
| NRK is Norway's equivalent to the BBC. I'm not sure about the
| BBC, but NRK is not allowed to run ads. More importantly, they
| have a number of great in-house developers that churn out
| quality content and a great video streaming service
| (tv.nrk.no).
| qiskit wrote:
| > NRK is Norway's equivalent to the BBC.
|
| Which is britain's equivalent to RT?
| willeh wrote:
| If you think the BBC is anything like RT you ought to read
| about the BBCs reporting during the Falklands War.
| pydry wrote:
| Britain's transition to becoming more like a British RT
| happened post Iraq/David Kelly/Hutton Inquiry and even
| then it happened fairly slowly - it took time to pension
| off all the good journalists who asked the difficult
| questions.
|
| The BBC under Greg Dyke and Gavyn Davies was fiercely
| independent and objective though, until they were
| unceremoniously let go for not towing the party line on
| Iraq's WMDs.
| MrYellowP wrote:
| People are stupid, so you should add links verifying your
| claims.
|
| Also, noteworthy, is that most people can not remember,
| or talk about, the fact that certain nations lie to us so
| they can go to war. They also can't think about the whole
| _actual_ reasons why what 's happening is happening.
|
| Always remember that 99% of all people only parrot what
| the mass media present to them, with _no_ critical
| /analytical thought applied whatsoever.
| KarlKemp wrote:
| That's the sort of cynicism RT want you to adopt, yes.
| pydry wrote:
| RT didnt fire the director general for not towing the
| line on Iraqs WMDs.
| [deleted]
| qiskit wrote:
| My opinion of the BBC was formed long before RT even
| existed. One is a government funded state propagandist.
| The other is RT. RT emulates BBC as do a lot of state
| propagandists around the world. All RT and other state
| propagandists like CGTN, al jazeera, etc does is copy the
| BBC. It's because the BBC is the best at propaganda. It
| sets the bar that other state propagandists aspire to.
|
| It isn't by accident George Orwell modeled the Ministry
| of Truth after the BBC. After all he worked as a
| propagandist for the BBC during ww2.
|
| You truly have to be brainwashed to believe that the BBC
| is any different from RT. Just gotta tip your hat to the
| BBC. They do a good job.
| Mordisquitos wrote:
| > My opinion of the BBC was formed long before RT even
| existed. One is a government funded state propagandist.
| The other is RT.
|
| I'm surprised that, having held such a strong opinion
| about the BBC for such a long time, you are still able to
| immediately make a factually incorrect statement
| regarding such common knowledge as where its funding
| comes from.
| qiskit wrote:
| RT's funding doesn't come from the government?
| Tostino wrote:
| The BBC funding is primarily through TV licensing fees,
| so it's essentially an optional tax.
| qiskit wrote:
| > The BBC funding is primarily through TV licensing fees,
| so it's essentially an optional tax.
|
| That's a long-winded and highly convoluted way of saying
| government funded.
|
| You have to admire the BBC. They've done such a good job
| brainwashing people that they jump through all kinds of
| hoops to hide the fact that the BBC is government funded
| state propaganda. BBC is what RT aspires to be one day.
| KarlKemp wrote:
| No, see, that's but one example of how your unwillingness
| or inability to accept any complexity or nuance gets in
| the way of thinking.
|
| The TV license system is set up specifically so that the
| institution is somewhat isolated from day-to-day
| politics. It's a completely different situation if the PM
| can decide on a whim to fund you or not, or if there's a
| difficult-to-change law that sets the fees that you get
| for a decade in advance
|
| If you insist that everything is the same and all
| politicians are corrupt and all media are lying then
| you're just giving away any power you might have. Why
| would any politician _not_ turn corrupt or leave id you
| are screaming invectives at them at the top of your lung,
| completely divorced from their actual work?
|
| That's why RT loves cynicism and tries to amplify exactly
| that work view: it's a self-fulfilling prophesy.
| dundarious wrote:
| The license fee is likely to be scrapped in 2027:
| https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-60014514.
| Alternative funding is almost certainly going to carry
| significant strings (either from advertisers or more
| direct control from government officials).
|
| Arguably there has been a multi-decade push to extinguish
| the institution altogether, or at least to drastically
| shrink it and simultaneously bring it under more rigid
| government control. The trend towards official state
| broadcaster and away from public interest broadcaster has
| been ongoing for many many years.
|
| I think the BBC is not exactly like RT in degree or in
| kind, but there is a definite trend towards its kind.
| It's also interesting to note that some of the official
| US complaints about RT influence on US public opinion are
| based on RT platforming legitimate social critics in the
| US. Dissidents for thee but not for me.
| PolandKid wrote:
| The amount of "whataboutism" and bothsidism when it comes
| to the comment section of any Western outlet (here
| included) is pretty wild. I would say this 2 month old
| account you're replying to is a great example of the
| typical output of such accounts.
| SecondChildSev wrote:
| The BBC isn't allowed to run ads either. They are also
| generally can't recommend products without talking about
| alternatives. Always amusing on kids arts/crafts shows when
| they name a brand and then have to state other products that
| are available.
|
| They can display adverts under certain circumstances though.
| Public billboards aren't censored in news reports, and
| adverts on the sidelines/stands of sporting events (like
| football) can still be seen.
| James-Livesey wrote:
| It's only a requirement for content served inside the UK
| though; international content (such as BBC.com) is allowed
| to (and sometimes does) show ads because it's technically
| not covered by the licensing agreement for the UK.
| Eduard wrote:
| Browsing bbc.co.uk, e.g.
| https://www.bbc.com/news/world-60947877 , from outside of
| UK, half the page estate is dedicated advertisement.
| KSPAtlas wrote:
| Not here
| petepete wrote:
| BBC doesn't run ads in the UK but the BBC World Service has
| done on some stations for a few years.
| cbjoerke wrote:
| Hi! Thanks for your kind words. We have corrected it to
| kilometeres. All the best, Christian/NRK
| GoRudy wrote:
| What software / platform are you using to serve that kind of
| content? Very well done
| nicce wrote:
| In Finland, national newsmedia Yle is forced to serve
| mostly similar content because of some legistlation that it
| cannot purely act as normal news site (text only), as it is
| traditionally broadcasting company. They serve content like
| this to bypass these rules.
| HatchedLake721 wrote:
| Would you consider creating a Russian version of this?
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| Wait, do you _really_ think residents of a city 80 km away, one
| that they used to commute to for groceries and stuff, get their
| news from _Tik Tok_?
|
| How out of touch are you?
|
| For God's sake, they can practically see Kharkiv out of their
| window!
| elliekelly wrote:
| I think TikTok is the primary news "source" for an alarming
| number of people.
| MrYellowP wrote:
| You write that like it makes a difference.
|
| It doesn't. At all. Why?
|
| _Because it 's the same dumb people, regardless of
| source._
|
| _It doesn 't matter if they believe TikTok or any other
| mass media. At all._
| pjc50 wrote:
| You can't see 80km from the ground, and it's on the other
| side of a closed international border _and the war itself_.
| Residents of Belgorod can have little to no idea what 's
| happening in Kharkiv other than the news. Well, that and the
| gigantic explosion of the local oil depot.
|
| Heck, in many places around the world people get most _local_
| news from social media apps.
| rvp-x wrote:
| I've heard explosions similarly far away (although it was
| at the coast and in an unusually quiet place). Explosions
| in the air travel really far. And every time I heard
| explosions so far I looked at the news/social media.
|
| In one of these incidents the news article seemed like it
| might be a coverup to me so I looked up user forums in case
| someone leaked the real information.
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| Seriously?
|
| Imagine an alternate universe where Canada and USA went to
| war. Do you _really_ think that people in Seattle would
| have to depend on German social media apps to figure out
| what goes on in Vancouver while it 's being bombed?
| Seriously?
| stickfigure wrote:
| If, in this alternate universe, Americans have no free
| press and live in fear of men with guns showing up on
| their doorstep and hauling them away, then - sure? Where
| else would they get news?
| [deleted]
| NoOn3 wrote:
| It's a very little free press in US...Inconvenient people
| for the authorities have almost no chance of getting on
| TV.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Look at CNN while Trump was president, or Fox while Biden
| is. Inconvenient people for the authorities are on US TV
| _daily_.
| yywwbbn wrote:
| What would the alternative be if US banned all
| independent media sources (like Russia did)?
| d0mine wrote:
| unrelated: could you name one just one US media source
| that you consider to be independent (with an anti-war
| article where US is perpetrator).
| Symbiote wrote:
| You have changed the question.
|
| Russia has banned _foreign_ media, in addition to
| restricting local media to publishing the government
| view.
|
| Since I'm British, and you'd probably consider the US and
| UK equivalent for this purpose, here's a major British
| newspaper article arguing against NATO action in Libya: h
| ttps://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/mar/23/noth
| in...
|
| (Given https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guardian_US, it
| probably counts for the US anyway.)
| NoOn3 wrote:
| I understand that Russian ban of foreign media is not
| good, but some west countries banned Russian media too
| and created special difficulties for them early...
| [deleted]
| yywwbbn wrote:
| Comedy Central. Technically not an article, but Jon
| Stewart (also technically not a journalist, but imho he
| was better at being one than actual journalists) was
| pretty open about opposing the Iraq war. I assume in
| Russia he'd already be serving his 15+ year sentence?
|
| Yes the US has problems. But Russia is just on another
| level considering that being a free and independent media
| source is literally illegal there.
| FormerBandmate wrote:
| The Intercept, the Grey Zone, and a bunch of other
| American media sources literally take the opposite
| position of the government every time
| kasey_junk wrote:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knight_Ridder
|
| Famously debunked the justifications for the Iraq war at
| the time they were being spread.
|
| https://amp.theguardian.com/world/2022/mar/18/sergei-
| lavrov-...
|
| The Russians view Fox News as a balanced news source.
|
| Walter Kronkite, perhaps the most famous TV anchor in US
| history was publicly against the Vietnam war
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Cronkite
| stefanfisk wrote:
| https://www.democracynow.org has plenty.
| startoffs wrote:
| US has done it's fair share of banning . Trump even tried
| to ban TikTok.
| kasey_junk wrote:
| What media sources has the US banned?
|
| Trump tried and failed to ban TikTok is exactly the
| difference being discussed.
| globalise83 wrote:
| Think about North v. South Korea: neither side really has
| the slightest clue how the other lives. If there were a
| famine or coup in North Korea no-one would have a clue
| except through the reports of spies.
| pjc50 wrote:
| There aren't any global German social media apps, and the
| US has a very different media landscape, so like all
| "what if the situation was completely different"
| hypotheticals, it would be completely different.
