[HN Gopher] TikTok users can't upload anti-ICE videos. The compa...
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TikTok users can't upload anti-ICE videos. The company blames tech
issues
Author : kotaKat
Score : 1165 points
Date : 2026-01-27 13:44 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.cnn.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.cnn.com)
| kotaKat wrote:
| well... i submitted it as
| https://lite.cnn.com/2026/01/26/tech/tiktok-ice-censorship-g...
| but i guess HN drops the lite off of it? le sigh, here's hoping
| _someone_ can frontpage one of these tiktok censorship stories
| today...?
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Looks like this one made it to the front page.
|
| Interesting times...
|
| My mother was born just after WWII--died a few years ago. As
| sad as I have been (still am) when I watch the world fall apart
| around me I am thankful that she at least lived through perhaps
| the best stretch American history--does not have to see the
| shit I am seeing daily (she was the type that would have been
| unconsolably anxious about it).
|
| I feel badly, so far, for my daughters born roughly in the
| period around September 11, 2001. Still, I'm hopeful they might
| yet see even a brighter future than I had growing up in the
| 70's...
| pjmlp wrote:
| I am the first generation after the fall of Salazar's
| dictorship, so naturally I belong to those that had the
| opportunity to grow in freedom while hearing the stories from
| everyone that suffered from it, the dead and crippled from
| colonial wars, many sent as punishment for their political
| views and so on.
|
| Never I though that I would still see the return to such
| politics in my lifetime, even in Europe it is getting harder
| to push back on them.
| criddell wrote:
| Based on this comment, I think we are around the same age.
| I'm 55 and have two kids born in the early 2000's.
|
| I was born in Canada in 1970 to loving and extraordinarily
| supportive parents and moved to the US in the mid 90's. I
| can't imagine a better time or place to have been born. I
| have kids around the same age as yours and their lives are so
| much more difficult even though they are smarter and harder
| working than I ever was.
| BeetleB wrote:
| > I am thankful that she at least lived through perhaps the
| best stretch American history--does not have to see the shit
| I am seeing daily
|
| I think the Vietnam War was much worse than what you are
| seeing daily...
| nomilk wrote:
| Meta note: it would be awesome to collate a list of 'better
| ways to view populate sites'. For example, I only learned
| recently that replacing www with old in a reddit url takes you
| to a less cluttered version of the site. And I only recently
| bookmarked a couple of 'archiving' sites (important for reading
| content that's paywalled). TIL your cnn 'lite' technique.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Yeah, rock the 'old'. New reddit is TikTok Jr.
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| The forced US hosted tik-tok sale is all about hiding information
| from the US public that most people in the rest of the world have
| easy access to.
| gruez wrote:
| >is all about hiding information from the US public that most
| people in the rest of the world have easy access to.
|
| Are we talking about the Trump administration or the Biden
| administration? The current ban was passed under Biden with
| supermajorities in both houses.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Efforts_to_ban_TikTok_in_the_U...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protecting_Americans_from_Fore...
| throwforfeds wrote:
| Both.
|
| I'm not sure why the meme on the right is that the left wants
| to protect Biden or anyone else. Who cares, they all can come
| crashing down.
| gruez wrote:
| >I'm not sure why the meme on the right is that the left
| wants to protect Biden or anyone else.
|
| No, the point isn't "protecting Biden", it's pure self
| interest. Tiktok is a social media platform that's very
| popular with Democrat's electorate and is already left
| leaning. Why risk it falling into the other party's control
| (especially near the end of Biden's term), just so you can
| maybe push more left leaning talking points?
| wat10000 wrote:
| Because the concept of limiting state power for when the
| other side takes power is not in the American political
| vocabulary.
| gruez wrote:
| The difference here is that unlike expanding the NSA or
| DHS, control of tiktok doesn't pass to the next
| administration, because it's held in private hands.
| wat10000 wrote:
| > Why risk [TikTok] falling into the other party's
| control
|
| > control of tiktok doesn't pass to the next
| administration
|
| Huh?
| pshirshov wrote:
| How can that be that during any single administration there
| always are bipartisan votes in favor of digital surveillance
| and censorship, oh, I mean online protection for kids and
| puppies? Pure coincidence I think.
|
| Boden's good, Grump's bad, simple as that. Or Grump's good,
| Boden's bad doesn't matter.
| direwolf20 wrote:
| One is clearly worse than the other on some issues -- only
| one of them executed US citizens in the street for
| protesting, during both terms.
| pshirshov wrote:
| Choose your alignment wisely! You can only serve the Good
| or the Evil!
| justonceokay wrote:
| Why is it always a blame game? What dos that accomplish?
| There's no "good guy" administrations. There's just
| realpolitik. The current iteration of ICE is an outgrowth of
| the Obama admin, as is the problem with billionaires in
| politics. Biden put a target on Maduro's head before leaving
| office (continuing to fill a multi-administration powder keg
| re: Venezuela). Trump just had the panache to brazenly do the
| deed instead of waiting for the next guy to do it. Horrible?
| yes. Unprecedented? Hardly.
|
| Now I'm not saying things are inevitable. Trump has a bull-
| in-china-shop mentality. But he is only being manipulated to
| set the same agenda, just faster than any president in living
| memory.
| hbarka wrote:
| //
| justonceokay wrote:
| Maybe. I just find most "which administration really
| started XYZ" discussions are a way for people to feel
| better about their affiliations. Because 'cause' and
| 'effect' are continuous and not an inherent property of
| things, it is always possible to construct a causal chain
| that happens to start wherever convenient for your
| rhetorical purposes.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| "The current iteration of ICE..."
|
| Just murdered two protestors. A bit of a change there.
| duskdozer wrote:
| I think you'll find that pro-privacy, anti-right-wing people
| often don't have the highest opinion of "their" guy
| wat10000 wrote:
| The current nonsense has been enabled by decades of
| overreach. A small minority kept saying, this stuff is going
| to be really bad if a bad guy takes power. Well, guess what
| happened.
| asadotzler wrote:
| The bad guys would have done it anyway. That's the
| important part. "Good guys shouldn't make tools because bad
| guys might (or will) use them" isn't how we should operate.
| No more should we say "the [internet|source code|pen
| testing tools|etc] could be used by bad guys so good guys
| shouldn't have it."
| wat10000 wrote:
| If by "tools" you mean technology or physical
| infrastructure, I largely agree.
|
| But I'm talking about _political_ tools. Breaking down
| the norms about how power is supposed to be wielded.
| Concentrating more and more power in the executive
| because Congress would rather be powerless and blameless
| than have responsibility.
|
| For example, giving the President the power to set
| tariffs was done with the understanding that the
| President would use this power wisely in an actual
| national emergency. That created a political tool. Now we
| have a deeply unwise President who declared a nonsense
| national emergency and is playing havoc with trade using
| this tool. If the tool hadn't been created then I don't
| think we'd have that problem. I doubt Congress would be
| willing to pass sweeping emergency powers in an
| environment where there is no emergency and no need for
| those powers. And there was never a need for those
| powers. Tariffs don't need to be enacted so rapidly that
| they can't wait for Congress to convene and pass a law.
|
| In this case, we've created a political tool giving the
| President broad power to interfere in a specific private
| business. It's no surprise if that tool gets abused, and
| it was completely unnecessary to begin with.
|
| So I'd phrase it as: "Good guys shouldn't make political
| tools that are far more powerful than they need to be
| assuming that they'll be used wisely, because bad guys
| will happily use the full power of those tools."
| desolate_muffin wrote:
| I am not sure. I think we're talking about the one where
| Trump illegally and unilaterally ignored the sale or de-list
| deadline passed in said bipartisan bill so he could figure
| out which Trump loyalists would be taking over. I'm glad they
| finally got it sorted out a little over a year after the
| January 19, 2025 deadline in the bill.
| saubeidl wrote:
| The Democrats always have been nothing but controlled
| opposition, designed to give you the illusion of choice.
| reliabilityguy wrote:
| > the rest of the world have easy access to.
|
| Except for China, where TikTok is nothing like the TikTok for
| the rest of the world
| LauraMedia wrote:
| Which is basically what the US also wants.
| Swoerd123 wrote:
| except with a different brand of fascism.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| Which used to be seen as "Ew, China has their own version?
| Crazy censorship" but after some time it seems like the US is
| aiming for the very same thing. Classy.
| mc32 wrote:
| I mean, they say it's not censorship when it's not the
| government doing it even when the government has embeds
| with "suggestions" ala facebook, twitter and reddit
| somewhere around 2020...
| Gud wrote:
| It's more sinister than simple censorship.
|
| The point is brainwashing.
| xanthor wrote:
| How do you know that conclusion is not the product of
| brainwashing? MKULTRA is just what we know about with
| certainty.
| Gud wrote:
| I am an open minded, well traveled man. I disagree with
| the powerful.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > I am an open minded, well traveled man. I disagree with
| the powerful.
|
| This kind of narrative is actually one of the more
| popular forms of propaganda.
|
| "We are the side of the revolutionaries. The status quo
| is wrong but only about the things we want to change and
| not the things we want to stay the same. Powerful people
| are our opponents."
|
| All politics is about opposing powerful people, because
| if they weren't powerful then it would be easy to defeat
| them. But there are different groups of powerful people,
| with different interests, and then it rather matters
| which ones you align yourself with on a given issue. And
| if it's always the same ones then you're doing
| partisanship rather than reasoning.
| Gud wrote:
| I didn't say I was a revolutionary. I am observing the
| world.
| steve1977 wrote:
| Hard to tell for sure, but one data point might be that
| most people outside of the US probably come to the same
| conclusion.
| autoexec wrote:
| Censorship is just a form of brainwashing.
| lenerdenator wrote:
| Case-in-point of why we shouldn't have approached China
| like we did over the last few decades. It normalized
| totalitarianism in some segments of Western society.
| pydry wrote:
| If a large outside power is intent on screwing with your
| populace I think the only way to really stop it is with
| diplomacy or a crackdown on free speech.
|
| Authoritarianism has been starting to become normalized
| because China and Russia are increasingly able to mess
| with our society in the same way our leaders always
| messed with theirs.
| mistercheph wrote:
| True, true, so true. Actually when a large outside power
| is screwing with your populace you gotta crackdown on the
| whole constitution. Yep, that's the only solution i
| think, sign of the times, I guess!
| iamnothere wrote:
| Unfortunately so. Niceties like civil rights and free
| elections were great before the rise of mortal enemies
| like Russia and China. Now we have to curtail those for a
| time to protect our democracy.
|
| Don't worry, everything will return to normal one day.
| Pinky swear.
| fogzen wrote:
| The U.S. government has not publicly presented any
| concrete evidence showing that TikTok has actually been
| used to influence US public opinion in line with CCP
| policy.
| palmotea wrote:
| > Case-in-point of why we shouldn't have approached China
| like we did over the last few decades. It normalized
| totalitarianism in some segments of Western society.
|
| An interesting thought I read a couple days ago:
| https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/24/opinion/trump-carney-
| chin...:
|
| > Finally, and most controversially, I suspect the same
| "if not America, then China" logic applies to political
| ordering as well. The United States under Trumpian
| conditions has allowed populism to come to power,
| bringing chaos and authoritarian behavior in its train.
| Recoil from that by all means -- but recognize that it
| happened through democratic mechanisms, under
| freewheeling political conditions.
|
| > Meanwhile, the modes through which Europe and Canada
| have sought to suppress populism involve harsh
| restrictions on speech, elite collusion and other
| expression of managerial illiberalism. And what is
| China's dictatorship if not managerial illiberalism in
| full flower? When European elites talk about China as a
| potentially more stable partner than the whipsawing
| United States, when they talk admiringly about its
| environmental goals and technocratic capacity, they
| aren't defending a liberal alternative to Trumpian
| populism. They are letting the magnet of Chinese power
| draw them away from their own democratic traditions.
| 1over137 wrote:
| China is not publicly espousing conquering Canada and
| Greenland (Europe). Who would _you_ choose, the people
| threatening to invade you, or the other guys?!?!
| lostlogin wrote:
| China is threatening invade other places, which are of
| more value to them.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| It would not surprise me in the least to discover that
| China is the true source of the current internal attack
| on the US, and Russia is a cut out.
|
| It would be _efficient_ for China to have Russia
| undermine the US while Russia also weakens itself.
|
| China has made huge inroads in Africa, which gives it
| access to essential metals and other raw materials, and
| also puts it in a strong position diplomatically.
| lostlogin wrote:
| If the root cause is external, it's easier to stomach.
| But what if this is just America, attacking itself?
| That's a lot harder.
| somenameforme wrote:
| America's history is basically one long story of internal
| divisions, briefly overcome primarily during economic
| booms. The last economic boom, the computing/internet
| boom, was particularly long lived and helped create the
| longest window of internal stability we've had. That
| boom's coming to an end, and the era of stability it
| brought probably isn't that far behind. And this is
| before you even stop to consider things like social media
| which helps amp up and accelerate divisions by orders of
| magnitude.
| 1over137 wrote:
| >China is threatening invade other places...
|
| Taiwan and where else?
| lenerdenator wrote:
| Pretty much anything that happens to abut the South China
| Sea.
|
| I suppose you could also make the argument that they
| already _did_ invade Tibet and Hong Kong, though that 's
| splitting hairs.
| RobotToaster wrote:
| Hong Kong was always Chinese, and was leased at gun
| point.
| lenerdenator wrote:
| And now the agreement that they'd be given a more
| liberalistic government is being torn up at gun point.
| palmotea wrote:
| There's also the whole South China sea thing, where
| they're making claims on international waters and the
| territorial waters of their neighbors: https://en.wikiped
| ia.org/wiki/Territorial_disputes_in_the_So...
|
| But I have a feeling your position is basically "Except
| for all the cases where they're threatening their
| neighbors, they're not threatening their neighbors at
| all."
| 1over137 wrote:
| >I have a feeling your position is basically...
|
| No, not at all. I don't follow China closely, and was
| genuinely asking.
| thesmtsolver2 wrote:
| Arunachal Pradesh.
|
| https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna245797
|
| Tibet and Xinjiang already conquered and we have
| forgotten about them.
| ahtihn wrote:
| Xinjiang conquered? If you go that far back you can blame
| every big power for having conquered some of their
| territory.
| lostlogin wrote:
| India, Bhutan. South China Sea. East China Sea/Japan.
| thesmtsolver2 wrote:
| China claims parts of India, occupied some parts already
| in Ladakh, has conquered and subjugates Tibet, subjugates
| Xinjiang and has disputes with almost all other
| neighbors.
|
| As a person whose country is being threatened by China, I
| support the US.
|
| If China were as developed as the US, a lot of China's
| threats would have been reality.
| thih9 wrote:
| I guess rest of the world should take notes and adjust
| the approach to China and those segments of Westerd
| society where totalitarianism got normalized.
| euroderf wrote:
| Oceania gets tech tips from Eastasia.
|
| Oceania has always gotten tech tips from Eastasia.
| NoGravitas wrote:
| America: does the usual American thing Americanly
|
| Commentators: What are we, some kind of Asians?
| lenerdenator wrote:
| That's... not what I'm saying?