|
| The US operated censorship during WW2:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Censorship ; who
| knows what would operate during the war with Canada?
|
| I'm not sure whether you're ignorant of the near-total
| state control of media in Russia and Belarus, but how do
| _you_ expect them to get accurate news?
| MrYellowP wrote:
| Do you actually believe anyone else gets accurate news?
|
| Because that thought's beyond ridiculous.
| pjc50 wrote:
| How accurate do you want it to be?
|
| Picking a random story from the BBC front page,
| https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-manchester-61002096
| , what do you think is inaccurate about it? Do you think
| the MD has not resigned? That there have not been queues?
| That they have mistaken the names of people involved?
| That Manchester does not in fact exist and is a liberal
| conspiracy?
|
| (The main problem with political news is
| _disproportionate coverage_ , double standards of
| scandal, and the selection of who gets quoted - as well
| as a vast area of "op-ed" which is not technically news
| but is on the same websites.
|
| As well as reporting on "future" or "possible" events,
| which by definition are difficult to be accurate about)
| [deleted]
| vilius wrote:
| If governments are censoring our internet we need to change the
| way we're being geolocated. VPN is too much configuration and
| centralisation. TOR is over the top privacy. I want something as
| accessible as turning the flight mode on my mobile. The button
| can be placed next to flight mode and called CENSORSHIP. You can
| turn it on. It will then reveal your true IP address and make the
| internet very fast. However it's off by default. The internet is
| a bit slower. But your requests are being cleverly routed through
| random IPs that are not censored. These random IPs are provided
| by organisations but most importantly by peer users of the
| feature who happen to live in free countries. Sort of SETI@home
| but the goal is to increase intraterrestrial intelligence.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Having IP addresses whose most significant bits can roughly map
| to a location (because IP "blocks" are allocated to distinct
| ISPs that are in known locations) was a big mistake. It would
| be much harder, but not impossible, to graft geopolitical
| borders to the internet if every public address that a computer
| got was random.
| vermilingua wrote:
| > TOR is over the top privacy
|
| And yet what you described is... Tor, almost exactly.
| MrYellowP wrote:
| None of this matters when _people_ don 't believe _other
| people_.
| d23 wrote:
| I think Apple is roughly trying that with their VPN service?
| I'm not sure; I never used it since I'm not a full 100% Apple
| device person, and if I'm going to pay for a VPN I want to be
| able to use it on all my devices.
| soheil wrote:
| What is ironic is surely the dancing video mentioned and not that
| a publicly funded Norwegian government-owned media, NRK, (Jens
| Stoltenberg from Norway is the head of Nato) publishes a hit
| piece on TikTok all the while ignoring what FB, Twitter and many
| other social media have been doing to people in their own
| counties including the US for years.
|
| Very convenient.
| older wrote:
| You clearly have no idea what are you talking about. Here's
| what NRK has published about Facebook: https://nrkbeta.no/?s=F
| facebook Feel free to search for articles about other social
| media.
| verisimi wrote:
| This is a fair point - that people are seeing different things in
| Russia and Ukraine.
|
| But can we reflect for a second that we are _all_ in the same
| boat? We don 't know what we are presented on screens is real
| either. Who's to say we are receiving the truth? Are our leaders
| beneficent? I think not.
|
| We are all in the same boat. We are all propagandised. We don't
| even know what is going on anywhere else, except for what we are
| able to personally verify. And even that is limited by how we are
| able to explain and frame our experience!
| Fervicus wrote:
| Great point. In my circles I have far too often seen people
| criticizing other governments of propaganda, while also
| accepting the narratives we live in without question.
| ajross wrote:
| An important distinction is that if I want to find foreign spin
| in the west, I can do so trivially and legally and share it
| with anyone I want. And the worst punishment I will see is a
| downvote.
|
| The core claim in the liked article isn't about content
| moderation, it's about censorship. And it's really upsetting to
| see the extent to which HN commenters want to conflate them.
| verisimi wrote:
| Content moderation _is_ de facto censorship. If someone is
| sharing a honestly held opinion, not threatening anyone -
| that should be allowed.
|
| You seem to be unaware of the level of censorship that goes
| on here, youtube, twitter, etc, etc. It is called breaking
| community guidelines, de-platforming, shadow banning, hate-
| speech, etc.
|
| Do you remember when Alex Jones was removed from everywhere
| in a couple of days? Regardless of what you think, should he
| be allowed a voice?
|
| All of this is taking place outside of the legal system btw.
| Which is meant to establish people's right to free speech.
| krapp wrote:
| >Do you remember when Alex Jones was removed from
| everywhere in a couple of days? Regardless of what you
| think, should he be allowed a voice?
|
| Alex Jones has a voice, it just isn't on mainstream
| platforms.
| verisimi wrote:
| Is that not effectively censorship?
|
| Do you remember when Trump was banned from Twitter?!?
| krapp wrote:
| It is not effectively censorship. Censorship is not
| effective if it merely makes communication slightly less
| convenient.
|
| >Do you remember when Trump was banned from Twitter?!?
|
| Yes, and he deserved it. And yet everything Donald Trump
| says and does still gets national press coverage, and
| he's starting his own social media platform with a
| backlog of millions of followers. It's garbage, but that
| isn't censorship's fault.
|
| We should all wish to be so censored.
| verisimi wrote:
| > We should all wish to be so censored.
|
| Good god.
|
| Do you ever think you're part of the problem? Should we
| censor people who have a different opinion?
| krapp wrote:
| Being banned from Twitter isn't censorship. Donald Trump
| wasn't "censored" for having a different opinion. Nor was
| Donald Trump "censored" in any way that actually
| interfered with or hindered his ability to communicate.
|
| People really should stop picking Trump as an example of
| a martyr to the cause of free speech, he's a really bad
| one. I know they _want_ the narrative to be that "cancel
| culture" was _just so powerful_ that it _silenced a
| sitting President_ but it 's just not working out that
| way.
| ajross wrote:
| > Content moderation is de facto censorship.
|
| It simply is not. And the proof is that you can see _in
| this very thread_ a bunch of flagged, dead comments that
| are still visible, still citable, and (importantly) whose
| posters are not guilty of crimes for their creation.
|
| I'm sorry, but no. Difficulty of finding information is not
| the same thing as censorship. And we have to stop
| pretending that it is.
|
| > Do you remember when Alex Jones was removed from
| everywhere in a couple of days?
|
| Nope, actually I don't. But interestingly: I absolutely
| know that Alex Jones' rhetoric is still pervasively
| accessible to anyone who wants to hear it. Here's his site,
| if you're having trouble finding it due to all the, ahem,
| "censorship": https://www.infowars.com/
| verisimi wrote:
| I'm sorry, yes.
|
| If major platforms de-platform you, in a co-ordinated
| fashion that's not censorship?
|
| This is all works on account of corporate policies - not
| law. Law would dictate that unless what was said was
| illegal, that a person had a right to say it.
|
| Which is supportive of the fact that we are living in a
| fascist (corporate + governance) system. That the legal
| system is now a joke.
| [deleted]
| ajross wrote:
| > If major platforms de-platform you, in a co-ordinated
| fashion that's not censorship?
|
| Not in a world where you can continue to post on Infowars
| or 4chan or reddit or HN or wherever instead, no. Why
| would it be? You really don't see the difference? In
| Russia, it is _illegal_ to report on international
| perspectives about events in Ukraine. That content doesn
| 't exist, and you can't link to it without committing a
| crime (and, likely, also using a ban evasion tool like a
| VPN).
|
| Do you have an example of an idea or perspective (even
| one!) that is being suppressed by "major platforms" in a
| "co-ordinated fashion" that I won't be able to refute
| with a simple link as I did above?
| verisimi wrote:
| I don't think you are taking my point.
|
| Yes, you can have a website and your own voice. But if
| you are being excluded from public platforms - not
| because you are doing anything illegal, but because a
| majority or even just the owner doesn't like your opinion
| - this is a genuine problem. You will live in an echo
| chamber.
|
| These are legal issues and there is legal framework
| already in existence to prevent illegal acts. Shops
| cannot refuse service to the public. But an online public
| platform - eg Twitter - _is_ able to refuse. The ability
| to refer to a terms of service document that can justify
| stopping your usage of a public platform when a person
| has done nothing wrong, should not be legal. That you can
| be silenced can interpreted as a political act, eg Trump.
| You might agree with the political slant (but then how
| would you even hear about alternative views?).
|
| I really don't get how you can think or argue that voices
| are not being censored in the public domain.
| rejectfinite wrote:
| I feel like the premis is flawed. Maybe I am a boomer but who
| would excpect TikTok to provied unbiased news content?
|
| It is a chinese social media app.
|
| Use established media for news.
|
| And yes I know that is how people get content, I use Youtube and
| Twitch for political news and its just as bad.
|
| But this is on another level.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| > Use established media for news.
|
| And what if the topic is say, Hunter Biden's laptop?
|
| If you got your news solely from TikTok, you probably would
| have know that was real about 500 days before NYT and WaPo
| finally admitted it.
| rvz wrote:
| I was asking [0] for strong evidence of TikTok being a tool to
| manipulate the west and it seems that this is all the evidence
| that satisfies this claim.
|
| It is no wonder governments would love to use this glorified
| recommendation algorithm as it is the new digital crack /
| cocaine which is effective on manipulating billions of _users_
| today.
|
| Now looking back at this once again [1], I don't even think it
| was a clever thing to say that _" TikTok is the best thing to
| have happened to the Internet"_. At most it is the direct
| opposite and it is even worse than Facebook.
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28463370
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28135484
| dncornholio wrote:
| Those comments on your critical thinking is what is worrying
| me about todays society. Even going as far as offending you,
| wow.
| Koshkin wrote:
| Nitpick: the Ukrainian version of the name Nicholas is Mykolai
| (with an M).
| jimbobimbo wrote:
| Mykola. "Ai" ending appears in Russian spelling of the name.
| throwaway3968 wrote:
| It's probably good that Twitter is banned over here at the
| moment. Overnight, my feed filled up with a nasty mix of ethnic
| cleansing and "collective guilt" calls coming from Ukraine in
| response to the massacre. All directed at people who've been on
| their side by all legal means they have available. I don't know
| how to react to that.
| cabirum wrote:
| Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter are blocked in Russia because
| they only allow pro-Ukraine narrative. The social platforms
| became weapons in this war. Anyone noticed they blocked accounts
| of most Russian media companies and news sources? Or users with
| "wrong" opinions are being shadow banned? Or Google deprioritised
| or excluded some Russian gov services (even non news)?
|
| Sorry, but unbiased sources do not exist. Free speech does not
| exist. It's not two worlds, but two bubbles.
| older wrote:
| > Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter are blocked in Russia
| because they only allow pro-Ukraine narrative.
|
| This is demonstrably not true and easily disproved. All the
| official Russian accounts are on twitter and keep posting lies
| after lies, lately main topic is denial of massacre in Bucha.
| For example:
| https://twitter.com/mod_russia/status/1510649349482635265
| ShivShankaran wrote:
| With the fog of war there has been more embellishments coming
| out of Ukraine than Russia. The tank running over, Ghost of
| kiev, shopping mall fiasco, snake island deaths, russian
| death squad (turned out to be ukranian border guards) ,
| ukraine claiming russians bombed babi yar....
|
| Even with maternity hospital bombing, the women in
| photographs said that the Ukranian army had occupied the
| hospital and forced them out of the maternity wing.
|
| Like the other poster said: it's fake news on fake news. Two
| different bubbles.
| older wrote:
| What is all this random stuff you have written here has to
| do with the fact that the other poster lied about twitter
| not allowing russian propaganda?
| rackjack wrote:
| It doesn't.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30664769
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30763209
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30763216
|
| Look at the author.
| alex-ant wrote:
| Currently Russia doesn't have a singe reliable news source. We
| all have seen the pro-Russian narrative - there's no war, we're
| not murdering the civilians, all Ukrainians are nazis
| developing bioweapons targeting "slav DNA" and to be delivered
| across the border by birds, etc. Those are not news. Needless
| to say that this propaganda also targets people in other
| countries with large ethnical Russian population, specifically
| the Baltic states and incites those people to riot and hate the
| land they live on creating a bridgehead for possible Russian
| invasion.
| NoOn3 wrote:
| https://www.rbc.ru/ and RBC tv channel maybe called somewhat
| like independent source... But reliable news source on tv
| does not existed at all on almost all TV channels in all
| countries, they all promote profitable to them point of
| view... Only if you watch different sources you may try to
| imagine something close to reality.
| pphysch wrote:
| What is your standard for "reliable news source"?
|
| Does it look something like this?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Per.
| ..
| cabirum wrote:
| However "unreliable" these news sources are, they present a
| different opinion that is being censored. And since there are
| just two sides in this war, you can only see just one side of
| a story.
| renw0rp wrote:
| Russians doing what they have been doing for a hundred
| years: lying, blaming, spreading clearly false propaganda,
| stealing, murdering and raping people.
|
| Meanwhile people in the west, or at least outside of the
| conflict zone, discussing about free speech.
|
| Nothing has changed.
|
| You can be proud of yourself and your principles.
| Zanfa wrote:
| Given russian media is legally only allowed to spout
| government-approved propaganda, it really makes sense to ban
| them from social media. This does not equal to only allowing
| pro-Ukrainian media.
| cabirum wrote:
| Why don't you call pro-Ukrainian media "propaganda"? They did
| recently ban all but a few pro-gov political parties, and all
| their media is equally under total government control
| artem247 wrote:
| older wrote:
| What do you consider pro-Ukrainian media? The BBC?
| d0mine wrote:
| If you consider that the Ukrainian conflict is a war
| between US and Russia, then yes all western media are
| pro-Ukrainian (it serves US interests at the moment).
| Zanfa wrote:
| It's not though, so your point is irrelevant.
| ShivShankaran wrote:
| so what's your response to Ukraine banning all left wing
| parties even the ones that won popular votes?
|
| What about panama papers proving zelensky and ukrainian
| politicians having twice as many illegal activities as
| whole or russia?
|
| and ghost of kiev or the snake island bombing or the tank
| dude or the other million of fake news being peddled
| Zanfa wrote:
| Whatabout?
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| This is very sad.
|
| Obviously, it would be valuable if someone could suddenly change
| TikTok so that it thinks all Russians are Ukrainians.
|
| Such information warfare is vastly less violent than missiles and
| probably much cheaper to implement. The sooner the Russian
| population knows what their leadership is really accomplishing,
| the better for the world.
| NoOn3 wrote:
| Maybe I'll get a lot of downvotes. I just write my opinion,
| maybe I'm wrong. It's clearly a certain number of people in
| Ukraine sympathize Russia. Yes it seems that more sympathize
| The West in the latest times, but this is not much of an
| overwhelming majority. From that majority has some small group
| of nationalist. And there are detailed recordings of their
| bloody crimes. Maybe sometimes Russian media exaggerates it,
| but you can't say that was no crimes. Western countries have
| never condemned any of these crimes. The Us could give just one
| guaranty to not accept Ukraine(maybe even for some time) in
| NATO to prevent war. And western media have many confirmed
| fakes too. And Zelensky not very different from dictatorship
| from the point of view of a simple person. He was banned many
| tv media and parties in Ukraine. It is difficult to clearly
| value the actions of the rulers. We don't have so much
| information that they have on their level. Government does not
| consist of one person. Sometimes what we think is dictatorship
| is necessary to save the country. In Crimea for example most
| people really prefer Russia and speak russian. Minsk agreements
| could be least damaging to people on both sides. But if they
| were not fulfilled, How else could this issue be resolved? It's
| very very complicated situation... It's only my humble opinion.
| I may be wrong.
| bacan wrote:
| This is exactly what happens when algorithms tailor what people
| see on their newsfeed. They will push narratives.
|
| One of the main reasons I prefer Reddit is the existence of
| r/All. Provides a very balanced view
| zarriak wrote:
| This is an absurd statement. Reddit is by far the most
| effectively gamed and manipulated social media platform that
| exists. There's countless examples of how powerful mods are on
| Reddit on shaping narratives.
| ShivShankaran wrote:
| reddit is one of the absolutely most gamed social media on the
| internet. Don't forget that the "head of content" that was
| hired few years back is from NATO with no technical background.
| Reddit is on harcore mode right now deleting entire subreddits
| and permabanning people that even slightly critique NATO or
| Ukraine.
|
| /r/all is nauseatingly full of "russia bad, ukraine good" with
| mindless flinging of feces.
|
| Yall be blaming facebook but reddit is the real snake in the
| grass.
| [deleted]
| goldenchrome wrote:
| If you think Reddit isn't highly curated too, you're wrong.
| Perhaps you could make that argument 10 years ago but no
| longer. In the last few years Reddit has taken on hundreds of
| millions of dollars of funding to morph the site into a more
| mainstream advertiser-friendly offering. They've silenced lots
| of controversial communities by outright banning them or
| neutered them with "quarantines". Over the years, Reddit has
| succeeded at pushing out people who don't have palatable
| opinions and retained a core base of advertiser-friendly true
| believers. "Advertiser-friendly" in the contemporary era means
| "left-leaning with no reservations". This is about the furthest
| thing you can get from a "balanced view".
| d0mine wrote:
| Reddit is a typical western media that promotes corresponding
| world view.
| bertil wrote:
| I feel like the article is dodging the reality of what they are
| asking: How many people are employed by TikTok in Russia? What is
| their responsability and how do they influence product decisions?
| What would happen if TikTok refuses to comply with local laws?
|
| I'm not sure that sending local ad sales people who have no
| influence on the product, and depriving their family of their
| support is the ethical choice.
| toxik wrote:
| The dream of the internet as some sort of great democratizing
| force is already dead and buried, but for any who still believes,
| this must surely be the final nail in that coffin. Controlling
| the narrative is only a problem for existing democracies with
| press freedom. All bets are off once the threat model includes
| control of the media.
|
| So cherish your freedom of speech, and exercise and defend it. I
| don't know what to do concretely, maybe donate to the EFF or
| something.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| Yep...
|
| Putin blocking media ... sure... dictators block stuff all the
| time.
|
| EU blocking RT.com (and a few others) was quite a shock for
| me,... really a thing that should not be happening in EU (no
| matter whose propaganda it is).
| toxik wrote:
| Agreed, I was also surprised that the EU would do the very
| thing that is supposed to set it apart: media censorship.
| viraptor wrote:
| RT was targeted multiple times in the past - this is not
| exactly a new thing. RT itself was not really censored
| either (not in the way specific information is outright
| illegal in Russia for example) - you can still go to the
| source if you really want to. (See the comment below about
| domain blocking though) They're just forbidden from using
| the national broadcast, since that was always controlled by
| various orgs. In most EU countries you get in trouble for
| lying in adverts, (https://www.citizensinformation.ie/en/co
| nsumer/consumer_laws...) so I'm not surprised Russian-gov-
| masquerading-as-news got affected too.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| Many ISPs have blocked rt.com domains on their DNS
| servers
|
| eg. in belgium:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Websites_blocked_in_Belgium
| #EU...
| toxik wrote:
| Thank you for this nuance. I thought it sounded crazy.
| qiskit wrote:
| EU has been at the forefront of censorship. Germany is a
| model for internet censorship around the world.
|
| https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/11/06/germany-online-
| crackdow...
|
| It's funny how people think EU or europe in general is a
| bastion of freedom. It's not. Never has been. And never
| will be. What europe is exceptional at is self-promotion
| and virtue signaling.
| mopsi wrote:
| > _EU blocking RT.com (and a few others) was quite a shock
| for me,... really a thing that should not be happening in EU
| (no matter whose propaganda it is)._
|
| Why? Neo-nazi sites have a long history of getting banned
| everywhere.
| jl6 wrote:
| The issue is that despite the internet appearing to be an
| infinite sea of nodes that can all participate in a global
| village, the reality is that "the media" is the very finite set
| of nodes that have control of users' attention.
|
| We're surely all guilty of facilitating this. Forget the global
| village of a billion voices - the number of news sources I
| regularly read isn't even dozens.
|
| Anybody can still put up a web server, but it's the attention
| channels that matter, and those are well and truly under
| control through non-internet means (money, regulation, threats,
| lobbying, ...).
| sjg007 wrote:
| We can surely build apps and devices to enable the see of a
| billion voices. After all everyone now has a computer in
| their pocket connected to the internet.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| Is there a "Jevons paradox" equivalent for information and
| media? That is, Jevons paradox states that as efficiency of
| resource usage improves (e.g. MPG goes up) that usage of that
| good can also, somewhat paradoxically, _also_ go up, because
| the relative cost of that good goes down so it can be used in
| more ways, people can drive further, etc.
|
| With information and media, lots of us originally thought
| that lowering barriers to entry for media dissemination would
| make it easier to have this "global village of a billion
| voices". But instead what it has done is made it easier for
| users to filter to the top content, and easier for producers
| to use tons of data mining and machine learning to filter in
| on the most addictive (if definitely not the best) content.
| In the long term it can make it _harder_ for smaller
| producers because they are competing against a much larger
| set of competitors for attention.