|
| The US has traditionally had at least some counterweight
| to the state, in the form of a free press, free speech,
| opposition parties, checks and balances in branches of
| government, and an armed populace. The effectiveness of
| these measures has varied over time but there has never
| been a point when any single institution had control over
| the United States to the point that the CPC has control
| over mainland China.
|
| People are concerned that the US is taking an
| authoritarian bent under Trump, and many of the tactics
| being used would lead to a state far more similar to the
| PRC than the historical US.
| direwolf20 wrote:
| There still isn't. If a single institution had the level
| of control over the US that the CCP has over mainland
| China, you wouldn't be allowed to talk about it on HN, as
| Paul Graham would have his webserver license revoked for
| allowing it. Webserver licenses are a thing in China.
| direwolf20 wrote:
| Although... Actually... There _are_ many conspiracy
| theories that fit this description.
| GaryBluto wrote:
| He's not engaging in a discussion with you, he's just re-
| posting a troll comment frequently spammed on various
| platforms whenever somebody discusses China. It's an
| attempt to turn a good faith discussion into a race
| debate.
| mindtricks wrote:
| I lived in China as an American a while back and had a
| similar take. Their ability to grow successfully and
| manage their populace definitely presented a new model to
| a lot of countries.
| mock-possum wrote:
| What does their treatment of the Uyghurs present to other
| countries?
| sylos wrote:
| The opportunity to get rid of non-state sanctioned people
| and get free organs
| thrance wrote:
| Why blame China? This dire situation is not on foreign
| nations seeking to destroy US democracy, it's entirely on
| domestic robber barons capturing the State for their own
| gains. China has very little soft power among the general
| population, while Musk, Ellison and the other
| propagandists run the show.
| autoexec wrote:
| Our domestic robber barons are building the capacity to
| monitor and control Americans in ways similar to those
| used by China to monitor and control their population.
|
| China isn't to blame, but they are a frightening example
| of where things are headed and they're giving the robber
| barons screwing us a blueprint to follow.
| thrance wrote:
| Indeed, thankfully it seems this admin and its allies are
| nowhere near as competent and diligent as the CCP.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > Which used to be seen as "Ew, China has their own
| version? Crazy censorship"
|
| It used to be _marketed_ as that by "China evil" people.
| Western politicians have always seen this as an arms race.
| They claim infinite brutal censorship and suppression in
| China in order to claim that not having it here is a
| strategic disadvantage. Meanwhile, China's "social credit"
| is just like a US credit score, which in most countries is
| an illegal thing to do.
|
| This is completely bipartisan, both US parties take turns
| shitting on their two greatest enemies: the Bill of Rights
| and (almost completely defeated at this point) antitrust
| law. Those are painted as China's advantages: that they
| don't have to respect anyone's rights and that their
| government directly runs companies. 1) Neither of those
| things are true, and 2) they just ignore that China
| manufactures things and invests in infrastructure (which US
| politicians as individuals have no idea how to do because
| they are lawyers and marketers), and pretend that
| everything can be reduced to gamified finance and
| propaganda tricks.
|
| It's the "missile gap" again. The US pretended and marketed
| that Russia had an enormous amount of nuclear weapons in
| order to fool us into allowing US politicians to dedicate
| the economy to producing an enormous amount of nuclear
| weapons.
|
| The result, the child of the Oracle guy owns half the
| media, and uses it for explicitly political purposes that
| align with the administration (whichever it may be.)
| lukeschlather wrote:
| Most of the country is genuinely committed to the bill of
| rights. The Trump administration is determined to ignore
| every single amendment, but even a lot of the Republican
| party I don't really think wants this. People are
| genuinely worried about Chinese media control. But Trump
| obviously wants to control the media and censor things. I
| hope the right turns around. Assuming that everyone in
| politics is working in bad faith is how we become an
| authoritarian country like China. It is hard when the
| leadership is obviously working in bad faith and the
| entire Republican party deliberately chooses bad faith
| and lies over any reasonable alternatives.
| direwolf20 wrote:
| > Most of the country is genuinely committed to the bill
| of rights.
|
| I'd like to see evidence of that. A third of the country
| voted to burn the bill of rights, and another third voted
| they don't care but they'd be ok with it happening.
| acdha wrote:
| > This is completely bipartisan, both US parties take
| turns shitting on their two greatest enemies: the Bill of
| Rights
|
| Ignoring the magnitude to draw a false equivalence is a
| great way to discredit your position. Neither party is
| perfect but only one of them is denying the full
| personhood of over half the population, having armed men
| threaten the public with lethal violence over
| constitutionally-protected activities, or saying that the
| executive should be able to direct private industries for
| profit. Debates about things like how much the government
| should ask private companies to enforce their terms of
| service are valid but it's like arguing over a hangnail
| while you're having a heart attack.
| Hikikomori wrote:
| Police in all states systemically violate it. MAGA ramped
| it up to 11 though.
| Fischgericht wrote:
| "The result, the child of the Oracle guy owns half the
| media"
|
| I guess in 90ies version of polymarket nobody would have
| had that result on their bingo sheet. But, well, they
| probably also didn't have "something like polymarket
| could exist in the free world" on those bingo cards,
| either...
| lambdasquirrel wrote:
| People in China know. Believe me they know.
| prmoustache wrote:
| Knowing is not enough.
|
| We all know that advertising and marketing is manipulation,
| yet even the most contrarian among us are still influenced
| it.
| Aurornis wrote:
| TikTok is different in China, but the rest of the world isn't
| getting a completely free TikTok.
|
| TikTok is known for tipping the scales on political keywords
| everywhere. In the past they haven't outright censored
| because that's too obvious, but uploading videos on the wrong
| side (according to TikTok, of course) of a political topic
| will result in very few views.
|
| I wouldn't be surprised if as part of the transition they're
| struggling with the previous methods of simply burying
| topics, so the obvious ban was their intermediate step.
|
| The comments claiming this is specific to the US are simply
| wrong. TikTok has always done this everywhere.
| ryandrake wrote:
| > TikTok is known for tipping the scales on political
| keywords everywhere.
|
| All social media does this. Even HN (through its users
| flagging articles). This article will be flagged by users
| and removed from the front page very soon, just as a
| similar one[1] was already.
|
| 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46777652
| Aurornis wrote:
| > All social media does this. Even HN (through its users
| flagging articles).
|
| I don't consider user-directed upvotes/downvotes/flags to
| be in the same category as company or state decided
| censorship.
| ryandrake wrote:
| The observed effect is the same: A relatively small
| number of people decide, based on political leanings,
| what is on-topic and off-topic, on behalf of the rest of
| the users.
| fwip wrote:
| Do you think anti-ICE videos are being blocked in China?
| palmotea wrote:
| > Do you think anti-ICE videos are being blocked in China?
|
| Of course not, but other stuff is.
|
| Interestingly, my understanding is government pressure
| forces Douyin to be more "positive" and "encouraging" than
| Tiktok (i.e. outrage is an easy way drive engagement with
| obvious negative externalities, and that path is blocked).
| fwip wrote:
| Then the GP statement is still correct.
|
| "The forced US hosted tik-tok sale is all about hiding
| information from the US public that most people in the
| rest of the world have easy access to."
| palmotea wrote:
| > Then the GP statement is still correct.
|
| In the most point-missing, technical kind of way.
| fwip wrote:
| No? The point is that the US government made this deal
| with Tiktok so the US can censor stuff the US government
| doesn't like.
|
| Saying "But China also censors!" is the one missing the
| point.
| palmotea wrote:
| > No? The point is that the US government made this deal
| with Tiktok so the US can censor stuff the US government
| doesn't like.
|
| That's too black and white. The Tiktok sale isn't just
| one thing by one actor for one reason, it's more
| complicated. There's the Biden administration bill,
| there's Trump's deal implementing it, etc. I don't think
| the bill that forced the sale was passed "so the US can
| censor stuff the US government doesn't like." Before
| Trump got involved, it was heading for a straight
| blackout (which IMHO would have been better for
| everyone).
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| probably not, in fact, the CCP likes to promote content
| that shows the "US in disarray", while simultaneously
| censoring and suppressing any content that is critical of
| the CCP or that exposes its bad actions
| conductr wrote:
| Out of curiosity. What do those videos mean to an average
| Chinese person?
|
| What are the opinions of illegal immigration over there?
| How do they police it? (If at all).
|
| Does this look like normal government activity? Or are they
| appalled at the lack of "freedoms" in America?
|
| I am truly naive on their culture or politics around this
| and how they would use it to show the US as boogeymen
| government and how their government is better. Is it a
| grass isn't always greener type thing for them or is it a
| way to actually think we're evil and should be stopped.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Don't forget that the regular operation of Chinese
| policing is already much less free than what Americans
| are used to, plus the restrictions on _internal_ freedom
| of migration (Hukou, less onerous than it used to be,
| plus the two SAR of Macao and HK). Mandatory state-issued
| ID, linked to your phone and bank account and so on.
|
| As well as racial profiling. There's not that much
| immigration to China in the first place, legal or
| otherwise.
| aprentic wrote:
| How so?
|
| My experience in China was that the police were a bit on
| the bureaucratic side but otherwise far less obtrusive
| than in the US.
|
| They divide their police forces into civil police and
| armed police. The civil police tend to be bored looking
| middle aged guys lounging around in guard booths at
| museums. They don't have weapons. The only armed police I
| saw stood at attention at the airport except when they
| had a changing of the guard ceremony.
|
| As near as I can tell, China only allows immigration if
| they think that will benefit China. They've been pushing
| hard on academic scholarships and, in recent years,
| they've managed to shift net visits from the US to China.
|
| They also seem to be pushing really hard on increasing
| the number of visiting African scholars. That's likely
| straight out of the US playbook; they see China as a
| rising power and want to make sure that their emerging
| leaders were educated in China and have ties to China.
| direwolf20 wrote:
| Isn't it the case that Chinese police don't need to be as
| visible because everyone fears what they can do, and
| doesn't commit crimes? A bit like how Iran has to send in
| military force to kill 50k protestors, but the UK can
| just spread a few messages that people will be arrested,
| and then they don't protest.
| aprentic wrote:
| I doubt it.
|
| As near as I can tell, there are essentially 2 kinds of
| laws; laws that people agree with and laws that they
| don't.
|
| For the second type, governments often have trouble
| enforcing them consistently so they often try to
| compensate by making the punishments harsher (eg
| mandatory minimum sentencing). As near as I can tell,
| that tends to fail miserably.
|
| Our government here has been shooting people in the
| streets and that hasn't stopped protesters from pouring
| out.
|
| When you see a bunch of people peacefully following laws
| the most likely explanation is that they just think those
| laws are reasonable.
| foldr wrote:
| I think the issue there is just that people in the UK
| have less immediate cause to protest than people living
| under the Iranian regime. The idea that British people
| are more afraid of their police than Iranians seems a bit
| wacky.
| conductr wrote:
| That's kind of my point. _through their eyes, is any of
| this really shocking at all?_ is kind of my question.
| aprentic wrote:
| A bunch of people around the world used Xiao Hong Shu for
| months when they were worried about a twitter ban.
|
| They got the same version of the app that people in China
| got. I haven't seen any formal studies but my impression, at
| the time, was that Chinese people were far better informed
| about the US than Americans were about China.
| contagiousflow wrote:
| Well you could say that every educated country is far
| better informed about the US than vice versa.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| You could even say that many foreigners are better
| informed about the US than US citizens are about the US,
| but that's not a high bar... I mean, 38% still approve of
| the current administration so that's already over one in
| three who don't understand the basic functioning of
| government or the economy.
| aprentic wrote:
| I think foreigners tend to be better informed than the
| locals wherever you go.
|
| As a baseline, they have experience living in about twice
| as many countries as the locals. They picked up their
| lives, often learned a second language, and established a
| home with minimal social support. They tend to be highly
| motivated people.
|
| In many cases, they know more about the country than the
| locals do because they've traveled all over said country
| while the locals never left their home town.
|
| edit: I just realized this might be confusing. By
| "foreigner" I mean someone who is from a place other than
| where they currently live. I'm not referring to people
| who only know about a country through hearsay.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| Yeah, it took me a moment to clue in, but I think maybe
| "expat" is the more common term there.
|
| In any case, I think it also applies to some degree to
| people who live outside the US just purely based on media
| diet. We all see clips of CNN and MSNBC and Fox on
| YouTube, but a person elsewhere will have the additional
| perspective of BBC, Al Jazeera, Le Monde, The Guardian,
| etc.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Well, yes, China doesn't have open media for its citizens.
| _Chinese_ people will on average be less well informed
| _about China_ , even accounting for the extent of Americans
| who choose trashy propaganda channels.
|
| (reminded of ex-tech influencer Naomi Wu, who basically
| went dark with a post along the lines of "the police have
| told me to stop posting")
| woooooo wrote:
| You're saying Chinese people are less informed than
| Americans about China?
| curt15 wrote:
| Compare what is required to learn about the Tiananmen
| Square massacre from inside and outside the Great
| Firewall.
| woooooo wrote:
| Ni juede zhongguoren bu zhidao tiananmen square 1989 de
| shihou zuole shenme?
|
| That's HSK2 being generous, if you had to plug it into
| Google Translate, how can you say you know more than the
| people who speak the language and live there?
| aprentic wrote:
| Given that they're regularly labeled as "pro democracy
| protests", I'd venture to say that most people outside
| the Great Firewall don't know much about it either.
| bllguo wrote:
| western arrogance is truly astounding. somehow people who
| consume 0 chinese media and cant speak a lick of the
| language somehow are intricately aware of not only
| chinese media, but chinese society.
|
| but of course. the benchmark is minor influencer and HN
| darling naomi wu.
| PearlRiver wrote:
| At least the Chinese are not pretending to be a free
| democracy.
| direwolf20 wrote:
| The population of the DPRK think they are, and it would be
| funny if it wasn't so sad.
| bigfishrunning wrote:
| To be fair, they're not really allowed to show any
| evidence that they think otherwise...
| andsoitis wrote:
| > hiding information from the US public
|
| It is literally on the front page of news papers....
|
| Also, you can see it on Instagram, X, etc.
|
| Even a cursory search on TikTok reveals anti-ICE content...
| hairofadog wrote:
| TikTok is hugely influential, and the younger people they're
| trying to influence don't read newspapers and don't hang out
| on X or Instagram (both of which also censor certain
| political content).
|
| https://www.npr.org/2024/03/26/1240737627/meta-limit-
| politic...
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/OptimistsUnite/comments/1i9zf5u/rco.
| ..
|
| https://arxiv.org/html/2508.13375v1
| andsoitis wrote:
| I am willing to bet that the vast majority of young people
| are very much aware of what ICE has been doing. Do you
| believe otherwise?
| hairofadog wrote:
| The question isn't whether they've been successful in
| hiding information. It's whether their goal is to hide
| information (or I would say, to control the narrative),
| which it clearly is.
|
| This is why the administration has gone out of its way to
| try to get Kimmel and Colbert off the air, why it has
| commandeered CBS and tried to kill 60 minutes pieces
| critical of the administration, why it violated the law
| in order to keep TikTok (already fervently pro-Trump) up
| and running, and why allies of the administration have
| been put in charge of TikTok after the transition. It's
| why Bezos is slowly strangling the Washington Post, why
| Patrick Soon-Shiong is doing the same to the LA Times,
| and why the administration is putting their thumb on the
| scale for Paramount, rather than Netflix, to buy Warner
| Brothers Discovery (which owns CNN). It's why Musk bought
| Twitter. It's why they blatantly lie in their press
| conferences and statements to the media about how the ICE
| killings happened.
|
| If you walked into a Turning-Point USA meeting in a high
| school, do you think the kids attending that meeting
| could accurately tell you what ICE has been doing? I
| don't.
| datsci_est_2015 wrote:
| I didn't realize that TikTok retroactively wiped every
| young person's brains of the content they watched over
| the past months as well!
| Forgeties79 wrote:
| Surely you know how things work at scale.
|
| If you introduce friction with something that millions or
| more use, a few % peeling off or missing things means
| tens of thousands of people are impacted. And tiktok has
| a hell of a lot more than a million users.
|
| I still don't get what you're trying to say or why you're
| downplaying this.
| ericmay wrote:
| I've never in my life used TikTok. Can you please point to a
| specific article, news source, journal, any piece of
| information that is _legal_ in the United States that I don 't
| have easy access to so I can see what I'm missing?
| tdb7893 wrote:
| Larry and David Ellison have been buying media outlets and
| those media outlets have started spiking (or delaying,
| editing, etc) stories that look bad for Trump. It's not that
| you don't have access at all, it's that these specific
| platforms are starting to suppress it.
|
| This is the notable example:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inside_CECOT
| andsoitis wrote:
| > It's not that you don't have access at all, it's that
| these specific platforms are starting to suppress it. This
| is the notable example:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inside_CECOT
|
| The 60 Minutes Episode on CECOT aired on Jan 18 and it is
| also on CBS News' website:
| https://www.cbsnews.com/news/what-deported-venezuelans-
| endur...
| woooooo wrote:
| And it got a Streisand Effect from the attempted
| scuttling. That doesn't change what they were trying to
| do, it just means they're not always executing perfectly.
|
| In the long run, they bought out some dying legacy media
| in CBS and social media has a short half-life. Nobody's
| saying they're geniuses but it's clear what they're
| trying to do.
| gruez wrote:
| It got delayed, didn't it? In the meantime the news cycle
| moved onto Trump's intervention in Venezuela and even
| greater ICE violence.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inside_CECOT#Broadcast_post
| pon...
| miltonlost wrote:
| Nice of you to delete their first sentence which includes
| "delay". Which is what happened if you read the wikipedia
| article instead of holding water for propagandists, e.g.,
| Bari Weiss.
| miltonlost wrote:
| NPR article about the rest of the right wing spin that's
| happening at CBS news is pretty insightful:
| https://www.npr.org/2026/01/27/nx-s1-5689849/after-rocky-
| sta...
| woooooo wrote:
| It's not about legality, its about scrolling and
| recommendations. Young people see stuff by other young people
| by default.
|
| Its been a conservative/zionist talking point for years now
| that "the youth are getting brainwashed by tiktok", and
| Ellison in particular seems to be in the "I've gone hard
| right due to the latest Israel conflict" camp. So of course
| they're not being subtle about it.
| gruez wrote:
| [deleted]
| woooooo wrote:
| Bro, conservative talking points have existed since
| before Jan 2024.
| ericmay wrote:
| So I do have easy access to information, and the OP was
| incorrect?
|
| > its about scrolling and recommendations
|
| Don't scroll and don't take recommendations from these
| platforms. It's better now that it's American owned, but
| you really shouldn't have been using it when the Chinese
| Communist Party owned it.
|
| And I'm only talking about TikTok because that's the OP. I
| don't use any social media platforms besides LinkedIn, and
| LinkedIn is such a big piece of trash I don't think it
| matters if anyone uses it.
| woooooo wrote:
| OP said "buying TikTok was about hiding information from
| people", and the people who bought TikTok are trying to
| suppress certain information on TikTok.
|
| Whether you or I think that's effective or not is up for
| debate, I also avoid social media, but OP made a
| statement about intentions.
|
| (And, aside, the current intentions appear far more
| pointed and ideological than when it was owned by
| ByteDance as a lottery winner with a surprise overseas
| success, optimizing for youth engagement.)
| ericmay wrote:
| > The forced US hosted tik-tok sale is all about hiding
| information from the US public that most people in the
| rest of the world have easy access to.
|
| Restating the OP ^
|
| I don't know exactly what the OP intended, and they are
| welcome to clarify, but based on the words above I read
| it as selling TikTok is a means of suppressing
| information that the rest of the world has access to from
| Americans. I disagree with the notion because what
| matters is whether or not information is suppressed
| holistically, not whether or not information is
| suppressed in a limited manner on a platform. If you
| think it's a problem, by the way, you should reach out to
| the EU, China, India, and every other major government
| that influences what content is posted on social media
| platforms including but not limited to TikTok.
|
| If you want to argue the US obtaining control of the
| content from TikTok in America is tantamount to
| information suppression, you can only do so by also
| arguing it's true only for people who use TikTok. In
| which case it's an improvement anyway since the CCP is no
| longer influencing content.
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| The chinese government has never physically assaulted me
| or my neighbors, never used tear gas around the
| elementary school my family attends. The united states
| government has. It's interesting to me that you're so
| certain about your threat model here but I don't share
| it.
| ericmay wrote:
| > The chinese government has never physically assaulted
| me or my neighbors, never used tear gas around the
| elementary school my family attends.
|
| Ok, well here where I live the government has never
| physically assaulted me or my neighbors, nor used tear
| gas around the elementary school my friends and family
| members children attend. But the government is clearing
| my streets of snow, gave me an opportunity to get an
| education, and generally helps make sure my life isn't so
| bad.
|
| On the other hand, the CCP (and others) has created lots
| of fake accounts, engaged in paying off people to help
| incite riots, and is responsible for algorithmically
| promoting divisive content which has caused people to go
| out and riot, shoot at each other, become white
| nationalist goons or antifa goons, and helped get Donald
| Trump elected.
|
| Donald Trump himself claims TikTok helped him get
| elected, he was wildly popular on the platform.
|
| > It's interesting to me that you're so certain about
| your threat model here but I don't share it.
|
| It's not that interesting, and this isn't warranted. I
| don't even know what you mean by threat model, and you
| never asked, so there was never an opportunity for it to
| be shared. Please don't wantonly levy suspicion here.
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| > Ok, well here where I live the government has never
| physically assaulted me or my neighbors,
|
| Lucky for you I hope you can keep saying that. But uh,
| where you live didn't need to have a civil rights
| movement?
|
| Plain and simple I think americans, and the american
| government, and movements formed in america and made of
| americans, are far more likely to harm me than any
| foreign power and I act accordingly.
|
| In fact they already have!
|
| > On the other hand, the CCP (and others) has created
| lots of fake accounts, engaged in paying off people to
| help incite riots, and is responsible for algorithmically
| promoting divisive content which has caused people to go
| out and riot, shoot at each other, become white
| nationalist goons or antifa goons
|
| This is americans doing this to americans with the help
| of the american tech industry for the benefit of american
| elites. How have you come to lay the whole thing at
| chinese feet. I know... but do you know? You worried
| about the wrong propaganda my man.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Yeah, this is where the friction is because it's ambiguous.
| "Access to" and "promoted by" are not the same thing,
| especially on platforms where you don't have a pure-
| chronological feed and all "home screen" content and its
| ordering is selected by the platform. Leaky, imperfect
| filters are still filters.
| woooooo wrote:
| There's 2 orthogonal lanes:
|
| 1) A philosophical debate along the lines you've
| indicated here, how much is it worth to control the
| algorithm, and how much does that equate to controlling
| speech.
|
| 2) The allegation that current buyers bought it
| specifically to bring their ideology to the algorithm,
| however effective or valid you think that is (I think it
| just hastens TikTok becoming something for "old people").
| JeremyNT wrote:
| _I 've never in my life used TikTok. Can you please point to
| a specific article, news source, journal, any piece of
| information that is legal in the United States that I don't
| have easy access to so I can see what I'm missing?_
|
| Whataboutism. You presumably know full well what the parent
| was describing, but if not:
|
| TikTok presents users with feeds of videos. For many users,
| this is their primary news source.
|
| An American oligarch and party loyalist now has de facto
| control of the app. Therefore, the regime has the capability
| to shape the narrative by boosting or hiding videos from the
| feed (whether or not they are doing so is an open question).
|
| Could users still hypothetically find the same information
| elsewhere? Sure. But if this app is their primary source of
| information, would they even _know_ they should bother doing
| so?
| ericmay wrote:
| > For many users, this is their primary news source.
|
| That's their problem. You can't make blanket claims saying
| Americans now don't have easy access to information when
| there are other sources, ranging from the NYT to the
| Intercept, to anything you want to read being written and
| translated right on your computer from the EU or Japan or
| anywhere else you want to read.
|
| > An American oligarch and party loyalist now has de facto
| control of the app.
|
| Chinese oligarch, American oligarch. Either way someone
| without your best intentions in mind owns your platform.
| Maybe you should stop using it.
| JeremyNT wrote:
| Goalpost moving, this one.
|
| The post you were replying to stated:
|
| > _hiding information from the US public_
|
| They didn't say "Americans now don't have easy access to
| information" (your words). They said this sort of
| manipulation would be to hide information from the
| American public.
|
| Many people in the American public only see news on
| TikTok. If information is suppressed within TikTok, it is
| hidden to them.
|
| If TikTok stops showing content, can they find it some
| other way? Yes, if they know to look. It's not _blocked_
| or _destroyed_ , but it's _hidden_.
|
| Is that a problem? Yes. TikTok's dominance _was_ and _is_
| a problem in and of itself. But that isn 't an excuse to
| abuse its dominance for propaganda purposes.
|
| As X has shown, these platforms are crucial to the
| information ecosystem, and their selective curation can
| warp the views of an entire population.
| ericmay wrote:
| Nope, didn't move the goalpost, let's set that aside.
|
| > The post you were replying to stated:
|
| Now you're cherry-picking what the OP wrote.
|
| > But that isn't an excuse to abuse its dominance for
| propaganda purposes.
|
| I didn't suggest that any of that was an "excuse" for
| anything - instead I called out that regardless of how
| TikTok operates you still have access to whatever
| information you want. If you choose to silo yourself,
| whether that's TikTok or FoxNews, that doesn't change the
| fact that you still have access to information.
|
| Reminder of the OP:
|
| > The forced US hosted tik-tok sale is all about hiding
| information from the US public that most people in the
| rest of the world have easy access to.
|
| If what you are suggesting is true, than OP's claim is
| untrue because all governments and all social media
| platforms _regardless of where they exist or who owns
| them_ curate content to some degree and are thus "hiding
| information from the public".
|
| You can't have it both ways here.
| asveikau wrote:
| You have easy access in that you can find things if you look
| for it.
|
| What that commenter means by easy access is that the
| information is in mainstream sources pushed to people such
| that you are likely to know about it without having looked.
|
| For example I made a comment here on HN recently that
| immigrants commit crimes at fewer rates than US born people.
| That sends a segment of Americans into a flying rage even
| though they have _access_ to that information, they were
| never going to hear it in their ordinary channels, even if
| they stick to "mainstream" media.
| ericmay wrote:
| Mainstream sources that control narratives, and are owned
| by the same extremely wealthy people that we're complaining
| about now owning TikTok?
|
| Sorry, this doesn't pass the smell test for me.
| asveikau wrote:
| Right now the Ellison family owns both CBS and the US
| version of TikTok, so sometimes the connection is kind of
| literal.
|
| But this complaint is pretty old, I think of Chomsky's
| Manufacturing Consent. (Setting aside his Epstein
| connections for a moment) The way we do censorship is
| much less the methods of a traditional totalitarian state
| and more like the private sector policing what is
| acceptable discourse.
| ericmay wrote:
| The problem with Chomsky's argument is that you can't do
| anything about it. Every country, every group in power,
| democracy, republic, chiefdom, &c, is participating in
| manufacturing consent and even if you fight to gain
| power, once you gain power you wind up doing the same
| thing.
| asveikau wrote:
| I'm not citing Chomsky with a claim that he's
| unassailable, just that it's a very old complaint. I also
| think he was right about a bunch of stuff, and wrong on
| others.
|
| As for what he suggested, this is reminding me that I
| never read his work _On anarchism_. I heard him speak
| favorably about the anarchists in the Spanish Civil War.
| I also found that topic very interesting when I was
| getting a Spanish minor many years ago at college. I am
| sure many HN commenters will disagree that it 's
| something to emulate.
| ericmay wrote:
| I think I have that book but haven't read it. I did read
| _Manufacturing Consent_ but it has been some time. I didn
| 't mean to imply that he was unassailable, just had that
| critique of that general point.
|
| I think his writing is very interesting, in general, and
| it always helps expand the mind to new or reframed ideas.
| mc32 wrote:
| I wonder where all the TikTok videos are about all the tanks
| and hotel shoot outs in Beijing over the last week or so are...
| where various party factions fought it out over control of the
| central committee and you have the disappearance of various
| generals in the PLA.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Care to elaborate?
| deadbabe wrote:
| Most Americans are unaware of how China is collapsing. All
| news is censored.
| pjc50 wrote:
| You must have heard about it from _somewhere_? Some
| reliable third party intermediary that is neither US nor
| China?
| buildbot wrote:
| I haven't heard anything about this but the claim appears
| to be mostly true - https://spectator.com/article/has-xi-
| jinping-fought-off-anot...
|
| The spectator is allegedly a reliable media source, I am
| not personally familiar.
| techterrier wrote:
| It is not. It's a contrarian newspaper, gives some
| interesting folks a platform, but mostly cranks.
| buildbot wrote:
| Is https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/the-spectator-usa/
| Wrong here?
|
| (I really don't know, but it does seem that this info at
| least is coming from multiple places?)
| techterrier wrote:
| It would be considered way on the right generally. To the
| right of the Telegraph, the main right wing broadsheet.
|
| It's a funny old magazine though, they really do get all
| sorts in there and print stuff that others wouldn't. It's
| entirely editorial though with huge biases.
|
| I'm glad it exists and read it often, but I'd go checking
| everything I read in it if I was after some facts.
| pjc50 wrote:
| The Spectator is 99% opinion pieces. They're not
| somewhere I'd go for news. It all seems a bit unconfirmed
| sources. Zhang being purged is confirmed on the BBC and
| absolutely everywhere else, along with pointing out that
| there's been a "clean sweep" of senior PLA staff. The
| street violence seems a bit less corroborated.
|
| (by contrast, while the Daily Mail is absolutely terrible
| at opinion and domestic news, they seem to have some
| capacity left for doing overseas reporting that isn't
| just wire service, so if they report on overseas events
| you can be reasonably sure that something like that
| happened)
| kipchak wrote:
| Given the details mentioned (9 guard deaths) the
| "unconfirmed reports" is probably referring to the x
| post[1] mentioned in the peoplenewstoday.com article.
| Personally word not somehow getting out of dozens of
| people being shot seems hard to believe, though not
| impossible.
|
| [1]https://x.com/ShengXue_ca/status/2015122407736963455
| wat10000 wrote:
| "According to unconfirmed reports...."