| KarlKemp wrote:
| Yes, absolutely; reading the NYT or WSJ twice a week and
| never touching another news source will make you better
| informed than consuming the out[ut of a hundred YouTube
| channels and Twitter feeds you have chosen because you
| enjoy their opinions.
|
| Diversifying your news sources is a poor form of hedging.
| What we should encourage people to do is trying to come up
| with methods to increase trust: can you think of a way to
| verify some snippet of news from first principle?
| karatinversion wrote:
| My take, which is less a paradox and more of a "bitter
| lesson", is that increases in ability to communicate always
| lead to increases in centralisation, for the types of
| reasons you indicate.
|
| The early internet's utopianism took place in the window
| when the new ability to communicate had not yet been used
| to effect the new centralisation.
| WillPostForFood wrote:
| _the number of news sources I regularly read isn't even
| dozen_
|
| At least you've added "nrk.no" to your list this week. The
| problem is real for people who live in Facebook or TikTok
| bubbles, but the democratized news dream of the internet is
| still alive, but it takes some work to break out from the
| world of the algorithmic feeds.
| zucked wrote:
| Humans are not geared for our "village" to be this big. The
| expansion of our sphere of "care" flies directly in the
| faces of thousands of years human evolution.
|
| The "bubbles" we create, consume, and participate in are a
| subconscious attempt to slim down our giant "tribe" into
| something that our brains can manage. Of course these
| bubbles are readily aligned to people like ourselves -
| language, interest, appearance, culture, etc.
|
| Expanding your bubble is _hard_. It takes work. As a
| result, most people don 't.
| skybrian wrote:
| You're just looking at the first hop and that's excessively
| gloomy. What about all the sites that authors you read have
| read?
|
| Link sharing sites like Twitter and Hacker News have exposed
| me to articles from lots of less popular news sites, not to
| mention, all the blogs I'm subscribed to.
|
| Also, research-heavy blog posts about COVID and the war in
| Ukraine have lots of outgoing links. Some sources are in
| languages I can't even read, but I can get a rough
| translation.
|
| There are people who geolocate photos from Ukraine as a
| hobby, aggregators who find patterns, and people who do
| amateur military analysis. Sometimes they're ahead of the
| newspapers. (By a few hours. I assume reporters read them
| too.)
|
| This results in big differences between what we can read and
| what would be possible in China or Russia, without a VPN
| anyway.
|
| (Changing majority opinion is a whole different story
| though.)
| dotancohen wrote:
| The threat that you're modeling against is not a threat to the
| internet.
|
| The internet is a group of technologies enabling near-realtime
| dissemination of information. It has no implicit promise of
| freedom of speech or press, democracy, or any other political
| ideal. Even the World Wide Web has no such implicit promise.
|
| The great democratizing force to which you refer is the ability
| to publish content, and to an extent the content itself, and
| that still exists (modulo nationwide firewalls). Just get off
| other peoples' servers and start hosting it.
| nameisname wrote:
| If you actually watch the video you can see they are no
| longer allowed to upload content so I think you're wrong.
| It's also going to be very difficult to host anything when
| the government has a total crackdown on internet. You host
| some videos of war there and I can guarantee it would come
| back to you very quickly.
| trasz wrote:
| Tor, IPFS?
|
| It's still besides the point, though: Internet is like
| radio waves; sure you can be prosecuted for using them for
| activity that's illegal in where you currently are, but it
| does not constitute a threat to electromagnetism.
| georgyo wrote:
| IPFS does two things here that you might not want to use
| for the use case you describe.
|
| Clients host the content they access.
|
| The real IP address of people hosting any particular
| content is discoverable.
|
| Using IPFS for this use case could make for an easy list
| of targets.
| nirui wrote:
| > It has no implicit promise of freedom of speech or press,
| democracy, or any other political ideal
|
| That's the magic part: you don't have to be explicit to
| promote certain thing, you just create the ground tech-
| knowledge to enable the easy access of such thing, and hand
| everything else over to natural progression.
|
| The Internet for example, enables everyone to exchange
| information with everyone else. That's textbook democratic-
| builtin design. Some undemocratic nations are so fearful such
| network, they go as far as creating their own little net to
| protect their pathetic little propaganda, the propaganda that
| those nations don't even dare to show to the world. And even
| that, they still have to fight a propaganda war (actual names
| might be different) in their own little net to keep
| democratic force in check.
|
| Internet is democratic, there should be no question about
| that.
|
| The problem about the Internet today, is that most people
| thinks Amazon+Google+Facebook+Twitter+other big brands is the
| Internet. They forgot that they can host things themselves
| without those big tech companies.
| BoiledCabbage wrote:
| > The problem about the Internet today, is that most people
| thinks Amazon+Google+Facebook+Twitter+other big brands is
| the Internet. They forgot that they can host things
| themselves without those big tech companies.
|
| With all due respect the problem with the internet is that
| you (and many others) don't know what the Internet is.
|
| You and many others believe the Internet is what the
| internet is capable of. It's not. The Internet is exactly
| what it is to the vast majority of people that use it. And
| that's Amazon, Twitter, Facebook, TikTok...
|
| It doesn't matter that the internet could be what you want
| it to be, not that it once was. But it's not now, and
| history isn't on your side - ask usenet or IRC.
|
| So here we are and _yet again_ technologists are shocked or
| in denial after believing that the existence of a
| technology would somehow overpower the interests of the
| powerful and the system they 've built - instead of
| realizing it will be co-opted by them.
|
| The martial arts adage - don't bring a weapon unless you
| know how to use it / control it. Otherwise it will simply
| be taken from you and used against you.
|
| If you are a technologist and failing to rigorously think
| through the negative cases and faults of your tech, or how
| your tech can be used against the interests of people or
| society you are a failure of a technologist. It doesn't
| matter if you're building an ML model, crypto, or a TikTok
| app.
|
| As an example, where does crypto end?
|
| 1. High efficiency money laundering, permitting sanctions
| evading (like Russia would love to do right now on a
| massive scale), and the medium for illegal business like
| digital extortion / ransomware
|
| 2. Just as regulated as the existing banking/credit system,
| centralized in a few exchanges, failing at any anonymity,
| no better than existing banking and CCs, while using up
| massive resources.
|
| Neither is any good and yet tons are in denial that that's
| where we'll end up.
|
| Technology does not exist independent of society at large
| as much as we'd like it to.
| nirui wrote:
| If I understood it correctly, here is the key point of
| your comment:
|
| > The martial arts adage - don't bring a weapon unless
| you know how to use it / control it. Otherwise it will
| simply be taken from you and used against you.
|
| To put it simply, you think: a technology must be tested
| safe and can only be used for the intended purpose,
| otherwise it will hurt you back and it's your (a
| technologist) own fault.
|
| While I do agree a technology should be designed with
| good intention, I must point out that your opinion is too
| idealistic.
|
| Most technology that we utilize today were invented not
| actually by one inventor, rather, they were invented by
| the iterative advancement of our (as human) knowledge.
| Further more, technology itself is not static, instead,
| it iterates too, sometimes by different people in
| different organization at different place across
| different time.
|
| Put it under the context of the Internet, an inventor
| maybe "rigorously think through the negative cases and
| faults" of their invention, but it is almost impossible
| for them to have complete control over even their own
| invention, let the lone alterations of it.
|
| Often in the end, you can only hope that you've designed
| something good, and let the progress of things take care
| the rest.
|
| Let me put my end opinion here: Internet is promoting
| democracy, the world will be a far worse place if the
| Internet don't exist.
| Joeri wrote:
| Like the zen koan, does a piece of information exist of no
| one is around to read it? Self-hosting is mostly pointless
| because the problem is the walled gardens trapping global
| attention. Many people barely see a browser window, and
| consume all online information inside the walled gardens.
| Whether you publish outside that garden or not it is
| effectively the same, because they will never see what you
| write.
| ianbutler wrote:
| I'd say you have to know your audience but it seems to work
| fine here. Plenty of self hosted blog posts make it to the
| front page of HN. I don't see anyone writing for the
| broader masses and maybe that's more the type of writing
| you think will be quashed, but writing for a niche seems to
| proliferate to the specialty sites just fine.
| sidlls wrote:
| " writing for a niche seems to proliferate to the
| specialty sites just fine."
|
| Does it, though? I'd actually like to see a thorough
| study done on this. My hypothesis is different from
| yours: the proliferation of "specialty sites" is a
| product and symptom of the walled garden phenomenon, and
| further serves to sequester and censor undesirable
| content from the wider audience.
| rrix2 wrote:
| I'm pretty happy that i havent had to read celebrity news
| sites because i have an algorthmically light diet,
| especially in the last few weeks with Will Smith etc. Do
| you really think this nichemaking is bad inherently bad?
| The natural course is that good niches fill and grow
| until they become the mainstream and the folks who are
| nudged out go make new niches. this even happens with Big
| Media... It even happened here.
|
| What are you suggesting is better, though? really, that
| we all just publish one of 10000 articles to dev.to and
| hope their search and popularity algorithm puts your
| article in front of peoples' eyes? That everyone should
| upload video to a single time-ordered feed that you have
| to scroll through until you find something you like
| without algorithmic involvement? Im seriously confused,
| how do you do content selection or personal curation in a
| world without niches
| FabHK wrote:
| > Many people barely see a browser window, and consume all
| online information inside the walled gardens.
|
| I seem to recall a survey in South East Asia asking people
| about their internet use, and there were _more_ Facebook
| users than internet users...
|
| Ah, here: https://qz.com/333313/milliions-of-facebook-
| users-have-no-id...
|
| "11% of Indonesians who said they used Facebook also said
| they did not use the internet."
| pydry wrote:
| My great hope in the early 2000s was that all you had to do
| was provide a _route_ for information and the effect of
| propaganda would crumble once people had access to the truth.
| And, the internet _did_ provide the route that did not exist
| before it just didnt matter.
|
| Truth is that people largely place trust in institutions and
| people they are used to and identify with, often for
| irrational reasons. People are prone to FUD. Theyre lazy and
| passive.
|
| This means that, for example, Rupert Murdoch has a
| disproportionate level of political influence in the UK
| because he dominates media through which people watch and
| read about sports.
|
| And Tiktok is an effective propaganda delivery channel
| because it already feeds kids videos of dances they like.
|
| Sadly, programming people on a mass scale is just as
| effective as it ever was because it turned out how trust is
| acquired mattered way more than mere access to information.
| selestify wrote:
| > Truth is that people largely place trust in institutions
| and people they are used to and identify with, often for
| irrational reasons.
|
| Is it really so irrational? How many people have the
| technical know-how and access to equipment to personally
| verify that COVID vaccines are safe for human consumption?