|
| The question isn't whether to trust The Spectator, it's
| whether to trust this unconfirmed, unnamed source.
| mc32 wrote:
| To be fair, I don't think it's as much collapsing as it's
| having an internal party power struggle where the more
| authoritarian faction seems to have violently quelled a
| rebellion by one or two other factions.
| aprentic wrote:
| Can you share the supporting data?
|
| Gordon Chang has been making this prediction for almost a
| quarter century. Will it happen before or after the Mayan
| calendar predicts the end of the world??
| SHAKEDECADE wrote:
| I was able to find this pretty quickly:
|
| _Zhang Youxia Arrested After Failed Coup; Gunfight
| Allegedly Occurred at Jingxi Hotel in Western Beijing_ (htt
| ps://www.peoplenewstoday.com/news/en/2026/01/25/1130776.h..
| .)
| yieldcrv wrote:
| Oh nice, what would the coup be about? Would it be for
| something closer to western interests or would it be
| about because theyre too far from marxism, like when the
| students at Tiananmen Square were trying to
| democratically vote in more marxism but the Americans
| only saw democratically
| pjc50 wrote:
| Reports talk about some combination of being too far from
| Xi and "corruption", which is the usual all-purpose
| charge in situations like this.
| ikamm wrote:
| What do you mean "you wonder where they are"? Do you even use
| tiktok to be able to see them? Because if you search about
| that on there you can find videos
| Aurornis wrote:
| > that most people in the rest of the world have easy access to
|
| The information is everywhere. Visit any news site, open any
| general social media feed, turn on any TV. We're discussing it
| right now in the front page of HN!
|
| Everyone in the US has easy access to the same information.
| Acting like only the rest of the world has easy access to this
| information is ridiculous.
| bearjaws wrote:
| _you_ have access to it, for an increasingly large number of
| people TikTok is their only source of news. Same as Fox News
| or CNN, one news source.
|
| Censorship of TikTok is inevitable given the owners, and it
| will inevitably lead to a new news bubble.
| Aurornis wrote:
| I think you're greatly overestimating the number of people
| who only use _one_ social media platform and never check
| any other news source at all.
|
| TikTok users are also known for being experts at evading
| filters and censors. Remember the rising popularity of
| "unalived" when talk of suicide was filtered out on the
| platform?
|
| I'm not saying this ICE censorship is good, because it's
| not! I'm saying it's ridiculous to claim that only people
| in other countries have easy access to information.
| Forgeties79 wrote:
| > I'm not saying this ICE censorship is good
|
| I hope not because it's bad and that's really all that
| matters in this conversation. And nitpicking whether or
| not there are other avenues for information is completely
| besides the point. I don't even really understand what
| point you're trying to make. If you think this is bad,
| then say it's bad and we shouldn't be ok with it. Saying
| "I'm not saying it's good" then muddying the waters reads
| like you're trying to defend the action.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > And nitpicking whether or not there are other avenues
| for information is completely besides the point
|
| That was _literally_ the argument I was responding to and
| talking about.
| Forgeties79 wrote:
| I am not getting that from your previous comment but I'll
| just assume I'm misreading it.
| Aurornis wrote:
| This entire comment thread was me responding to someone
| claiming that people "in other countries" have easy
| access to information.
|
| Given the downvotes and angry responses I think a lot of
| people misinterpreted it as something else. I should
| learn to avoid comment sections about politics.
| Forgeties79 wrote:
| I don't think that's the lesson here if you're looking
| for one. I think it's just a clarity/phrasing issue. If
| that's not what you meant then that's fine, no harm no
| foul as far as I'm concerned. I was just going off how I
| read it.
|
| If you're looking for feedback, "I'm not saying..."
| without saying what you _are_ saying generally comes off
| as obfuscating or at best wishy washy.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| > I think you're greatly overestimating the number of
| people who only use one social media platform and never
| check any other news source at all.
|
| When it comes to the _younger generation_, I don't think
| it's an over-estimation; they don't read news sites at
| all.
| Aurornis wrote:
| I was responding to a claim about people who use only one
| social media platform.
| 34679 wrote:
| Everyone has easy access right now. Everyone had easier
| access before the TikTok deal. That's the wrong direction for
| a free country and it's particularly alarming because the
| deal was forced by the government.
| fcarraldo wrote:
| Censorship doesn't become okay when it's easy to work around
| it.
| Aurornis wrote:
| I'm not condoning censorship. It's bad.
|
| I'm saying it's silly hyperbole to make the leap to
| implying that only people in other countries have easy
| access to information.
|
| These absurd claims always turn into a game of motte and
| bailey when they're called out, with retreats to safer
| claims. I'm talking about the original claim, that "people
| in other countries" have easy access to this information
| which we, in the US, see everywhere all the time right now
| (except TikTok apparently).
| mrexcess wrote:
| >The information is everywhere.
|
| For those who know to look for it, sure.
|
| For those who do not already know it, discovery is
| increasingly challenged by the deliberately obscurant
| curators of the information space, who are oddly tightly and
| uniformly aligned with special interest groups openly
| declaring their intent to hide that information and punish
| dissemination thereof.
| baby_souffle wrote:
| That information may be readily accessible but if it isn't on
| the screen you're currently engaged with, it may as well not
| exist.
| zzzeek wrote:
| tiktok always censored, it's just now it censors anti-Trump
| content instead of anti-CCP content [1]
|
| both are bad, I liked when tiktok was supposed to be just
| "banned". it's always been a tool for repressive governments
|
| [1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-11-28/tiktok-huawei-
| surveil...
| pousada wrote:
| If it's true for TikTok it will likely be true for all other
| forms of popular social media (twitter, instagram, etc) too,
| so a ban wouldn't have made a big difference probably.
| direwolf20 wrote:
| TikTok was the only popular platform where you could
| doomscroll and see bad things the US is doing. All others
| censored it to please the administration. And now TikTok
| does too.
| zzzeek wrote:
| I think platforms like Bluesky are better suited towards
| this and that's what people should be using
| direwolf20 wrote:
| Does Bluesky still randomly ban people?
| palmotea wrote:
| > The forced US hosted tik-tok sale is all about hiding
| information from the US public that most people in the rest of
| the world have easy access to.
|
| No, at least during the Biden administration when the law was
| passed, it wasn't.
|
| This shit is a lot more complicated that a hot take based on
| today's news.
| nashashmi wrote:
| It was even during Biden. The idea was to stop pro Palestine
| videos. Anti ice videos are in the same realm
| cael450 wrote:
| Forcing the sale of TikTok predates the current war in Gaza
| by a good bit. It's obviously a complex thing that
| encompassed a bunch of different people with different
| motivations. And considering there is pro-Palestinian
| videos all over American social media, I don't think it is
| kind of absurd to think this was the motivation.
| NoGravitas wrote:
| It started out with the "China bad" narrative, but it
| only got bipartisan support and momentum when US people
| started seeing Palestinian videos on TikTok.
| nashashmi wrote:
| The law for a sale was passed after Gaza. The thing you
| talk about is data sharing with China on Americans, and
| some in the Trump govt were opposed to this. That part
| was resolved with Oracle handling their servers.
| gradus_ad wrote:
| Not really. It was about preventing CCP control of information.
| Cyph0n wrote:
| The CCP angle is the PR version. From last year:
| https://www.axios.com/local/salt-lake-
| city/2024/05/06/senato...
|
| Note that there have been multiple instances over the past
| two years of high level ex/current officials repeating the
| same general point.
| cael450 wrote:
| This information is all over American social media... Even the
| article references that Megan Stalter posted her videos on
| Instagram.
| boelboel wrote:
| A lot of American propaganda hasn't been about strict
| censorship (as in making it strictly impossible to find out
| about things). It's about shifting the narrative enough. Most
| people have been made lazy enough to the point they don't
| read anything, certainly not fringe opinions. As long as
| people get their Mcdonalds, Soda and TV they won't do much.
|
| I don't think the original intent of the tiktok sale was
| about censorship as much as it was about the chinese not
| allowing american platforms in china. Doesn't change that
| they're trying to use it to its 'fullest'.
| roxolotl wrote:
| Just because the information is out there doesn't mean it's
| where people are looking. You see this based on the news
| people watch where things they don't cover might as well not
| exist. Which has always been true but it's especially true
| today.
| imgabe wrote:
| Of course, because TikTok is the only way people in the US can
| access information.
| SilverBirch wrote:
| No, they also access information through Facebook owned by
| Trump ally Zuckerberg, X owned by Trump doner and DOGE former
| official Musk, or via media organisations like CBS who have
| recently had their editorial standards changed to be more
| friendly to the regime. It's fine though people can here
| about the regime through neutral pundits like Jimmy Kimmel,
| who definitely hasn't come under any pressure to comply with
| the regime talking points. It's alright we've got NPR, which
| is definitely not under attack.
|
| If you haven't noticed a sweeping attack on free speech in US
| media, then I just don't think you're paying attention, and
| playing it off as if it's "just" Tiktok is at best
| disingenuous.
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| We were so naive in the 2000s. 'Tech will democratize
| everything' forgetting they will just flood us with
| bullshit so that nothing means anything.
| jimt1234 wrote:
| Back in the late-90s, I was watching a panel on CNN
| discussing the new "information age". Everyone talked
| optimistically about how the internet was gonna benefit
| humanity because people would be better informed - only
| the best information would make its way to the top, all
| the crap would be filtered out. But there was one
| naysayer, and I'll never forget what he said: _More
| information is not better information._ Others on the
| panel couldn 't believe his cynicism; said he didn't
| understand people. I think about that a lot these days.
| SilverBirch wrote:
| Well isn't it interesting that at the same time that
| these social media platforms were getting off the ground,
| the VC class decided founder control was super important
| and now essentially all of the biggest companies in the
| world are in the sole control of men who do questionable
| activies on islands in the Caribbean.
|
| Now you wonder what these companies are doing to shape
| events, and the answer is that Tim Cook is attending a
| private showing of a PR project for the wife of the
| president premiering on a _competing streaming network_
| whilst people hold vigils for the people that the regime
| has murdered.
| mrexcess wrote:
| >I just don't think you're paying attention
|
| Alternate explanation: they are paying intense attention...
| to the palms that are pressed desperately against their eye
| sockets as they attempt to See No Evil.
| dataviz1000 wrote:
| It isn't so much as the rest of the world having easy access.
| It is what the Chinese want the rest of the world to see. If
| you are in a South American country using a residential IP in
| new incognito session, doom scroll, after the initial
| disturbing content, you will start to notice videos of the
| United States government physically attacking people born in
| the country of the residential IP address.
|
| The TikTok algorithm in South America. Content about Tiananmen
| Square and Tibet gets filtered out. Content about the United
| States government rolling through protesters in armored
| vehicles, killing people in Venezuela with bombs, and
| threatening Greenland, straight to top of feed.
|
| The most brutally honest propaganda is always the most
| effective propaganda.
| potatototoo99 wrote:
| TikTok US it no longer controlled by the Chinese.
| falcor84 wrote:
| Sounds like you're in agreement with the parent - outside
| the US, people see content that reflects poorly on the US,
| and which is blocked for US citizens
| buran77 wrote:
| The painful to answer question is whether the intention
| is to block the spreading of lies or the spreading of
| truth?
| bgirard wrote:
| When you have a personality disorder like NPD, you'll
| believe to your core that every criticism of you is a
| lie.
|
| When you're in an abusive relationship they say
| intentions don't matter, only impact does. Because
| victims often focus on the intentions of their abuser and
| stay in the cycle of abuse.
|
| Let me repeat it, intentions don't matter, only impact
| does.
| reactordev wrote:
| Both. It's controlling the narrative. Project 2025.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > The painful to answer question is whether the intention
| is to block the spreading of lies or the spreading of
| truth?
|
| What it _should_ be about is preventing _someone else_
| from blocking the spreading of truth.
|
| "Block the spreading of lies" is something authoritarians
| say when they want to declare any criticism of themselves
| to be a lie and censor it. You can't block the spreading
| of "lies" without ordaining someone as the decider of
| truth and there is nobody you can trust to have that
| power.
|
| But if we were actually doing what we should then what we
| would be doing is developing censorship-resistant
| uncentralized systems rather than fighting over the keys
| to the censorship apparatus.
| daveguy wrote:
| The intention is to block the spreading of anything that
| doesn't conform to dear leader's narrative. Accuracy has
| nothing to do with it.
| mrexcess wrote:
| >It isn't so much as the rest of the world having easy
| access. It is what the Chinese want the rest of the world to
| see.
|
| If your prosperity depends on using technocracy to deny 1.3
| billion people the ability to communicate and share ideas
| with your citizens, a few things are true:
|
| 1) You have created a digital iron curtain
|
| 2) You are doomed because information wants to be free
|
| 3) If you succeed the result will be war, the only thing left
| when communication breaks down
| pixl97 wrote:
| 2) Why?
|
| I think some people live in movies where the bad guy always
| loses. Reality doesn't work this way. Bad situations where
| information is denied from people can last lifetimes.
|
| With modern technology we may be creating systems that end
| up imprisoning our minds for generations with no escape
| because you'll be killed the moment your technological
| monitor realizes you're going to fight back.
| direwolf20 wrote:
| We should let people know how bad politicians are. If
| everyone knows every time a politician is a mass murderer, it
| might provide an incentive for politicians to stop mass
| murdering people.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| The general problem is that people think based on
| relativity.
|
| Suppose there are thousands of law enforcement officials in
| the US, some minority of them are violent offenders and as
| a result of that some minority of police shootings are
| murders rather than legitimate self-defense or protection
| of the innocent, where the number of annual illegitimate
| police shootings is somewhere between 2 and 999, and the
| propensity for those people to be prosecuted is lower than
| it ought to be. Suppose further that China has over a
| million Uyghurs in concentration camps and is using them as
| slave labor and subjecting them to forced sterilization.
|
| Is the first one bad? Yes. Is it _as bad_? Uh, no. But you
| can present a distorted picture through selective
| censorship.
|
| Obviously what you want is for _neither_ of them to be
| censored, but not wanting a foreign power to be the ones
| who decide what people see is fully legitimate.
| autoexec wrote:
| > Obviously what you want is for neither of them to be
| censored, but not wanting a foreign power to be the ones
| who decide what people see is fully legitimate.
|
| It's less legitimate when you don't want a foreign power
| to be the ones who decide what people see on their own
| platforms. The US for example shouldn't dictate what US
| users see when they visit www.bbc.co.uk
|
| The just US got mad because a Chinese owned/operated
| social media platform got massively popular and they just
| wanted the ability to control and censor it.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| "Their own platforms" is the flaw. Countries and
| companies shouldn't "own" the means of mass communication
| to begin with.
|
| How the feed is filtered should be a fungible commodity
| that anyone can swap out for themselves or offer to
| others without sacrificing the network effect, because
| the network itself shouldn't _be_ owned.
|
| Notice that the US _doesn 't_ censor bbc.co.uk, because
| the web is a decentralized system. But then ordinary
| people end up on Facebook or TikTok, which isn't.
| pixl97 wrote:
| I mean, you're not wrong, but there isn't very much
| nuance here.
|
| I think there are a number of things occurring all at
| once and it's going to lead to the destabilization of
| most democracies (which China is a big winner if this
| occurs).
|
| Democracy has never really been as free as the people
| living in democracies believe. The rich and large media
| entities have always controlled the vote with much more
| impact than the actual issues individual voters had.
|
| If you believe this previous statement to be true this
| leads to a number of issues in the modern world.
|
| One is that previous to now most countries demanded some
| kind of local media ownership, so the message would be
| more aligned with someone living in the country rather
| than some other entity (not perfect, but still better
| than nothing).
|
| Another is media groups tended to be smaller and more
| fractured. They may hold conflicting opinions on things.
|
| Which bring us to now, with huge foreign media
| organizations holding massive sway over gigantic
| audiences. This isn't just about China over the US, it's
| just as much about the US over many EU entities. These
| are potential powers that can change course of the world
| and they have governments behind them directing them
| where to go.
|
| Also don't forget the US absolutely loves to control what
| gets in the media. The right in the US didn't just start
| brining up socialism and communism yesterday, it's been a
| control mechanism on what can be published and what you
| can see for over 100 years.
| lbrito wrote:
| That's some very obtuse thinking.
|
| The US has been applying soft power and hard power in South
| America - to put it euphemistically, as the most recent US
| intervention was just days ago - for close to a century. The
| Chinese... haven't.
|
| Why should people in South America give a shit about
| Tiananmen or Tibet and at the same time not give a shit about
| the escalating authoritarian grip of the US regime, which is
| infinitely more relevant to their lives?
| dylan604 wrote:
| How can you say the Chinese "haven't"? They've been using
| soft power for some time with Venezuela. They've been
| importing Venezuelan oil. They have been making loans as
| well. The loans a are a huge part of "soft power". They've
| also replaced a lot of items impacted by Trump's tariffs
| from South America.
| direwolf20 wrote:
| Things the US could also do if it unsanctioned them.
|
| I threw my computer off the balcony. I look at a web
| design business. "No fair!" I think to myself, "if only I
| had a computer I could have a web design business too!"
|
| I smash the web designer's computer out of spite.
| dylan604 wrote:
| The US _could_? The US has used soft /hard influence for
| a long time. We've crop dusted Colombian fields
| attempting to eradicate cocaine. We've eliminated leaders
| in Central and South America. We've influenced elections
| trying to get specific leaders elected. We've sanctioned
| the shit out of one little island, we blockaded the
| island when it was allowing itself to be used/influenced
| by another government we didn't like. We've allowed US
| corps to invest and build infrastructure within these
| countries. We've given them millions/billions in various
| ways including straight cash injections.
|
| I don't know how much more would need to be done for you
| to think things _are_ being done.
| Fraterkes wrote:
| You don't think that there could be purely organic reasons
| why content showing US hypocricy might be immensely popular
| in South America?
| dataviz1000 wrote:
| > TikTok users can't upload anti-ICE videos.
|
| I am responding to the fact US TikTok does not show videos
| of an armored vehicle driving through a crowd of protesters
| standing in front of it like the lone man in Tiananmen
| Square. They are being removed.
|
| This ability to control what information TikTok users are
| presented with is the reason TikTok was originally banned
| in the United States.
|
| I am being objective discussion how TikTok is being used as
| a propaganda tool whether or not I personally agree with
| China influencing people in South America or whether or not
| what the United States government is doing to protestors is
| good or bad. I'm not putting a value on it. I'm pointing
| out that when I'm in South America and someone links a
| video in a text message and I start to doom scroll after a
| while I will start to be introduced to videos of the Unites
| States government committing violence against Spanish
| speaking people.
|
| > might be immensely popular in South America
|
| Objectively the current United States regime was hugely
| popular in Spanish speaking countries like it was in
| Spanish speaking Florida. Up until a couple months ago,
| people would tell me how much they support and admire the
| current regime in the United States. That has changed
| recently which likely has to do with the content they
| receive via TikTok which is controlled by the Chinese
| government which is why it was banned in the United States.
| After being sold, it is not surprising that the United
| States is using it the way they accused the Chinese of
| using it.
| axus wrote:
| > Content about the United States government rolling through
| protesters in armored vehicles, killing people in Venezuela
| with bombs, and threatening Greenland, straight to top of
| feed.
|
| Aren't these recent events? A better example would be showing
| US atrocities from the last 50 years, but not Chinese.
|
| Or hiding the suffering of Ukranian and Iranian peoples.
| dataviz1000 wrote:
| I'm in South America.
|
| If I doom scroll TikTok without cookies from a residence in
| South America, after a while, I will be presented with anti
| American propaganda showing videos of recent events or
| people speaking in Spanish about the atrocities that the
| United States is committing against Spanish speaking people
| that is recent.
|
| I'm am describing objectively what I see.
|
| The United States didn't want TikTok controlling what is
| visible to people in the United States so they banned
| TikTok. Later the United States offered allowing it to be
| sold to an American company.
|
| Currently, there are two extremely influential forces for
| people under 25 years old in Spanish speaking Latin
| America, TikTok, a Chinese company, and an American music
| artist, Bad Bunny, who likely is the single most
| influential person in the Spanish speaking world. Let's
| stay tuned for the Superbowl.
| brabel wrote:
| I think most media is talking about the mess the US is in
| with ICE right now. For what's worth I am in Europe and
| on X more than half of what I see is about American cops
| and ICE , most against ICE but some in support of it.
| fogzen wrote:
| The U.S. government has not publicly presented _any_ concrete
| evidence showing that TikTok has actually been used to
| influence US public opinion in line with CCP policy.
| autoexec wrote:
| Wasn't there something about the algorithm pushing brainrot
| to US audiences while Chinese users got more
| educational/high quality content? Turning Americans stupid
| might count.
| text0404 wrote:
| They said "concrete evidence". Have we also considered
| that US consumers seek out brainrot, so the algorithm
| gives them what they want? How is that different from any
| other US-owned social media?
| Hikikomori wrote:
| >Turning Americans stupid might count.
|
| Don't need tiktok for that. Besides, a certain party
| prefers it that way.
| timschmidt wrote:
| Tribalism is part of the brainrot. Divide and conquer. To
| paraphrase Carlin, wealth and power are are big club and
| we ain't in it.
| somenameforme wrote:
| China has media laws that would make much of what appears
| on any sort of Western media platform illegal, so they're
| obviously going to get a very different experience in
| China. From anything that might violate social ethics, to
| clickbait titles - all illegal in China. They've even
| cracked down on overly effeminate men - 'girly guns' [1]
| and a million other things I'm not listing here.
| Basically Western style social media simply is impossible
| there.
|
| In any case, entirely Western oriented platforms also
| push brainrot to Western viewers, so I don't think
| there's any conspiracy so much as just cultural
| differences.
|
| [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niang_pao
| WarmWash wrote:
| China is less interested in turning Americans into carriers
| of the red banner, and more interested in sowing political
| discord and instability. Just like Russia was doing in
| 2016, creating faux Bernie rallies and organizing them
| across the street from faux Trump rallies.
| rluna828 wrote:
| If I was a foreign government I would promote division. For
| the left promote anti-center truth. For the right, anti-
| center truth. For the center, anti-wing truth.
| Recommendation systems do this automatically, they are
| inherently anti-social. This power needs to be controlled
| domestically were we can force changes to algorithms if
| needed.
| noitpmeder wrote:
| How about just letting the user choose, instead of
| foisting your own idea of 'right' on them.
|
| If I was the US blessed feed, let me have it. If I wasn't
| the Chinese maintained one, why not.
|
| Or, even better, let me make my own! Or use one from an
| open source that I, the user, trusts.
|
| Hell, EXPOSE THE ALGORITHMS. The simple fact that we
| can't see the weights, or measure inputs to outputs,
| means we are in total control of whomever currently holds
| the reins, and they can literally play God behind the
| scenes if they have control over enough eyeballs.
| parthdesai wrote:
| Does China go around the world invading countries in the name
| of freedom?
|
| > Content about the United States government rolling through
| protesters in armored vehicles, killing people in Venezuela
| with bombs, and threatening Greenland, straight to top of
| feed.
|
| None of this is propaganda, it's just facts.
| sneak wrote:
| Propaganda can be entirely factual. In fact, the best
| propaganda is.
| parthdesai wrote:
| I think you're being sarcastic, but just in case you're
| not
|
| > Propaganda is the deliberate, systematic manipulation
| of information--including facts, half-truths, or lies--to
| influence public opinion, attitudes, and behaviors toward
| a specific cause, ideology, or agenda.
| cheeseomlit wrote:
| >including facts
| parthdesai wrote:
| > deliberate, systematic manipulation of information
|
| And, what are we doing with those facts? We're
| manipulating them lol
| fc417fc802 wrote:
| It's using information to influence public opinion in a
| calculated manner. Said information can include facts. It
| can even be _entirely factual_.
|
| Manipulating the feed of a social media website for the
| purpose of swaying the viewer's opinion is a cut and dry
| example of propaganda. Doesn't matter who does it or
| whether the information displayed is factual or not.
| Those things make zero difference.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| This really doesn't pass the sniff test. It reminds me of
| a recent post I saw: "what are movies people like only
| becsuse it is good?", calling it "quality slop". It's
| contradictory.
|
| If people are given a wide perspective of a situation and
| adjusts bias for the Overton window (aka, we don't let
| Nazis have an equal platform to a more progressive
| group), then we just call that good reporting. The act of
| convincing people isn't inherently a bad thing. How you
| do it matters a lot.
| sneak wrote:
| I am not being sarcastic at all. It is a common
| misconception that propaganda means lies. Propaganda is
| information designed to get you to believe a certain
| thing or feel a certain way. The best propaganda uses
| entirely truthful statements to manipulate your beliefs
| and emotions.
| somenameforme wrote:
| One of the best examples of this were the endless photos
| and information about stocked store shelves, filled with
| fresh goods at dirt cheap prices, during the Cold War. In
| general truth is the best propaganda, because when you
| lie there's always a rubber-band effect when somebody
| realizes, sooner or later, that they've been had.
| mvdtnz wrote:
| So literally what he just said. Propaganda can be
| factual.
| muwtyhg wrote:
| Sometimes what you choose to show, even if true, can
| impact how people see a situation or fact. That is what
| the OP is referring to. Your quote even mentions that
| propaganda can be made of "facts" and "half-truths" (a
| half-truth is usually a fact with a portion omitted to
| change the interpretation of the fact).
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Propaganda is information which supports a specific
| cause, whether true or false.
|
| If you think "propaganda" is defined as something being
| lies, then you have misunderstood the word.
|
| Product advertising is the most widespread form of
| propaganda. And in some non-english countries it is
| called "propaganda" and not "marketing".
| WarmWash wrote:
| A large percentage of Americans are convinced that police
| will just shoot them if they happen to feel like it.
|
| Even including ICE in this statistic, you will _never_
| even meet someone who knows someone who was murdered by a
| cop. Police encounters that turn deadly, not even blatant
| murder, are on the order of 1 in 50,000.
|
| However, that stream of police murder videos are
| definitely real.
|
| Propaganda is often stoking tiny sparks into large raging
| forest fires.
| southerntofu wrote:
| > police will just shoot them if they happen to feel like
| it.
|
| Well that's exactly the problem. There's nothing stopping
| them: no accountability, no justice. Many cops just don't
| feel like randomly shooting people, and that's good. The
| problem is if they do, and even if they brag about it,
| little will be done.
|
| Take for example the latest Sainte-Soline repression
| scandal revealed a few months back by Mediapart [1] where
| videos show dozens of riot cops making a contest about
| maiming the most people, encouraging one another to break
| engagement rules, and advocating for outright murder.
| Everybody knew before the bodycam videos, but now that we
| have official proof, we're still waiting for any kind of
| accountability.
|
| If i go around and shoot people, there is no way i will
| avoid prison. If a cop goes around and shoots people, or
| strangles people to death, prison is a very unlikely
| outcome.
|
| > you will never even meet someone who knows someone who
| was murdered by a cop
|
| That's not how statistics work. Police abuse tends to
| happen in the same low-income social groups (and ethnic
| minorities). As an example, living in France, i've met
| several people who had a family member killed by police.
| Statistically unlikely if i only hung around in "startup
| nation" or "intellectual bourgeoisie" circles, which is
| not my case.
|
| [1] https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manifestation_du_25_mar
| s_2023_...
| WarmWash wrote:
| Being killed by police is different than being murdered
| by police.
|
| Police in the US kill somewhere around 1000 people a
| year. But of those, it's something like 5-10 that are
| murders. There is maybe 1 every few years where the cop
| is itching to shoot someone who is clearly compliant and
| not a threat.
|
| The 990 police killing videos that become available every
| year now are not particularly compelling, because its bad
| actors trying to kill police and getting themselves
| killed.
|
| Sorry, I don't know anything about France and police
| though. The US has a different dynamic because guns are
| everywhere, especially where crime is. Every cop knows
| about the ~50 cops who are killed by guns every year.
| southerntofu wrote:
| The dynamic doesn't look very different here, at least
| from reading the news. I don't know about the US (though
| i suspect <1% murder out of all police killings is a
| gross under-estimation), just for anyone's curiosity, in
| France police killing of a threatening person is the
| outlier. [1]
|
| We don't have guns circulating freely around here (though
| some people have them such as for hunting). Many police
| murders take place in police custody (such as El Hacen
| Diarra just this month). According to the most
| comprehensive stats i could find [2], out of 489 deaths
| by police shootings (1977-2022), 275 victims were
| entirely unarmed.
|
| [1] Not very scientific method: any case of police being
| assaulted and using "self-defense" is widely spread in
| the media, and those few cases per year don't account for
| the dozens of deaths every year.
|
| [2] https://bastamag.net/webdocs/police/
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| >Even including ICE in this statistic, you will never
| even meet someone who knows someone who was murdered by a
| cop. Police encounters that turn deadly, not even blatant
| murder, are on the order of 1 in 50,000.
|
| That just shows that people's social circles aren't that
| wide. 1 in 50,000 is rare in your personal bubble. For a
| town of 1 million people, thats 20 people.
|
| Sounds tiny, but if we were to line up 20 people and have
| them murdered by law enforcement, it'd pretty much end
| the careers of anyone in that chain of command. Because
| that's not a behavior you want to let spread and expand.
| brabel wrote:
| In Portuguese we use the same word for ad and propaganda!
| In fact that word is just propaganda!
| direwolf20 wrote:
| PR departments used to be called propaganda departments
| tintor wrote:
| In Serbian too: EPP - Ekonomske Propagandne Poruke |
| Economic Propaganda Messages
| morkalork wrote:
| You should see how some people justify Tibet..
| ikrenji wrote:
| I mean China is not exactly a poster child for a benevolent
| hegemon - tibet / taiwan / uyghurs to name a few
| hungryhobo wrote:
| all 3 places you mentioned have been integrated into
| china longer than the us has been a country
| thomasmg wrote:
| China: for Taiwan, they are in the planning phase.
| (Vietnam, Hong Kong, Tibet, Aksai Chin, Korea, Scarborough
| Shoal do not count in your view of course). Not saying they
| are worse than the US.