| (Can you even verify that on your short of running mass
| human trials?) And yet, by and large, most of us are not
| conspiracy theorists who wonder if the vaccine will
| secretly kill us or render us infertile.
|
| There are often good reasons to trust the official
| narrative. There are often good reasons to distrust it too,
| but placing trust in people and institutions is often not
| so irrational.
| sidlls wrote:
| It is completely irrational to have no skepticism,
| though. On any subject, including ones in which we trust
| the authorities (e.g., scientists). Because both the
| authorities and the rest have some agenda, and it isn't
| necessarily mine.
|
| I'd argue it's deeply unhealthy to have any trust at all
| in governments that have shown themselves to be
| authoritarian or oppressive.
| hansworst wrote:
| This is basically how science works in practice too. If
| you want to publish a paper and make an impact, better
| make sure you publish in one of the important
| journals/conferences. And if you're trying to figure out
| if a source is trustworthy, it probably make sense to see
| if it was published in a reputable journal.
|
| Anyone can publish a paper nowadays, technology has made
| that very easy. But trust is still something that needs
| to be earned, and that takes time. It makes sense to have
| trustworthy institutions, I don't think it's something we
| can easily replace with technology.
| pydry wrote:
| >placing trust in people and institutions is often not so
| irrational.
|
| The question is _which_ institutions and people do we
| place trust in? When they contradict each other whom do
| you believe? Should we believe them sometimes but not
| others?
|
| _That 's_ where people get irrational and antivaxxers
| are just one example of that.
|
| Yes, it's blindingly self evident that you cant run your
| own vaccine trials.
| mgfist wrote:
| This whole discussions reminds me of this great scene
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U3Ak-SmyHHQ
|
| Humans will always accept some axiom as truth without
| _really_ verifying it. It 's impossible to do so. Can any
| single person truly know how everything in their computer
| works? Or how the machines that made the semiconducter
| work? Nope. All we can do is try to determine the truth
| by proxy, which means the truth can and will always be
| manipulated.
| dash2 wrote:
| > Truth is that people largely place trust in institutions
| and people they are used to and identify with, often for
| irrational reasons. People are prone to FUD. Theyre lazy
| and passive.
|
| I think to a degree, this is a misunderstanding. The
| Russian approach to disinformation in particular does not
| sell the message "trust us!" - at least, not in the West.
| Instead, they push the message "trust nobody!" In fact,
| RT's slogan is "question everything". While that sounds
| enlightened, in fact, total lack of trust makes you
| cognitively disabled. You can't believe anything or any
| expert. All too often, you then "do your own research" and,
| as a gullible amateur, are sucked into conspiracy theories.
|
| The problem isn't the sheeple, it's the wake-up-sheeple
| people.
| fartcannon wrote:
| Youre victim blaming, no? The problem is the lack of
| ethics of the people in the know, who are creating the
| propaganda, and tools and disinformation on behalf of the
| Robert Murdoch's in exchange for money. All this stuff is
| done by people like us.
|
| We are the problem. Not the misinformed masses.
| pydry wrote:
| You're effectively saying the same thing as me...?
|
| Russian FUD propaganda resonates in the west because of
| the lack of trust in western media. That's them
| successfully exploiting a hole _our_ media dug for
| themselves.
|
| The fact that we've responded by _banning_ RT highlights
| that that hole goes deep enough that we 're responding
| by, as a matter of imminent practicality, violating a
| core value of _our_ civilization. That both hurts and
| deepens the hole.
|
| Unfortunately we cant go back in time and reinstate the
| fairness doctrine and render RT a pathetic waste of time.
| The cat is out of the bag now we deliberately eroded
| trust in our own institutions and autocratic regimes have
| been exploiting it for years.
|
| Speaking of antivaxxers, the same thing happened in
| reverse. I have friends in Russia who absolutely refused
| to take sputnik because why the _fuck_ would you inject
| something into your arm because _Putin_ told you to?
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _them successfully exploiting a hole our media dug for
| themselves_
|
| You're arguing that RT exploits a hole the West dug
| itself into. The comment you're responding to argues the
| hole is besides the point. The exploit would work with or
| without it. (The fact that all media is lumped into a
| single category, a fallacy, seems to prove the point.)
| pydry wrote:
| >The comment you're responding to argues the hole is
| besides the point.
|
| They're making no comment about _why_ RT resonates, just
| that those people it does resonate with "are the
| problem".
|
| By media I was referring exclusively to mainstream
| newspapers/sites, TV, etc. I realize that the way I used
| the term was slightly ambiguous.
| KarlKemp wrote:
| > It has no implicit promise of freedom of speech or press,
| democracy, or any other political ideal.
|
| The internet original was little else _than_ implicit
| promises of such things, if not explicit. "It routes around
| censorship" and all that...
| snarf21 wrote:
| I disagree. The connectivity of the internet still has the
| ability to shine the light on the darkness. The problem is
| that, writ large, we don't care. (me included, we just post a
| grumble online and get back to our lives)
|
| Look at all the disinformation that you will see on the "news"
| channels (both sides) and "news" sites (which have replaced
| paper). Faux outrage is _extremely_ profitable and as long as
| that is true, there will be no news, just infotainment click-
| bait for profit.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| This is TikTok, it is not a platform for freedom of speech or
| whatever. It is a platform to see cute dance videos and more
| generally a happy place to waste time.
|
| For that I'd say that the Russian TikTok is more in like with
| what TikTok is for and that's the Ukrainian TikTok that is
| unusual. I guess that you can't avoid it when there is a war in
| your country, despite all the efforts TikTok makes to keep
| things carefree.
| snek_case wrote:
| TikTok has a lot of CCP propaganda in it (fake influencers
| paid by the CCP). It's not just a happy place to see cute
| dance videos.
|
| This goes into some of said propaganda in it, and how they
| have more "soft" propaganda in the US version of TikTok vs
| more intense propaganda in the Chinese version of the app:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3aYCG4vEe5s
| tgv wrote:
| Your parent is still right, though: that's what the internet
| largely is. Companies that try to make a quick buck by
| grabbing attention. And while there are still many other
| sites that allow open discussion, Russia can block them quite
| easily for a very comfortable majority of the population.
| adhoc_slime wrote:
| This is TikTok only after a despotic government created a law
| about fake news that can result in a 15 year jail sentence.
|
| your characterization of TikTok is shallow, its a social
| media platform. Just like every other social media platform
| people want to share and talk about the world along with
| their silly dances and you miss the point of OP and the
| article that it isn't about what TikTok should or shouldn't
| be, but that the limits set on free speech result in a
| neutering of of the social media platform, and is one example
| of many apps/website/platforms/news stations that will have
| been effected by this.
| toxik wrote:
| You are parroting an old tired "it's only protected speech
| when it's the government meddling", and to that I ask, did
| you not read the part where TikTok is doing this because the
| Russian government decided to jail people over "fake news"?
| Does this not constitute a textbook violation of the freedom
| of speech?
| bbarn wrote:
| What freedom of speech?
|
| That freedom doesn't exist in two of the three countries
| involved here.
| LightHugger wrote:
| What is this reply? The complaint is that the freedom
| doesn't exist.
|
| You seem to be implying that people just don't know, when
| it's exactly what they're talking about?
| bbarn wrote:
| "A textbook violation of the freedom of speech" assumes
| there is a "textbook" to violate.
|
| There isn't one at all here, so why is there any debate
| at all on the freedom of speech being violated?
| depaya wrote:
| On my TikTok page I watch stand up comedians, cooking videos,
| comedy sketches, political commentary, engineering videos,
| goofy out of context clips, song mashups, video game footage,
| and yes very occasionally a dance video.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| nazgulsenpai wrote:
| China has been doing this for almost 2 decades.
| qiskit wrote:
| > Controlling the narrative is only a problem for existing
| democracies with press freedom.
|
| Doesn't explain why both democratic and non-democratic
| countries ban press. It's amazing how quickly people forget
| that democratic countries have banned russian, iranian,
| chinese, etc government/press/etc.
|
| It's like the same people saying only "autocratic" countries
| russia ( which is actually a democracy ) is a threat to other
| nations. When in actuality, 90% of all invasions in the past
| few decades have been by democracies.
|
| Maybe democraticizing forces is the evil we all should be
| fighting against because democraticizing forces have done so
| much damage worldwide. Even though we pretend to be the saints.
| jabbany wrote:
| The Internet has never been a "democratizing" force. Even now
| there are hardly any large services and/or platforms that use
| anything even close to a real _democratic_ process when it
| comes to dealing with content and moderation.
|
| At best the Internet gives us some _freedom of choice_ in
| selecting whichever authority we'd like to operate under the
| reign of. Having (some) freedom of choice does not in and of
| itself lead to democracy.
|
| That said, even this freedom of choice is increasingly being
| challenged with the erection of more and more national
| boundaries on the Internet. Collectively we do need to figure
| out how the Internet is to be governed in the future, because
| if we just take the default, we will end up replicating the
| same national borders as we have now.
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| The old dream is gone, but now that we saw what corporate
| takeover and commercialization brings, maybe we can reconsider
| and attempt to save the pieces that we can.
|
| At the end of the day, we still have a choice. All of a sudden,
| Mastodon and like projects start looking more attractive.
| tempodox wrote:
| Exercising your freedom would start by not using such a closed
| platform where you have no control over the content you provide
| and are subject to arbitrary rules.
| criddell wrote:
| What do you mean by "have no control over the content you
| provide"?
| tempodox wrote:
| Things like retaining ownership/copyright to said content,
| determining yourself who gets to see it (probably everyone,
| but maybe not), the ability to delete the content, etc...
| toxik wrote:
| Alright, I did and nobody cared. What now?
| jahnu wrote:
| The maximalist version of that dream, perhaps, sure. Seems a
| bit early to write it off completely.
| [deleted]
| luke_value wrote:
| Imagine believing there is freedom of speech in liberal
| democracies in 2022...
| ethbr0 wrote:
| Strong encryption is the only true internet freedom.
| kube-system wrote:
| Except where it is outlawed.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| That's exactly why it's outlawed.
|
| And notably, Russia hasn't banned VPNs yet, afaik?
| wanda wrote:
| I wouldn't be so hasty to call time of death on the internet.
| We are all of us here discussing this matter, after all.
|
| More significantly, controlling the narrative is not new. The
| Cold War was a narrative war, each side warning their citizens
| of the dangers of the other, and that even the ideas from
| across the seas were virulent and treasonous.
|
| World War II was a war that featured a huge amount of
| propaganda, and while I would hesitate to say that it was more
| prevalent in any part of the world, the most well known
| examples come from Nazi Germany.