| rluna828 wrote:
| What China did to the Han Chinese makes them worse than
| ANY other modern country. The great leap forward and the
| cultural revolution have not comparison. Add in the
| chinese invasion of Tibet in 1959 and 1979 invasion of
| Vietnam and they are butchers and imperialists.
| kdfjgbdfkjgb wrote:
| the Han? are you sure you didn't mean a different group?
| elektronika wrote:
| > Content about Tiananmen Square and Tibet gets filtered out.
| Content about the United States government rolling through
| protesters in armored vehicles, killing people in Venezuela
| with bombs, and threatening Greenland, straight to top of
| feed.
|
| There's also the degree of relevance. Tiananmen was over a
| quarter of a century ago. The USA is killing protestors,
| bombing Venezuela, threatening Greenland now.
| kurthr wrote:
| The persecution of Uighurs continues apace. Even if it is
| not allowed to be called genocide on TikTok. The political
| elements to this are pretty obvious, but conflating two
| terrible Minneapolis ICE killings in 3 weeks to the horror
| that occurred in Xinjiang is beyond the pale. While we may
| go down the authoritarian path with a Clown King, we're
| still at least 10-15 years behind China.
|
| https://www.rfa.org/english/uyghur/2024/11/05/uyghur-
| tiktok-...
| elektronika wrote:
| Radio Free Asia is USA funded propaganda.
| inetknght wrote:
| That doesn't mean it should be ignored. That doesn't make
| it normal.
| tamarinddreams wrote:
| China had the less sophisticated tools of groups like the
| Stasi in that era.. 3 weeks of terror was not much more
| in retrospect.
|
| Americans who are currently protesting should consider if
| the apparatus will be subtly manipulating their
| environment not just in the next months or years but from
| now on with high quality data it will have perfectly
| categorized mined and will re-mine.
| tech_hutch wrote:
| > the United States government rolling through protesters in
| armored vehicles
|
| I'm sorry, did I miss something? Is this something that's
| happened (ever)?
| garciasn wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qbMRywfYiM8&t=105s
|
| e:
|
| 1. tracking string removed per request.
|
| 2. it's a video of a WCCO news (local MSP TV station)
| segment which shows an armored vehicle pushing protesters
| out of the way.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| You may wish to remove the ?si=... tracking string from
| your URL. It might also be worth editing in some context:
| right now, it's a bare YouTube link (which I don't
| particularly want to click on). Is this footage? A video
| essay? A pop song?
| elcritch wrote:
| Nice subtle twisting of words.
|
| There's an enormous difference between driving slowly
| through a crowd of protestors with no injuries versus
| running _over_ protesters with a tank.
| garciasn wrote:
| I didn't twist anything. If anything, I would argue YOU
| are twisting words of the original comment to which I
| responded:
|
| >> the United States government rolling through
| protesters in armored vehicles
|
| > I'm sorry, did I miss something? Is this something
| that's happened (ever)?
| ryandrake wrote:
| It's the first three lines of the Narcissists Prayer[1]
| That didn't happen. And if it did, it wasn't that
| bad. And if it was, that's not a big deal...
|
| 1: https://www.thelifedoctor.org/the-narcissist-s-prayer
| garciasn wrote:
| I honestly don't understand why you posted the
| Narcissist's Prayer; however, to clarify: the original
| comment I responded to referred to another comment that
| said, "the United States government rolling through
| protesters in armored vehicles," to which I replied, in
| part, "it's a video of a WCCO news (local MSP TV station)
| segment which shows an armored vehicle pushing protesters
| out of the way."
|
| The person who said I was twisting words said (emphasis
| mine), "There's an enormous difference between driving
| slowly through a crowd of protestors with no injuries
| versus _running over protesters with a tank_. "
|
| At no point did I nor the comment I responded to use the
| words, 'running over protesters with a tank'.
| WheatMillington wrote:
| I see people saying this a lot, but I've also seen videos
| demonstrating that you can easily post and search for
| Tiananmen Square content. I don't use Tiktok myself but it
| seems like this is basically untrue.
| rluna828 wrote:
| key word is "search," tianamen square will never be
| recommended in a feed. This is the illusion of "choice."
| Most people think they can "train" their feed, this is not
| true.
| Joeri wrote:
| On mastodon, with the non-algorithmic feed, following mostly
| accounts that aren't particularly political, those things are
| still at the top of the feed. If you're not seeing those
| topics at the top of your feed you're probably being misled
| by your algorithm.
|
| Another reason why feed ranking algorithms should be
| published. If we can see the algorithm we can stop playing
| these yes/no games. The real enemies are social media
| companies, not the other side of politics.
| freitasm wrote:
| Using whataboutism doesn't negate the fact that the first
| amendment is being trampled over by the US administration.
|
| Buying TikTok to censor it is the move of a fascist
| government.
| weinzierl wrote:
| I'm confused. I thought there was Douyin in China and TikTok
| for the rest of the world. TikTok used to be under Chinese
| control but now is essentially under US control. Isn't
| western TikTok a single entity?
| pests wrote:
| The news only dropped about 5 days ago about the US
| partnership. Its still a Chinese app. Now the deal with
| Oracle will have them designing the algo, storing US users
| data, and doing US moderation. It wasn't this way before.
| weinzierl wrote:
| Nah, the writing is on the wall for a long time and they
| nearly got shut down several times. I can't imagine that
| the permission to continue operations came without major
| concessions.
| mktk1001 wrote:
| I think the more concerning thing here is the US government
| attacking people of different ethnicities.
| miki123211 wrote:
| The TikTok ban is the hammer, antitrust is the anvil.
|
| Without antitrust regulation, TikTok would have been sold to
| Meta, and that would be it. We'd have an even worse monopoly
| (which is not a good thing), but at least we wouldn't have
| this. With such regulations present, the US government both
| forced a sale and disallowed a sale to anybody who they didn't
| like, basically forcing TikTok to choose a government-approved
| partner. What did that partner do to become government
| approved? We'll never know.
|
| Antitrust in the US (and GDPR in Europe) give regulators wide
| latitude over who to prosecute and for what. This makes it much
| easier to do under-the-table deals to achieve objectives that
| you can't or don't want to achieve by regulation, like
| restricting free speech.
|
| Subjecting companies to such regulation was ok when it was
| about transporting cattle or selling bricks, but giving
| governments the ability to regulate companies that have a wide
| impact on speech, even if the regulations don't seem to have
| anything to do with speech, is just asking for trouble.
| elAhmo wrote:
| > but at least we wouldn't have this
|
| I think you might have forgotten recent moves from Meta about
| removal of moderation, relaxing rules on hate speech,
| settling lawsuits with Trump and similar moves that imply
| they wouldn't really fight hard against what this
| administration wants.
| xve wrote:
| It's pretty clear this is a misuse of antitrust. Actually the
| details of these deals have very little to do with antitrust,
| it's likely simplecorruption. Antitrust might be used as a
| cover for those deals, not the other way around. The
| prevention of monopolies is one of the few regulations
| necessary for meritocratic capitalism to thrive.
| johnhenry wrote:
| By preventing uploads, they are preventing the world from
| gaining access, not just the US public.
| reactordev wrote:
| No, the rest of the world operates on different servers now.
| PokemonNoGo wrote:
| Interesting. How is it implemented? I opened Tiktok here in
| Denmark and went to something I, assume, would be in the US
| and it seems to load fine for me? Do you an example of
| something I shouldn't be able to view so I can try?
| reactordev wrote:
| [delayed]
| DoneWithAllThat wrote:
| You have no evidence that this is true and it sounds like a
| para kid conspiracy theory from the depths of the worst
| subreddits. Stop being silly.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| On Twitter, there's a bunch of reports that TikTok suddenly
| prevents people from sending the word "Epstein" in DMs [1].
|
| I had expected an Orbanisation (aka, what happened to the media
| sphere in Hungary after Orban took over and his cronies bought up
| almost all media) of Tiktok, but not that fast, it's like less
| than a week after the deal [2].
|
| Scary shit if you ask me, and it's made scarier by the fact that
| Tiktok has already been changing the way our youth speaks due to
| evading censorship (e.g. "graped" instead of "raped", "unalived"
| instead of kill/murder/execute/suicide).
|
| [1] https://x.com/krassenstein/status/2015911471507530219
|
| [2] https://techcrunch.com/2026/01/23/heres-whats-you-should-
| kno...
| inetknght wrote:
| > _but not that fast_
|
| Why not? All the tech was already put in place by China. All
| that the U.S. had to do was change the filtered words.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| I had expected a longer "cooldown" time so that people don't
| immediately jump to the conclusion that the forced TikTok
| sale was to suppress discussion of the Epstein files.
| pjc50 wrote:
| No, the forced _bipartisan support_ TikTok sale was to
| suppress discussion of _Palestine_.
| afpx wrote:
| It's so blatant, it's more like trolling at this point.
| sosomoxie wrote:
| What words were China filtering? I've never seen reports of
| censorship like this on TikTok before Ellison bought it.
| netsharc wrote:
| On WeChat lots of things are censored, almost keyword
| based. E.g. a building collapses, you want to talk about it
| to your friends, your message can't be sent because it'll
| be deemed to be trying to cause social unrest..
|
| Duoyin (Chinese version of TikTok) would definitely not be
| different..
| dns_snek wrote:
| Enough of them to give rise to the term "algospeak" which
| means using words like "unalive" in place of "kill" to
| avoid automated censorship.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algospeak
|
| Meanwhile you can report a bot who's posted 20+ comments
| under a video to advertise illegal drugs and all of the
| reports and subsequent appeals will consistently come back
| as "No violation found".
| sunaookami wrote:
| This has been happening for 10+ years on e.g. YouTube,
| you can't say certain words in the video or mention them
| in the title or you get demonetized. Nothing to do with
| China.
| dns_snek wrote:
| >> All the tech was already put in place by China. All
| that the U.S. had to do was change the filtered words.
|
| > I've never seen reports of censorship like this on
| TikTok before Ellison bought it.
| inetknght wrote:
| > _you can 't say certain words in the video or mention
| them in the title or you get demonetized_
|
| That's not censorship problems.
|
| That's advertisement problems. That's conflicts of
| interest problems. That's incentives problems. That's
| people-who-post-videos-just-to-make-money problems.
|
| Well, okay, it can easily be turned into censorship
| problems: instead of just demonetizing the video, don't
| show it to anyone. It's quite a fine line, but the line
| is indeed there.
| estearum wrote:
| Does "kill" have some type of salient political valence
| that I'm not aware of?
|
| This seems like a fairly blunt attempt at quality-of-life
| improvement for the general platform vibes, no? Put some
| friction on the (legitimate) nutjobs who just want to say
| "Kill X, kill Y" all the time and are so insane they
| can't figure out euphemisms?
| NickC25 wrote:
| On WeChat and Douyin (chinese tiktok), good luck mentioning
| things like:
|
| the cultural revolution famine the great leap forward
| Taiwanese independence Hong Kong self governance democracy
| human rights Falun Gong Uyghur people free speech KMT party
| Chiang Kai-shek
|
| and that's just off the top of my head. there are likely
| hundreds of others.
| sosomoxie wrote:
| But did this apply to the US version of TikTok? We now
| have imposed censorship in the US app, that as far as I'm
| aware did not exist at all when it was owned by China.
| inetknght wrote:
| > _did this this apply to the US version of TikTok?_
|
| Yup. China doesn't want you to know about Chinese
| problems or history, like Tianenmen Square.
|
| > _as far as I 'm aware did not exist at all when it was
| owned by China._
|
| Then either you weren't paying attention or the filters
| were working against you as intended.
| sosomoxie wrote:
| You say yes, but do you have any evidence to back that
| up? I've never seen any credible reporting suggesting
| China was censoring any topic on TikTok.
| netsharc wrote:
| But this blatant move shows "We're no different to the
| Chinese ruling party now"... If it's a slow descent, people
| might accept the madness (imagine if a bombshell report
| showed Biden had links to Epstein, sexually assaulted 20+
| women, and was moaning about the Nobel Peace Prize to the
| prime minister of Norway)...
|
| Somehow I'm optimistic that this means the Trump Regime is on
| its last legs. But well, what's the quote about
| underestimating the stupidity of the American public?
| inetknght wrote:
| > _But this blatant move shows "We're no different to the
| Chinese ruling party now"_
|
| Yup!
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Also: https://www.the-independent.com/tech/tiktok-epstein-
| trump-ce...
| pjc50 wrote:
| The Epstein situation is .. weird. On the one hand, it's a
| massive nexus of corruption and abuse. On the other hand, it's
| just .. evidence. Nobody cares about evidence, they've already
| decided they want to protect the Trump administration no matter
| what. Rather like ICE shooting legal gun owner US civilians.
| nomilk wrote:
| I hope for the good of mankind, _all_ sides of politics unite
| against deplatforming and oppressing opposing viewpoints.
|
| It's sad that certain topics (anti-ICE, Epstein) neutered on a
| social media platform, but this went on for years when the
| politics were reversed.
|
| Let everyone have their say, I say.
| conception wrote:
| But the thing is people aren't having "their say". Social media
| companies are amplifying voices and viewpoints. They are not
| acting as "common carriers" letting quality sift to the top. It
| is curated and crafted.
| tartoran wrote:
| Now they're thumbing down the scale for censorship.
| kortilla wrote:
| "Letting quality sift to the top" implies that there is a way
| for this to happen without curation.
|
| Pure user vote driven things like Reddit are a failure (echo
| chambers, emotional appeals, bot rings, etc). So I'm curious
| what you think would let that happen?
|
| Even HN is heavily moderated to maintain topics.
| conception wrote:
| Moderation is not amplification.
| infecto wrote:
| I am not sure why this was flagged but I don't think it's
| wrong. I am not sure if it's a uniquely American thing but the
| internet has caused an unfortunate case of brigading for almost
| anything. I like to think I sit fairly middle in a lot of
| American topics I lean left on some items, taxes, healthcare,
| free school lunches and right on others but I remember how easy
| it was a number of years ago to be labeled a racist. You really
| cannot have an opinion about much these days without someone
| labeling you something unfavorably. It's unfortunate.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| "Labelling" is different than censorship though, no?
| infecto wrote:
| I think it's all part of the same culture of brigading. My
| comment was more an extension of thought to the parents
| that America has gone down a hole where dialogue no longer
| exists.
| lyu07282 wrote:
| > but I remember how easy it was a number of years ago to be
| labeled a racist
|
| Centrist my ass
| infecto wrote:
| I am going to vouch for this comment because this is a
| great example of what I was describing. People jump to
| whatever conclusion they want and you are either with them
| or without. It's sad what has come to be in society.
| dmit wrote:
| People jump to the conclusion because a lot of the time
| they've had this exact argument already, and they know
| how it tends to end.
|
| Proclaiming oneself a centrist might seem like a noble,
| moderate position. But in 2026, with the Overton window
| basically being shifted outside the frame?
| infecto wrote:
| What argument are we having? I see someone struggling to
| hold their own words steady, and you claiming that I am
| proclaiming something when I only mentioned it because of
| this exact problem. I do not really think of myself as
| left or right within the current American political
| system. I do not follow either political party, and my
| opinions often zig zag across existing party lines. If
| anything, maybe "centrist" is the wrong or overly loaded
| word. I do not follow any particular political movement
| in America.