|
| All sides in warfare claim to be winning. Morale is a huge
| factor in survival and achieving victory, the morale of the
| military personnel and the populace.
|
| The belief is that you can't go around saying that you're
| losing, because this is more likely to convince people to stop
| trying to win.
|
| By contrast, you can say that it's challenging, and that many
| have died, because a challenge is something to aspire to do,
| and the deaths of your people is something to arouse anger and
| a desire for revenge.
|
| During times of war, freedoms have always been infringed upon,
| to keep the citizens in line and to police the nation for spies
| and dissenters.
|
| What you are seeing is the use of a new tool in the propaganda
| toolkit. While the press can be swayed, big global news outlets
| need far more than a little cash or aggressive coercion to
| adopt a story contrary to fact, especially if to support a
| regime hated in the West where all the business is.
|
| The point here is that your traditional internet outlets for
| news and discussion, namely news websites and forums, are
| harder to game. They're entrenched, they have their own agenda
| and you can't coerce your agenda over them.
|
| But social media is journalism that anyone can produce, edit,
| fake and broadcast from anywhere. The way the content is
| displayed isn't chronological like news and forums, it's based
| on whether something is "trending" which I take to mean that a
| lot of people are engaging with it (viewing, commenting,
| liking, saving whatever). This can be gamed, so now you're
| controlling what the content is and how it is presented.
|
| The internet is not to blame.
|
| The worst thing that happened to the internet was how obnoxious
| advertising was allowed to become, from your 200px x 75px pixel
| art banners at the bottom of the screen to over 40% of viewport
| being adverts, adverts that can play video, modals that pop up
| based on whether your cursor has travelled toward the address
| bar or tabs to close the site (seriously, if a website does
| that, I know the company doesn't give a shit about its users).
|
| It's not necessarily bad that advertising became the primary
| means of extracting revenue, it's just that we as a user base
| didn't do enough to punish websites that adopt dark patterns.
| We didn't as a majority categorically refuse to engage with
| content obscured by such methods, we just clicked through it to
| get what we individually wanted.
|
| The real problem is that a lot of content is generated for the
| purposes of attracting people to it rather than providing new
| or true/useful information, but this tends to be solved by
| simply keeping a list of trustworthy, useful websites in mind
| and add to that list very selectively.
|
| The internet is okay as long as you filter it, is my point, and
| I'm very grateful that it's still around precisely because I am
| here, talking to you now.
|
| If we want the internet to change, that's something we as its
| users have to bring about ourselves. And while that may mean
| nothing happens, it's better than an internet where something
| or someone is in control of it.
|
| Google would love to think of itself like such an entity, but I
| honestly think its losing influence fast.
|
| I don't personally trust Google to keep a product around, so I
| daren't use half their services because I don't like thinking
| that my use of the service is on a clock. Rather than take an
| ailing product and make it profitable, they just kill it.
|
| There are also the privacy violations etc but I strongly
| suspect that most companies that have the opportunities do the
| same things as Google has been accused of doing. That's not a
| pass, it's just cynical apathy on my part because I don't care
| if Google knows what porn my partner watches.
|
| The reason Google is losing influence is simply because their
| search isn't very useful. It was good in the beginning, I feel
| like it was easily gamed for a bit, then it was more or less
| unbeatable for many years, and now it just... delivers promoted
| or garbage content. I've been trying DuckDuckGo out, which has
| been ... okay? I was surprised to learn it's powered by Bing, I
| thought Bing was supposed to be kinda bad but it has been
| working ok so far.
|
| I digress. The internet is full of junk content but it's not
| dead or buried. It's still better than TV, it's better than
| your newspaper -- unless you buy all of the newspapers every
| morning -- and it's better than no internet.
|
| It's primarily the social media subset of the internet that's
| creating problems and those problems are not confined to the
| misrepresentation of this Ukraine-Russia conflict.
|
| People are coming to define themselves as the characters they
| perform as on social media, rather than who they are. I find it
| ironic because I have always kept my online and irl lives
| completely separate, both me (maybe I'd be a bit braver years
| ago with opinions and discussion topics than irl) but with no
| overlap of people I know.
|
| and yet people who merge the two irl and online lives end up
| becoming some persona.
|
| I think the way social media works is very dangerous. It
| predicates the value of an individual on how liked they are,
| and how liked they are is determined by whether their opinions
| and sense of humour converge with those of the majority of a
| userbase of a social media network.
|
| There are numerous articles about the mental health of young
| people -- I don't think you need to look much further than
| social media to find some answers.
| criddell wrote:
| > I wouldn't be so hasty to call time of death on the
| internet. We are all of us here discussing this matter, after
| all.
|
| What has died is the idea of _the_ internet. It is thoroughly
| balkanized now.
|
| We're here on this internet talking. Things are different on
| other internets.
| htrp wrote:
| >What has died is the idea of the internet. It is
| thoroughly balkanized now.
|
| The original design was that individual state level actors
| couldn't sever access to the internet without significant
| investment.....
|
| We just balkanized the internet in a different direction
| (walled gardens)
| krapp wrote:
| We balkanized _platforms_ on the internet. It does still
| take significant investment to balkanize the _entire_
| internet.
|
| Platforms on the internet are not the internet, as much
| as people like to conflate them for the sake of the
| narrative.
| richardsocher wrote:
| That was a very thoughtful post. You bring up many reasons
| for why we started https://you.com - to have less junk, more
| control over one's sources, no ads, less engagement loops
| that you see on social media and Google, etc.
| jmiskovic wrote:
| Internet is a bit larger than TikTok and some other social
| networks. Wikipedia, Internet Archive, even the Reddit for all
| its issues, are still living examples of great democratizing
| force.
| [deleted]
| Zambyte wrote:
| All three of those are centralized authoritative forces.
| Mediawiki (distinct from Wikipedia), Mastodon, Pleroma,
| Peertube, Lemmy, Owncast, etc. are better examples of
| democratizing forces on the internet.
| cybdestroyer wrote:
| Had to sign in to visibly laugh at this comment. Democracy is
| dead b/c TikTok is the most childish opinion you could post
| about this topic.
|
| Edit: as others pointed out TikTok =! Internet.
| ZGDUwpqEWpUZ wrote:
| He didn't say democracy was dead. He said the internet is not
| the democratising force it was once hoped to be (e.g. during
| the Arab Spring).
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media_and_the_Arab_Spri.
| ..
|
| Perhaps that was before your time?
| nanoservices wrote:
| Their in lies the power of the internet. It exposes who and
| what wants to control the narrative. This is what needs to be
| quelled. The need and want for control is toxic and needs to
| end.
| sourthyme wrote:
| To me TikTok is not the "internet" because no matter how much
| the app gives, the user doesn't own their content.
|
| You can still write anything in a blog that you own and have
| people see it. To me that freedom is the "internet".
| spyder wrote:
| Because blogs and websites aren't getting blocked in Russia
| or what? The only way content can be a little more resilient
| against blocking is P2P hosting. But even that can be made
| hard to access by blocking the on-ramp ( websites, app for
| the tools to get access to P2P ) or the protocol.
| haliskerbas wrote:
| I see this comment and others like it. It's important to also
| know where the mindshare is. Where are most average
| individuals spending most of their internet hours? It is
| likely not niche-blog.com. TikTok is quickly becoming "the
| internet" for all intenents and purposes for some people.
| It's also how some folks get their news, etc.
| tommiegannert wrote:
| You don't even have to go that far to shoot down GP's
| argument. The blogs can be censored just like TikTok, as
| long as ISPs are incorporated in local states. Whether
| censorship happens by telling TikTok the rules, or telling
| the ISPs the rules seems inconsequential to the
| democritized availability of information.
|
| Starlink et al. have a unique possibility of being state-
| agnostic and even leave citizens room for plausible
| deniability. (The next problem is how Starlink is payed in
| a way that states can't block, but it seems people are
| working on that...)
| Jcowell wrote:
| Wouldn't Starlink just be beholden to the US government
| and it's laws ?
|
| As I see it no corporation can be state agnostic unless
| you want a corporation more powerful then states
| themselves and you don't want that either because a
| corporation is not beholden to the people.
| trasz wrote:
| Perhaps there could be a charity making payments for
| those who legally can't.
| short_sells_poo wrote:
| The bigger issue is that you may own your blog content, but
| if your blog is publishing undesirable opinions, it'll be
| difficult to find a host even in democracies with freedom
| of press.
|
| In other words, you may have a legal freedom to express
| your opinions but nobody is forced to give you the platform
| to do so. It can become arbitrarily difficult to actually
| disseminate your opinions at the extreme. E.g. I may
| vehemently disagree with Trump's opinions, but I have to
| admit that I feel deeply uncomfortable with private
| entities controlling whether he gets heard or not.
|
| At the same time, I don't have a good solution if I'm fully
| honest. Private entities absolutely should have the freedom
| to determine what they want published on their platforms.
| Maybe we need (as a society) realize that the social media
| has become a de-facto utility that needs to be provided as
| such, regulated as such and taken away from the hands of
| private entities?
| Izkata wrote:
| There was a post here, I think last year, about how in
| parts of the world WeChat is the internet: friends, school
| communication, payments, everything.
| kube-system wrote:
| Under that definition of internet, not enough people use it
| for it to be relevant democratizing force.
| rospaya wrote:
| > You can still write anything in a blog that you own and
| have people see it. To me that freedom is the "internet".
|
| It's easy when you have a domain, server in your basement, a
| reasonable ISP. But as soon as you break the ToS with your
| provider or registrar getting the word out becomes
| practically impossible without resorting to IPFS or Onion or
| whatever in which case the content you own becomes a little
| ghetto that nobody reads.
| brimble wrote:
| In a McLuhan sense, I'm not sure the "message" of the medium of
| the Internet is one that's compatible with free society,
| ultimately, once we get past the idealism and look at how it
| works in practice. Which is... not great.
| lastdong wrote:
| Brilliant article, thank you for sharing
| Tenoke wrote:
| Isn't tiktok's whole thing that it shows you very personally
| curated content based on data about you including demographics
| and most users see different content? Wouldn't users from Ukraine
| and England or ones from Mexico and America also see different
| videos?
|
| Are the Ukrainian videos actually unavailable in Russian TikTok
| if you search for them? It seems obvious that as you watch more
| non-war stuff (which might be the default based on the
| demographics) you'll see even less of them in the Russian
| account. And if you really can't see them even if you try (which
| the article doesn't even say as far as I saw) then isn't that the
| real news rather than the experiment that just shows how
| different demographics see different things on TikTok? What am I
| missing?
| d23 wrote:
| Are you serious? In the time it took you to write this comment
| you could have actually read the article to find the exact
| answer to your question. It's basically the whole point of the
| post.