|
| The point still stands brigading is a massive problem in
| America.
| dmit wrote:
| I'm not having an argument. I was just trying to explain
| that "I'm not left or right" sounds like "I am perfectly
| fine with how things are right now" to the people who
| think the current state of things is an absolute
| disaster.
| infecto wrote:
| > they've had this exact argument
|
| Maybe it's not obvious but you compared the thread to an
| argument. I see no argument. Just a boneheaded reply from
| someone which was a great example of exactly what I was
| describing.
|
| Your follow up is pretty on point too, somehow we go from
| the topic of brigading to maybe me being ok with the
| current state of things. This is a really great example
| of the problem I was describing. Thank you.
| nomdep wrote:
| He is accusing you of not beign "leftist enough", which
| he regards the same as beign a traitor to the "good" side
| dmit wrote:
| Do I need to be present for this thread, or are you
| capable of projecting the rest all on your own?
| pjc50 wrote:
| Ironically, "labelling" someone else is an act of free speech
| as much as anything else.
| infecto wrote:
| I don't think it's ironic and my point was not the act of
| labeling itself but more of how America has become a
| brigading culture. Free speech should be protected, even
| for things that we know are wrong but we have this decay of
| the internet and culture where you are either with someone
| or against them.
| pjc50 wrote:
| But that's my point: what you call "brigading" is other
| people using their free speech in a way you don't like.
| infecto wrote:
| I think we are talking past each other a bit.
|
| I am not objecting to people expressing disagreement or
| labeling as an abstract exercise of free speech. I am
| pointing to a pattern that has become common online where
| disagreement quickly turns into coordinated pile-ons,
| identity assignment, and social signaling rather than
| substantive engagement with the argument itself.
|
| Free speech protects the right to do that, but it does
| not mean the behavior is healthy or productive. When
| discourse collapses into binary alignment where nuance is
| treated as hostility, it discourages honest participation
| and pushes people toward silence or extremes.
|
| So yes, others are exercising free speech. My concern is
| about the cultural outcome of how that speech is
| increasingly used, not whether it is permitted.
|
| Increasingly society in America is either you are with us
| or not and at least for me my view of the world is more
| nuanced and day to day.
| ImPostingOnHN wrote:
| _> I am pointing to a pattern that has become common
| online where disagreement quickly turns into coordinated
| pile-ons, identity assignment, and social signaling
| rather than substantive engagement with the argument
| itself._
|
| It's easy to fall prey to the fallacy that disagreement
| with you means the disagreers are failing to engage
| substantively to the topic, and are simply "social
| signaling".
|
| It's easy to dismiss many people disagreeing with you as
| a "coordinated pile on".
|
| In my experience, these accusations are usually a result
| of the "piled on"'s failure to understand and consider
| the others' perspective, and their unwillingness to
| change their mind.
|
| Not to say that they _must_ understand and consider
| others ' perspectives, or that they _must_ be willing to
| change their mind either! But engaging with a society
| means facing social pressure to conform with social
| norms. There 's always _not_ engaging with society in any
| meaningful way, as an option.
| infecto wrote:
| I agree those are real failure modes, and I am not
| denying they happen. People absolutely misread
| disagreement as bad faith, or assume coordination where
| there is none, especially when emotions are involved.
|
| Where I differ is that I do not think this is only an
| individual perception problem. There are structural
| incentives online that reward signaling, amplification,
| and rapid norm enforcement over slower, substantive
| engagement. That does not require explicit coordination
| to function like a pile on, and it does not require bad
| intent from participants.
|
| Social pressure and norm enforcement are inevitable in
| any society, as you note. My concern is about degree and
| speed. When the dominant response to a nonconforming view
| is immediate identity assignment or moral framing rather
| than argument, the space for persuasion narrows quickly.
| At that point, engagement becomes less about exchanging
| ideas and more about sorting people.
|
| Opting out is always an option, but that feels like
| conceding that meaningful public discourse online is no
| longer worth defending. I am not convinced that is a good
| outcome either.
| ImPostingOnHN wrote:
| _> There are structural incentives online that reward
| signaling, amplification_
|
| Those same structural incentives reward people organizing
| around a topic about which they're genuinely both
| passionate and informed. So how are you determining the
| difference?
|
| _> and rapid norm enforcement over slower, substantive
| engagement_
|
| Different people have different opinions over whether
| violation of norms should be tolerated, and how quickly.
| Note that this is different from tolerating
| _disagreement_ , but some disagreement is so heinous as
| to violate norms in and of itself (e.g. a nazi salute).
|
| _> That does not require explicit coordination to
| function like a pile on, and it does not require bad
| intent from participants._
|
| Sure, but a _" pile on"_, which I'll refer to by the more
| impartial term _" many people disagreeing with a person
| or their take"_ or _" many people validly expressing that
| a person has violated norms"_ is totally okay and valid
| in a society. The speed and degree of that enforcement is
| itself a social norm, and if it seems people prefer a
| high speed and high degree, then that is the norm.
|
| I could speculate why that has become the norm, but I'll
| just generalize that there is a lot of hurt going around,
| and a lot of callousness to it, and a lot of failures of
| the traditional ways of addressing it, like shame.
| infecto wrote:
| I do not think there is a clean, mechanical way to
| distinguish passion and expertise from signaling in the
| moment, and I am not claiming omniscience there. My point
| is about aggregate behavior and incentives, not
| adjudicating individual intent. Systems that reward
| visibility, speed, and alignment will naturally select
| for responses that optimize for those traits, regardless
| of whether participants are sincere, informed, or acting
| in good faith.
|
| On norms, I agree there are cases where the content
| itself is the violation, not merely a disagreement.
| Extreme examples make that clear. Where it becomes tricky
| is that the boundary of what counts as norm violating has
| expanded and become more fluid, while the enforcement
| mechanisms have become faster and more punitive. That
| combination raises the risk of false positives and
| discourages exploratory or imperfect reasoning, even when
| the underlying intent is not malicious.
|
| I also agree that many people disagreeing is not
| inherently a problem. What I am pushing back on is the
| framing that this is always just neutral preference
| aggregation. When enforcement becomes immediate, public,
| and identity focused, it changes the cost structure of
| participation. The fact that a norm exists does not
| automatically mean it is optimal for discourse, only that
| it is currently dominant.
|
| Your last point about hurt and callousness is important.
| I suspect that is part of the explanation. But if
| widespread hurt leads us to default to faster and harsher
| sorting rather than engagement, it seems reasonable to
| ask whether that tradeoff is actually helping us
| understand each other better, or just making the lines
| more rigid.
| felixgallo wrote:
| the right wing furor about deplatforming and media bias was
| always just a bad faith rhetorical tactic. When Musk bought
| Twitter, it became clear that there was no conspiratorial
| algorithmic suppression -- in fact, the code showed that the
| only thumb on the scales was to promote Musk's own account. The
| right wing owned essentially all the media before, and within
| the last few years they also own Twitter, Facebook, The
| Washington Post, TikTok, Paramount, CBS, and are trying to grab
| CNN.
|
| There isn't an all-sides argument here; there's one side in
| almost total control of the entire discourse, whining about
| being victims, and promotingly increasingly insane viewpoints.
| NickC25 wrote:
| Not to mention, the largest media distributors / syndicates
| were parroting increasingly right-wing talking points instead
| of staying neutral or simply presenting the facts and letting
| the viewer come to their own conclusions.
|
| there is no left-wing media machine that even comes within a
| billion light years of the strength of the right-wing
| machine. Effectively, the entire spectrum is owned by hard-
| right billionaires.
|
| Media has fallen victim to the need for continuous profits
| (because they have been targeted over and over by bad faith
| right wing actors) and the journalistic integrity of the 4th
| estate has effectively been weaponized by the people who need
| to be named and shamed.
| nomdep wrote:
| "it became clear that there was no conspiratorial algorithmic
| suppression". Yes, the Twitter files showed that the
| suppression was done mostly by humans.
| felixgallo wrote:
| the twitter files, what a laugh. Can you point to a
| particular part of the twitter files that was not obviously
| overblown, wrong, or subsequently thoroughly discredited
| that supports your claim of conspiratorial right wing
| suppression? Here:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_Files
| lyu07282 wrote:
| Yeah except when it comes to what this was really about, in
| which case "all sides" happily go along with it. As it turns
| out censorship to protect our precious zionist ethnostate is
| something everybody agrees with.
| NickC25 wrote:
| I don't know.
|
| I think that over the years, bad faith actors in the world of
| geopolitics have taken advantage of this in a very nefarious
| way in order to sow chaos, bad-faith/purposefully-inaccurate
| "talking points" and capture the hearts and minds of the
| ignorant, the stupid, and the willfully delusional masses who
| are desperate to cling to a conspiracy if it fits their
| worldview which is in turn reinforced by said bad actors.
|
| Is it a potentially unconstitutional slippery slope? yes,
| absolutely. Is it something we need to tackle as adults and
| citizens? yes, absolutely. Should the desires of SV tech bro
| billionaires have any input in those discussions? no,
| absolutely not.
| rtp4me wrote:
| To me, the media is/are nothing more than drug sellers at
| this point. They have their weapon "of truth" sold to the
| very people you listed above. I do my absolute best to not
| consume any media because I know it is twisted and often
| wrong (eg. AI generated content). The best I can do is simply
| not participate in their war. Reddit, TikTok, X, etc are
| definitely supplying heavy drugs to anyone who wants to be
| hooked.
|
| At some point, we definitely need a cooling-off period where
| people from both sides refrain from inciting anger from the
| masses.
| bakies wrote:
| You can't have all side of politics unite when one side is
| doing that thing you want to unite against.
| Havoc wrote:
| Definitely not censorship
| tartoran wrote:
| /sarcasm
| malfist wrote:
| Is it a technical glitch that prevents the uploads? Or is it a
| technical glitch that let's people know that that content is
| being censored
| jimmydoe wrote:
| They have to block upload bluntly as they are still figuring
| out the algorithm how to shadow ban them.
| smashah wrote:
| They consider free people sharing information with each other
| against the consent and interests of MEGAPEDOELLISON Cabal in
| power a "technical glitch" that they're trying hard to "patch"
| by slaughtering the First Amendment.
| infecto wrote:
| Anecdotal to myself. I shamefully sometimes use TikTok, I
| particularly like recipe clips and even I noticed something in
| the last week, most noticeably around this weekend where the
| algorithm for recommendations changed. It's like they completely
| wiped my preferences. I try not to watch anything political so I
| cannot say much about censorship of content but something was
| noticeable in the last week.
| kace91 wrote:
| Have you been using it for long?
|
| I no longer use TikTok, but I was pretty hooked for a while,
| and I felt those "waves" every now and then.
|
| It was pretty noticeable because each time I started getting
| extreme right political content from my country, and I neither
| consume anything local nor right wing content.
| infecto wrote:
| Yes I have and this reset was very different than anything I
| have experienced. I would like a specific recipe and then
| they the feed would show me someone else's attempt of that
| recipe. I haves used the app for years off and on.
| davidmurdoch wrote:
| It does this all the time. I think it is called "exploration
| injection". It increases engagement by trying to prevent
| boredom.
| infecto wrote:
| It's amazes how confident people will describe your lived
| experiences and say you are wrong. No this was entirely
| different and coincided in time with the complaints of
| censorship.
| davidmurdoch wrote:
| I said you were right. You might need to go touch grass
| man.
|
| [Edit]: I shouldn't have made the "touch grass" comment.
| Sorry.
| lolc wrote:
| From my read you said something different from what OP
| said. They voiced that there was a wiping of preference
| that was noticeable, where you said "it does this all the
| time." Sure both can describe the same thing, but they
| don't have to be. Why double down instead of accepting
| that this time it might be different?
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| "I said you were right" is not doubling down, and looks
| like an accurate description of the conversation to me.
| OP got hostile for no good reason. If it's different,
| they can talk about how it's different instead of going
| on the attack against someone that listened and tried to
| provide information.
| davidmurdoch wrote:
| Thanks. Though I do admit that my swipe back at them
| about "touching grass" was out of line.
| infecto wrote:
| No hostility just amazing how I can share a datapoint as
| a long time user that something did interrupt the feed
| engine in a negative way and I get told it's normal when
| in my experience it's not.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| I don't understand. Why is that amazing?
|
| Sloppy analogy time: Imagine you came in and said your
| vacuum cleaner broke and someone said "Yeah, that brand
| loses suction after six months, it's obnoxious." They're
| telling you it's normal for that type of vacuum, but
| they're not calling you wrong, they're trying to agree
| with you. If your problem is different, go ahead and
| correct them, but they're not denying your lived
| experience!
|
| (And don't say they should have inferred you knew about
| that behavior and known you meant this was different.
| That's too close to expecting someone to read your mind.
| Especially when your original post didn't mention you
| were a long time user with enough dedication to notice
| that.)
| infecto wrote:
| I usually try to steer clear from replying to your full
| time posting but cmon. I am saying this experience has
| nothing to do with exploration injection. Could I have
| replied differently, sure but they also are whipping up
| some wild conspiracy theories and I have no time to be
| associated with that.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| > I am saying this experience has nothing to do with
| exploration injection.
|
| Yes.
|
| But the guy you're talking to had no way to know that,
| and you shouldn't have taken insult at what he said.
|
| > wild conspiracy theories
|
| What?
|
| Edit: Also for your first sentence, have we been in an
| argument or something? But apparently I've made 5
| comments a day all-time and 7.6 comments a day in the
| last year. If that's full time then I need to become a
| brand promotion contractor ASAP.
| davidmurdoch wrote:
| Because this exact conspiracy has been going on since the
| elections for 2020. And it's well known and documented.
| Are you essentially asking me why I wouldn't encouFrage a
| conspiracy theory based on the anecdote of someone who
| says they hardly use the platform they are suggesting is
| forcing propaganda/censorship on them?
|
| There are polarizing events getting more coverage right
| now, by far, than anything else in the USA, and HN user
| infecto is subscribing to the idea that the algorithm
| isn't going to try to check if these important ongoing
| events interest them.
|
| It's very unlikely that "this time might be different";
| the far more likely answer is that this is run-of-the-
| mill algorithm exploration injection.
|
| Infecto replied me I said "you are wrong". I didn't. My
| original comment was assuring, in good faith, made to let
| them know that TikTok changing theit FYP feed is normal.
| They hadn't yet mentioned they already knew about algo
| resets and that they were leaning in to the conspiracies.
| Their reply to me was not in good faith, and did not
| respond to the strongest possible interpretation of what
| I originally commented.
| infecto wrote:
| > There are polarizing events getting more coverage right
| now, by far, than anything else in the USA, and HN user
| infecto is subscribing to the idea that the algorithm
| isn't going to try to check if these important ongoing
| events interest them.
|
| No conspiracy theory here. Long time user of TikTok. The
| sometimes part is that I am not hooked on it but I do use
| its regularly. I started using it after being a user on
| Douyin.
|
| Like I already said I have no input on the censorship but
| just anecdotally to me something's dis change that was
| out of the norm for my usage that I never experienced
| before. If you want to say that's normal ok but I am
| suggesting it was out of the norm as a long long time
| user.
|
| Not sure why you are lumping me with a conspiracy theory
| just sharing a datapoint that something did change
| weather on purpose or not.