| Tenoke wrote:
| At least on phone it only gives you one sentence per page
| with a slow transition, so it wasn't as quick as you suggest
| to go over it again to confirm.
|
| Either way, the point seemed to be more about the different
| feeds which is not a surprise anywhere while the real and
| only relevant information actually is that the content is
| banned.
| grenoire wrote:
| The article indeed shows that certain Ukrainian tiktoks are not
| available to the Russian geolocated IPs.
| yeellow wrote:
| It is mentioned in the article:
|
| "Via our Russian IP address, we try to search for some of the
| war videos that Ukrainian Nykolai has watched.
|
| But they simply don't appear. Someone doesn't want us to see
| them.
|
| Who?"
| prionassembly wrote:
| This made me finally download TikTok and.. OW! that's REALLY
| NSFW!
|
| (I didn't think I'd live, as a man, to be offended by sparsely-
| clad voluptuous women, but there I am.)
| weinzierl wrote:
| You must be on a different TikTok than me. I'm using TikTok
| from Germany and I neither get NSFW content nor war stuff. It's
| all silly dance videos, lots of stupid pranks, wonderful
| musicians and a bit of English as a Second Language content for
| me.
|
| Regardless how much of this is because of my location or my
| behaviour, it supports OPs point: TikTok can be _very_
| different for different users.
| psyc wrote:
| If you weren't offended enough, many of those G-cup Megan Thee
| Stallion fans are self-admitted minors crying "stop sexualizing
| me! I'm a kid!" while they gyrate. I deleted TikTok shortly
| after I installed it. (Not just because of that. The last thing
| I need is another attention-optimized vapid rabbit hole.)
| austinl wrote:
| This was my first experience using TikTok as well -- I think
| those videos will always appear to new users because they get a
| lot of engagement. But if you swipe past them quickly, you'll
| likely never see them again.
| umarniz wrote:
| I love the execution of this!
|
| Not comparing but I did a similar project 8 years ago at the peak
| of Israel / Palestine conflict to compare tweets from Palestine
| vs tweets from Israel.
|
| Incredible difference when you see them side by side.
|
| It would be great if someone would execute such an idea for more
| areas of conflict to bring awareness.
| dotancohen wrote:
| As someone for whom the conflict affect my childrens'
| wellbeing, and having good friends on both sides of the
| conflict, I would love if you would share your findings. If you
| prefer private conversation my Gmail username is the same as my
| HN username. > It would be great if someone
| would execute such an idea for more areas of conflict to bring
| awareness.
|
| If you have any ideas, I can help code it or host it.
| Aeolun wrote:
| I did this a few years ago for front-page news from different
| areas of the world. Was very interesting to see the contrasts.
|
| Edit, thanks internet archive:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20180118162502/https://98clicks....
| catchclose8919 wrote:
| ...uhm, isn't TikTok _practically irrelevant_ in Russia now that
| they 've stopped allowing users to post new content?! I mean,
| this is what ppl use it for, viewing new content from ppl like
| them and posting new content hoping to get "famous".
|
| With all respect for the author's work, this is not very
| relevant, since TikTok is in "zombie mode" now for Russia.
| xweber wrote:
| Sure, but this article also shows that even though new content
| gets uploaded elsewhere (about the war), Russian TikTok-ers
| will not get to see that.
| jmiskovic wrote:
| Unless you have a data on number of users, this is just
| speculation. One could also speculate that with other sources
| being turned off the young Russians would all turn to TikTok.
| This site [1] claims 54.9M active users in January.
|
| [1] https://datareportal.com/essential-tiktok-stats
| idealmedtech wrote:
| Not sure what your experience is, but when I've used TikTok,
| only a very small percentage of the content I'm shown is
| recent. The vast majority is months old, which I think is part
| of the genius of TikTok; they don't discard good content just
| due to its age, and instead show it based on novelty _to the
| individual user_
| Ma8ee wrote:
| That sounds like YouTube. I'm often recommended almost a
| decade old videos.
| blamazon wrote:
| To add on to this - a truism of the internet is that most
| people don't upload content. They only consume content
| produced by others.
|
| It stands to reason, with the nontemporal algorithm behavior
| parent comment pointed out, that a vast amount of those
| consume-only users will not even notice the new content
| restriction.
| MrYellowP wrote:
| The poster above is referring to the 1% rule of the
| internet.
|
| Wikipedia as a source is good enough for this:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule
| [deleted]
| axus wrote:
| Certainly the ones paid to produce propaganda can upload from
| outside of Russia.
| foverzar wrote:
| I've tried uploading some SMM content to TikTok for Russian
| audience using proxy gateways in multiple states. It just
| ends up as "not found" when accessed from Russian IPs.
| Noumenon72 wrote:
| It doesn't say much about TikTok's algorithm, but it did help
| me imagine something like the US invading Iraq and me not being
| able to find out because Twitter blocked new tweets here.
| bannedbybros wrote:
| throwaway48375 wrote:
| >Ukrainian Nykolai gets to see men in military attire singing
| patriotic songs about loving Ukraine. Or talking about it being a
| man's duty to sign up for battle.
|
| >Russian Alexei sees a man tripping over in the water, a puppy
| patting a duckling on the head and some funny, homemade costumes.
|
| Is it just me or does the first one sound like propaganda and the
| second one sound like normal TikTok?
| jimbobimbo wrote:
| Does inability to explicitly find and watch Ukrainian videos
| from the Russian IP (see closer to the end of the article)
| sound like a normal Tiktok?
| thriftwy wrote:
| Why do you think they will watch Ukrainian videos? In
| Telegram there's plenty of Russian war videos. Probably,
| hundreds of channels with tens-hundreds of thousands
| subscribers.
|
| It's just TikTok does not want to be part of this.
| jimbobimbo wrote:
| The point being, those who "will watch" won't be able to,
| because TikTok actively suppresses those videos even in
| direct searches, as article alleges.
|
| If Ukrainian side being awash with war videos is
| "propaganda" and is "not normal for TikTok" (GP's claim),
| then is this normal?
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| The number of people unwilling to accept and be critical of
| Ukrainian propaganda has been eye-opening to me.
|
| The people that were just railing against "misinformation" by
| their political opponents, have been happy to jump all over
| snake Island, ghost of Kyiv, Z dressed in uniform last year,
| higher Russian death rate than frontlines of World War II, and
| going out of their way to ignore neo-Nazi groups there.
|
| No one has to be pro-Russia, to notice all the Ukrainian
| propaganda. Proves to me that everyone is full of shit when it
| comes to actual standards of acceptability.
| gruez wrote:
| >The people that were just railing against "misinformation"
| by their political opponents, have been happy to jump all
| over [...]
|
| source? while I don't doubt there's a many people for both
| groups, I haven't seen concrete examples of what you're
| describing.
| InfiniteRand wrote:
| The one war video that made it through to the Russian bot:
|
| The clip is shared by a Russian account and contains a gaming
| reference for pausing games
|
| Good factoid to note for dodging automatic filters
| dark-star wrote:
| It would have helped if they had made it more prominent that
| you're supposed to scroll down. I was watching the first video,
| expecting to see a second one for comparison or something. I
| already closed the tab again and only later saw a coworker
| browsing HN who clicked on the same link and saw him scroll :)
| [deleted]
| rvnx wrote:
| Very well executed project! Congratulations
| peter-m80 wrote:
| I hate this UX
| sAbakumoff wrote:
| Kremlin Press Secretary Dimitro "the cockroach" Peskov openly
| boasted about using VPN. Nothing prevents RU citizens to use VPN
| to get the full access to the TT content.
| sebastianconcpt wrote:
| Social Media big tech in collusion with party propagandists is
| poison in the internet freedom dream. Ideologues owning big tech
| is a dream come true for authoritarians. How are we going to fix
| this I have no idea.
| user3939382 wrote:
| My position is that Russia's Article 51 legal justification for
| the invasion is a stretch at best, but that the US policy of
| unnecessary, aggressive NATO expansion [1] baited Putin into this
| war whereas he was very clear Ukrainian NATO membership was a red
| line for him. We also made no effort to encourage Ukraine to
| honor the Minsk accords which would have almost certainly
| prevented this. If Mexico was hostile and Russia was in the
| process of working with them to put nukes in Tijuana I wonder if
| the US would sit idly by? Meanwhile was have Condoleezza Rice
| without a hint of irony on the news agreeing that invading a
| sovereign country is a war crime (does Iraq ring a bell?)
|
| I see my point of view reflected only in alternative, independent
| media. This includes, for example, Pulitzer-prize winning
| journalist Chris Hedges who had years of his work purged from
| YouTube simply because he had a show on RT which was never once
| sympathetic to Putin.
|
| My anti-war, pro-diplomacy POV is banned from corporate media,
| and flagged/downvoted into oblivion on Reddit and even Hacker
| News. From my perspective most supporting sending arms and money
| to Ukraine has been the victim of a policy campaign by the arms
| industry which has already generated windfall arms sales to
| Ukraine and now Germany (!). So am I surprised by this story? No.
| I've been seeing a banned perspective on this conflict in the US
| from day 1.
|
| [1] "We reiterate the decision made at the 2008 Bucharest Summit
| that Ukraine will become a member of the Alliance" June 2021
| https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/news_185000.htm
| gspr wrote:
| US policy isn't "expanding" NATO. NATO expands because free,
| sovereign nations apply to join.
|
| Name a single country that is in NATO against its own will due
| to "US policy".
| older wrote:
| > he was very clear Ukrainian NATO membership was a red line
| for him
|
| No, he wasn't. That's just another bullshit excuse manufactured
| to justify this criminal invasion. Here, read it from the man
| himself:
| http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/transcripts/21598
| user3939382 wrote:
| > No, he wasn't
|
| The Hill, April 2021 "Putin draws a 'red line' on Ukraine,
| and he means it"
|
| https://thehill.com/opinion/international/550036-putin-
| draws...
|
| The Ukrainian Weekly, June 2021 "Following summit, Kremlin
| says NATO membership for Ukraine would be a 'red line'"
|
| https://www.ukrweekly.com/uwwp/following-summit-kremlin-
| says...
|
| Reuters, September 2021 "Kremlin says NATO expansion in
| Ukraine is a 'red line' for Putin"
|
| https://www.reuters.com/world/kremlin-says-nato-expansion-
| uk...
|
| ABC News, November 2021 "Putin warns West: Moscow has 'red
| line' about Ukraine, NATO"
|
| https://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/putin-
| warns-w...
| older wrote:
| Exactly. So they were completely fine with NATO, but in
| 2021 it suddenly started being a problem.
| kcb wrote:
| Your perspective is the same tired idea that the US is the only
| country that controls world foreign policy and everyone else
| just plays along. What of the Ukrainian people?
| user3939382 wrote:
| Here's the US government explicitly picking the leaders of
| the Ukrainian government before they were put in place
| https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-26079957
|
| Not to mention that leading up to this transition of power we
| backed a violent coup of their democratically elected
| government in 2014.
|
| What of the Ukrainian people in Eastern Ukraine who have been
| getting bombed for 7 years in a civil war? The Ukrainian
| people through their government agreed to the Minsk accords
| which would have prevented this but were then never honored.
|
| I wouldn't say this idea is tired at all, it's the opposite,
| it's banned and unspoken on corporate media that serves as
| the mouthpiece for the US government and arms industry.
| artem247 wrote:
| megous wrote:
| > What of the Ukrainian people in Eastern Ukraine who have
| been getting bombed for 7 years in a civil war?
|
| What about them, exactly?
|
| https://www.osce.org/special-monitoring-mission-to-
| ukraine/5...
|
| There was a major decrease in ceasefire violations in 2020
| and 2021. Looks like to Russia that sounded like it's time
| to escalate and fix "the problem" whatever that is, by
| starting a major war and invading straight to Kyiv of all
| places. I'm sure poor people of Donbas will benefit greatly
| from a major escalation caused by Russia, that's going to
| reverse all this. Whole year of reported civilian
| casualties by OSCE now happen in a day.
|
| > The Ukrainian people through their government agreed to
| the Minsk accords which would have prevented this but were
| then never honored.
|
| Why OSCE SMM observations of agreement violating weapons
| are consistenly much higher in the separatist areas, by a
| large margin? (80/20 or so)
| user3939382 wrote:
| > There was a major decrease in ceasefire violations in
| 2020 and 2021
|
| Yeah, according to your own linked report there were only
| "93,902 ceasefire violations" in 2021 with the violations
| clearly _growing_ by the end of report period. I don 't
| know anything about the credibility of this report, but
| your own evidence refutes your argument.
| kreeben wrote:
| >> he was very clear Ukrainian NATO membership was a red line
| for him
|
| Whereas in the free world, no one, not even Putin, should and
| absolutely will not have a say in other nations agreements,
| because that is a preposterous idea that no supporter of
| democracy would even consider to be a valid stance.
| rocknor wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuban_Missile_Crisis
| user3939382 wrote:
| Unfortunately that's just not a standard that exists in
| reality. That's definitely not the policy of the US:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monroe_Doctrine
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2003_invasion_of_Iraq
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r.
| ..
| [deleted]
| beprogrammed wrote:
| What a fantastic article, was captivated from beginning to end.
| startoffs wrote:
| I have noticed that TikTok is more likely to show the content
| from my current location as I travel between countries. Must be
| the geo tagging that makes it easy for the . 80km is a long
| distance when it crosses national borders.
| totetsu wrote:
| I don't like how this site take over scrolling. I want to read
| the text in the middle of my screen where there isn't a crack
| avodonosov wrote:
| I agree. My screen isn't cracked, by the scrolling behaviour is
| confusing and inconvenient.
| eunos wrote:
| From the experiment they only change the IP addresses and no need
| to spoof the GPS?
| querez wrote:
| I don't understand how they're able to just "change their IP"
| to something that's located in those 2 cities. How does that
| work, do they have someone running a proxy for them in those 2
| locations?
| foverzar wrote:
| > How does that work, do they have someone running a proxy
| for them in those 2 locations?
|
| Sure, there are thousands of proxies in Russia and Ukraine.
| Lots of them are free. Besides, any decent paid VPN with
| multiple exit nodes would likely have nodes in both Russia
| and Ukraine.
|
| You could even order a VPS hosting, if that's your thing.
| hermannj314 wrote:
| Aggressor nations have the privilege of lying to themselves on
| the consequences and reality of their wars. The defenders do not
| get the privilege to ignore that.
|
| Americans barely talked about Afghanistan. For 20 years, our
| internet was full of funny videos, stupid songs, and memes of
| Osama bin Laden. Sure we bombed civilians targets and committed
| war crimes too, but we had very smart lawyers that taught us
| clever words for why it was moral when we did it. And we nodded
| our heads in agreement and turned the channel to American Idol.
|
| Americans are well aware that technology enables us to live in
| our own artificially constructed reality. We spent the last 20
| years building it.
| lambdasquirrel wrote:
| Well, lest we gaslight ourselves into what'd happened, the
| Putin Administration spent a lot of time hand-waving and saying
| that they weren't going to invade Ukraine. And then they did,
| and apparently expecting that they were going to be greeted as
| liberators. So there is no reason to trust them at all. (Maybe
| just like there was no reason to trust GWB's folks either.)
|
| From where I'm sitting, Biden's folks did no small part in
| subtlely goading the Russians into doing stupid things. But
| really, they just led Putin and Xi into their own worst
| excesses, much like how those have been doing to the U.S. in
| turn.
|
| The world is an ugly place, and it's up to us citizens to
| figure out what's going on. We are not served when the U.S.
| invades Afghanistan. How was that geopolitically smart, even in
| a realpolitik sense? Likewise the Russian people would be smart
| to realize just how much the public opinion in sympathetic
| countries (like Germany) has turned against them. When we buy
| into this Brave New World stuff, we are creating a worse
| situation for ourselves - and even more so for future
| generations.
|
| Most of all, we need to know ourselves, because these
| artificially constructed realities work against us when the
| algorithms know us better than we do.
| [deleted]
| asveikau wrote:
| On the other hand...
|
| I was really against the Iraq war and nobody ever threatened me
| with 15 years of jail for it.
|
| The architects of that conflict left when term limits were up.
| (Putin did not.)
|
| Don't get me wrong, Iraq was pointless. Afghanistan seemed to
| have a justification at the start but was mismanaged early on.
| In terms of culture, wide swaths of the population were
| brainwashed in a similar way to how we talk about Russia now,
| though with a little more vocal opposition. But what I can say
| is there is room in the American system for course correction.
| NoOn3 wrote:
| I don't really think if you will do peaceful express your
| opinion against war in Russia maybe with single protest you
| will get a real term in prison only a monetary fine and even
| this is not always the case.
| dcchambers wrote:
| This is a great visual and concrete example of how easily a
| narrative can be controlled.
|
| This is but one example of a larger systemic issue with media in
| the 21st century, and an issue with how people consume that
| media.
|
| Virtually every platform is like this, not just TikTok. It's not
| like TikTok tries to present itself as a neutral, unbiased
| source. Their whole premise is delivering "highly curated"
| content to you as fast as possible. The problem is that people
| have accepted that as normal and it's doing horrible things to
| the world. There's a reason everyone feels like we're the most
| divided we've ever been...and it starts with things like this.
|
| As far as the war in Ukraine is concerned, this is just like
| classic WW2 propaganda but turned up to 11 due to the nature of
| how fast and easy it is to spread [mis]information these days.
| ec109685 wrote:
| This where sanctions could be used. TikTok is profiting by
| keeping this neutered version up in Russia, so US government
| could prohibit making money in US until they take it down in
| Russia.
| blaser-waffle wrote:
| Tik Tok is Chinese -- and was raged against by Trump for that
| reason -- and would constitute picking a fight with the CCP.
| That's a big ole can of worms to open up while running other
| big-deal sanctions and playing the brinkmanship game with
| Russia.
| sharken wrote:
| Absolutely, it's tempting to go after China as well using
| the saying, If you're not with us, you're against us.
|
| But the current strategy of appealing to China to at least
| not help Russia in any way, is the best outcome.
|
| And thankfully China has opted to pursue a rather novel way
| of fighting COVID, which prevents them from getting
| stronger economically.
| latchkey wrote:
| Speaking of controlled narratives, I'd like to see the source
| code to their bots so that this experiment can be reproduced.
|
| I'm not saying that they didn't just make up the article, but
| how do we know?
|
| How do we know their bots didn't have bugs in them that pushed
| the results in favor of the tone of the article?
| sangnoir wrote:
| > I'd like to see the source code to their bots so that this
| experiment can be reproduced.
|
| You don't need the bots source code to reproduce the
| experiment, just as you wouldn't ask to borrow/inspect a
| biochemist's beakers to reproduce their experiment.You simply
| follow the same steps they did and see if you observe the
| same results.
| AlbinoDaffy wrote:
| While no the answer you are expecting, but the answer
| nonetheless. If you have android phone (or android emulator
| wink wink, nudge nudge), you can install modded TikTok
| client[1], which has a bunch of settings. The one you are
| looking for is "- Remove most of regional restrictions".
| Change your region to russland, and try scrolling it for
| yourself. If you are an advanced enough programmer, you can
| check out the changes made to the app in the github
| repository[2].
|
| Bots may be prejudice to the war content in terms of how they
| watch videos and how they scroll through them, and as such
| changing recommendation algorithm, but the original reporting
| is about censorship of war related content. Which doesn't
| require that much of a proof, it is officially confirmed by
| TikTok even in the statement at the end of a submitted report
| - it doesn't show newly uploaded content in rus region.
|
| [1] https://www.pling.com/p/1515346/ [2]
| https://github.com/tigr1234566/TikTokMod
| [deleted]
| tormeh wrote:
| Hm... Pretty solid argument in favor of federated/decentralized
| protocols, this. Is there anything out there that doesn't suck?
| Not for chat. We've got Matrix and chat is usually not censored
| anyway.
| d0mine wrote:
| Nobody in power wants it. For example, look at how alternatives
| to reddit that gain any traction are treated (they have a
| reputation that only bigots, incels, other unsavory characters
| use it--any such platform is overrun by government trolls).
| bogwog wrote:
| How well would a federated social network hold up to an attack
| from a government like Russia? Either to flood it with
| propaganda, or simply to bring it down?
| NoOn3 wrote:
| Therefore, in part they do not become popular, goverments
| simply do not allow them to do this.
| [deleted]
| macinjosh wrote:
| Now do Yemeni TikTok and the US.
| fbn79 wrote:
| So Facebook was not so bad after all!?
| NoOn3 wrote:
| Even if facebook's methods are a little softer It's not really
| a good.
| sporkland wrote:
| Love that people are doing this research.
|
| Maybe I'm delusional, but I found it positively surprising that:
| 1. The Ukrainian user saw videos about the war despite Russia and
| China wanting to suppress news around it, and I'm sure TikTok
| taking pressure around it. 2. It mostly isn't algorithmic
| deception, it's a byproduct of the fact that they had to turn off
| new video uploads in response to a crazy fake news law.
| dncornholio wrote:
| The point of the article is, in my opinion, TikTok is working as
| intended. What did you expect really?
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