|
| Sorry to offend you but please don't misread and lump me
| into a conspiracy! I explicitly said I had no opinion or
| datapoint on the censorship but there was a massive
| change in the feed. Wild how many hoops you are jumping
| through here. You continue to call out my own experience
| as wrong and now pump me into a conspiracy theorist.
| Nutty.
| davidmurdoch wrote:
| > sometimes use tiktok > use it regularly
|
| That's not how these words work. A reasonable person
| wouldn't think these phrases are interchangeable when
| taking about something addictive -- in this case TicTok.
| Someone who "smokes sometimes" and someone who "smokes
| regularly" are very different groups. This isn't an
| attack; I understand you now, I'm just trying to get you
| to see where I was coming from.
|
| > Like I already said I ... that I never experienced
| before.
|
| You had not said that yet, you just said I said you were
| wrong.
|
| > this was entirely different and coincided in time with
| the complaints of censorship.
|
| If you think this statement isn't reasonably interpreted
| as you implying and leaning in to, or in the very least
| encouraging, this conspiracy theory, then I think you are
| being disingenuous.
|
| I was trying to provide helpful information by giving
| someone who only "sometimes" uses tiktok some assurance
| that these changes are typical.
| infecto wrote:
| Please stop backpedaling and attacking me. You don't know
| me and you have not acknowledged the lies you have
| already used for absolutely no reason. I apologize my
| words upset you that was not my intent but I am concerned
| you continue going down this route.
|
| You're reading into my words far deeper than you should.
| I have used the App for a long time off and on but enough
| to know something changed whether intentional or not over
| the last week.
|
| I already stated in the very beginning that I have no
| comment or opinion on the censorship. That's not my
| corner of the world but was sharing an anecdote that
| something most definitely changed in my feed around the
| same time. Could be related or not but it coincides with
| the timeline. Even with the timeline similarity it may
| simply be a bug in the recommendation engine. I was only
| sharing an anecdote and no it was not exploration
| injection. The anecdote was just that my experience and
| saying it follows the same timeline is not suggesting a
| conspiracy is happening but that yes something
| happened/broke in the feed and it aligns with my
| timeline.
|
| Please stop attacking me. I have apologized for my words
| already they carried no ill intent but still amazed how
| you continue to invalidate my experience while also
| attacking me. Maybe you should take some of your advice.
| thewebguyd wrote:
| Same experience here, and also I noticed several channels I
| used to be following I was no longer following after the hand
| offs. The feed is completely different now.
|
| Something definitely broke.
| cardamomo wrote:
| I noticed exactly the same thing. I don't recall which day it
| started (probably this past Sunday), but it was as if a switch
| flipped. My For You Page no longer has anything to do with my
| preferences. I'm familiar with Tiktok nudging me in different
| directions in the past, but I was always able to steer it back
| to videos I was interested in within 10-15 minutes. Three days
| later, and it's as if Tiktok not only has forgotten everything
| about my watch history, it also hasn't learned. That said, it
| doesn't seem to be entirely about politics. I had a mix of
| political/protest related content, native plant content, and
| woodworking videos on my For You Page. None of those are
| showing up for me.
| infecto wrote:
| Very similar for me as well. And yes no connection to the
| politics angle. It was very pronounced for me because I would
| like a video and then every other video it showed me was
| someone else's version of it. It was very bizarre.
| kenjackson wrote:
| It's crazy to think that Instagram Reels, owned by Meta, is
| preferable to TikTok now. At least Reels now is at least
| competitive in terms of content - unlike two years ago when
| people were worried about TikTok being banned and Reels was not a
| good alternative.
| logicchains wrote:
| Isn't Reels content more right-wing, while TikTok has lots of
| both left-leaning and right-leaning content.
| kortilla wrote:
| Reels skews older in the user-base, which skews the average
| to the right.
| kenjackson wrote:
| TikTok historically has, but if this is truly the new owners
| trying to block content then that can change rapidly.
| Tiktaalik wrote:
| Reels is just AI and engagement slop
| hiprob wrote:
| Is Instagram better at this? Since their racist content is so
| unfiltered nowadays, surely they would allow this at least?
| jmyeet wrote:
| Heh, no [1][2][3][4].
|
| Meta and Google (including Youtube) kowtow to the
| administration in what speech they promote and suppress in the
| exact way the administration (both parties) says China might
| theoretically do in the future.
|
| [1]: https://theintercept.com/2024/10/21/instagram-israel-
| palesti...
|
| [2]: https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/metas-israel-policy-
| chief...
|
| [3]: https://www.972mag.com/social-media-ukraine-palestinians-
| met...
|
| [4]: https://www.hrw.org/report/2023/12/21/metas-broken-
| promises/...
| seanieb wrote:
| Anecdotal: uploading a video of original songs with
| political/protest lyrics will have random background noises added
| to the audio track, making the songs audio seem amateurish.
|
| Edit: here's a link to an example
| https://bsky.app/profile/seaniebyrne.bsky.social/post/3mby7j...
| duskdozer wrote:
| >This author has chosen to make their posts visible only to
| people who are signed in.
|
| Welp, guess I didn't want to learn about that anyway
| seanieb wrote:
| Sorry. Thats fixed now.
| duskdozer wrote:
| The audio is really strange, have people tested it with
| similar sounding videos without ungoodthink?
| prodigycorp wrote:
| can you relax the restrictions on your link or share a direct
| link to the video, i dont have a bluesky account
| seanieb wrote:
| Yes. Sorry I'd no idea/forgotten it worked that way. Thank
| you for pointing it out. I've updated my settings.
| nerdsniper wrote:
| https://www.bskydownloader.com/
| aendruk wrote:
| Have a mirror of the TikTok version for comparison? It's just
| showing me "Video currently unavailable".
| seanieb wrote:
| Dang. I didn't download it. But when was live it had the deep
| sound of chopper type motorcycles in the background.
| nerdsniper wrote:
| https://www.bskydownloader.com/
| krick wrote:
| That's super curious. No offense, the noise didn't make it
| sound _more amateurish_ to me personally, so I wouldn 't go as
| far as to immediately conclude that this was intentional by
| TikTok, let alone that it is because it didn't like the lyrics,
| but I'm very curious what is it anyway.
|
| Reminds me of how someone lately was going crazy about weird
| video-artifacts on Youtube. It was fixed (for his videos) after
| contacting somebody on the technical side of Youtube, but there
| was never an explanation AFAIK of what actually went wrong, so
| I was left pondering if that could be a result of some more
| ambitious ML-experiments in attempt to improve compression
| rates or something, but never found out conclusively.
| derbOac wrote:
| Honestly I'm surprised people don't jump ship more often with
| social media platforms. With TikTok this is kind of new news, but
| there have been related problems with it that have been pretty
| obvious for some time.
|
| The same with X and, before that, Facebook.
|
| TikTok has never worked for me though so maybe there's no real
| equivalent alternative. Maybe time to make one if not?
|
| To me it says something about the public, but I'm not sure what.
| I'm tempted to attribute it to indifference or complacency but
| I'm aware of network effects and the reality of alternatives.
|
| Sometimes I feel like education and theory about security
| practices needs to extend beyond micro-level phenomena like
| passwords, to things like administrative conflicts of interest
| and strength in decentralization and competition. Private
| monopolies and quasi-monopolies aren't just economically bad,
| they're bad for privacy and security, and make the public
| vulnerable through lack of choice. In important ways it doesn't
| matter if it's the government or a private company; whenever
| power concentrates it is easier to align and abuse.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > Honestly I'm surprised people don't jump ship more often with
| social media platforms.
|
| Most people don't pick one social media platform and use it for
| 100% of everything.
|
| They'll switch between TikTok, Reddit, Instagram, and others
| during the day.
|
| It's not hard to see when one of those platforms is missing
| discussion of current events.
| duskdozer wrote:
| Are you really surprised? I find the interest entirely
| unrelatable, but I'm not surprised. They tune these platforms
| for addiction. I mean, I don't even use them but I still
| immediately recognize their branding video-end sounds just from
| random exposure here or there. (I hate it)
| derbOac wrote:
| I'm surprised in the sense that it seems a few times we've
| been exposed to various problems arising from social media
| manipulation or censorship -- of the right and left variety
| actually -- so I'd think people might be more sensitive to it
| at this point.
|
| Part of it too I guess is my personal experience with people
| I know who will complain about a platform repeatedly (in
| terms of algorithmic political manipulation) and then turn
| around and continue to use it voluminously, sending links to
| stuff on the platform over and over again, etc. (not speaking
| just about TikTok in particular, with a few sites). It has
| this feeling similar to if they complained about how awful a
| food item tastes, and expressed concerns about it being
| poison, but then continued to binge eat it daily.
|
| Maybe they figure it's just inevitable or something, or maybe
| you're right about reinforcement contingencies. Maybe it's as
| simple as that.
| PurpleRamen wrote:
| They are in transition, so for the moment I believe them to have
| technical problems, because it also matches my experience.
| Yesterday I encountered problems with several videos, which are
| working today. And not all of them were political.
|
| Going by the comments, people on TikTok seem very fast in seeing
| conspiracies, when many problems can be simply explained with
| normal problems or human failings. And it's good to be critical
| and aware of dangers, but I fear if they are so easy to call out
| problems, it will wear of fast, and people will start to ignore
| real problems again, like they used to be.
| whatwhaaaaat wrote:
| Just technical problems in their "banned topic" identification
| models. No need to be concerned.
| PurpleRamen wrote:
| The point is that people are more aware of problems happening
| with that topic, but ignore whether it also happens with
| other topics. So at the moment it's a very skewed view.
| HelloMcFly wrote:
| The presumption of good faith has been justifiably obliterated
| when it comes to Topics Such As These with our right-wing
| extremist political and media leadership.
| PurpleRamen wrote:
| Especially with extremists, you should have a solid
| foundation of argumentation, because they will not ignore
| even little fails and weaponize everything against you if
| necessary.
| HelloMcFly wrote:
| Especially with extremists, a solid foundation of
| argumentation will do you no good because the facts are
| beside the point.
| PurpleRamen wrote:
| It's not about the extremists, it's about everyone else.
| Extremists usually have to convince people to give them
| power, to follow their BS. And by experience, even
| extremists sometimes can change their mind.
| ImPostingOnHN wrote:
| It's unnecessary: extremists usually aren't seeking to
| change their mind, and they'd sooner fabricate evidence of
| a fail than acknowledge The Perfect Argument That Totally
| Changed My Mind
| biophysboy wrote:
| I am also skeptical (despite having 0 faith in the new owners).
| However, I am a bit confused: why would new ownership alone
| cause technical issues? It seems like they set new requirements
| that required new software. Even if the reqs are content-
| agnostic, I am curious what they are and how they differ from
| the previous tiktok.
| mvdtnz wrote:
| Data migrations, new staff permissions and policies, merging
| AWS or other cloud accounts and their complex IAM policies,
| enrolling devices into new corporate networks, Okta setup,
| corporate firewalls. There are hundreds of reasons that
| moving to a new corporate ownership can cause technical
| problems.
| biophysboy wrote:
| which of these do you think is most likely? I thought they
| were already using usa-based cloud infrastructure
| mvdtnz wrote:
| All of these will be happening as well as hundreds of
| other moving pieces (domain name transfers, DNS changes,
| adjusting compute resources to maximise existing
| contracts with providers, migrating metrics systems
| impacting alerts and infra scaling etc etc etc). It's
| impossible to say from the outside which of these are
| causing issues.
|
| > I thought they were already using usa-based cloud
| infrastructure
|
| Unless they were already using the same provider on the
| same account with the same IAM policies as their new
| owner (they were not, obviously) this is irrelevant.
| hathym wrote:
| freedom of speech my a*
| lingrush4 wrote:
| Freedom of speech has literally never prevented a private
| company from controlling the content on its platform.
| mothballed wrote:
| It did before the internet. See Marsh v. Alabama where
| publicly accessible ( private sidewalk) on private property
| was ruled the people there still could exercise 1A rights and
| could not be trespassed for doing so even if the owners
| forbid it.
| voidUpdate wrote:
| How does freedom of speech allow you to walk somewhere you
| have been forbidden from walking? Does that mean you can
| just go into any building you want and use your 1A rights
| to not be arrested?
| mothballed wrote:
| You can read the case. Basically it was a privately owned
| public space that they could have been otherwise
| trespassed from, but not for the reason of their speech.
| Since the reason for the trespass was their speech, it
| was prohibited. They were not otherwise "forbidden" from
| walking there were it not they expressed something that
| was disapproved of.
|
| A weak analogy (I know analogy are never allowed here
| because "they're not the same") is that you can fire
| someone at will. Unless it turns out you fired them
| because they are black (yes I know being black is much
| different than expressing an opinion). It didn't mean you
| can't fire them at will, just that you couldn't for that
| specific protected reason.
|
| Although at this point we're well well past the goalpost
| of "Freedom of speech has literally never prevented a
| private company from controlling the content on its
| platform" and down into the weeds of how it happened. The
| case clearly prevented the company from fully controlling
| the content of its sidewalk platform.
| michaelt wrote:
| Platform allows criticism of a government.
|
| That government forces the platform to be sold to a
| billionaire ally.
|
| Platform's new owner immediately bans criticism of said
| government.
|
| "Not a first amendment issue, it's a private company"
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| Well... how do you reconcile that probably-truth with the
| Twitter Files? What do you call it when they private company
| censors at the demand of the government?
| buellerbueller wrote:
| You mean https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_Files
|
| These twitter files:
|
| "After the first set of files was published, various
| technology and media journalists said that the reported
| evidence demonstrated little more than Twitter's policy
| team struggling with difficult decisions, but resolving
| such matters swiftly. Some conservatives said that the
| documents demonstrated what they called Twitter's liberal
| bias...
|
| In June 2023, lawyers working for Twitter contested many of
| the claims made in the Twitter Files in court. According to
| CNN, 'the filing by Musk's own corporate lawyers represents
| a step-by-step refutation of some of the most explosive
| claims to come out of the Twitter Files and that in some
| cases have been promoted by Musk himself.'
|
| "
|
| The nothingburger Twitter Files?
| eatsyourtacos wrote:
| "private company"
|
| Ah you mean an app that the US forced to be sold to a private
| company that certainly agreed behind the scenes to certain
| terms of the government?
|
| Yeah.. completely independent private company...
| alex1138 wrote:
| It's kind of amazing that all the companies act in lockstep.
| Apple, Google, TikTok remove anti-ICE stuff, rightly or wrongly
| (I'll go with 'wrongly' because of freedom of speech/freedom of
| app choice, among other things)
|
| They ALL do incredibly corrupt things
| jokoon wrote:
| it's obvious that tiktok is doing this intentionally, pretending
| it's a technical issue, so that people can blame the US
| government for forcing the sale of tiktok
|
| it's just retaliation
|
| and obviously, trump will play into this
| estearum wrote:
| Or the right wing ideologues who now allegedly control
| (components of) TikTok are as dumb and ideological as they
| appear.
|
| Note: They also are having "technical difficulties"
| transmitting DMs with the string "epstein" in them.
| webdoodle wrote:
| If you care to fight them directly, upload them using
| "Ellistein" or "Epsteen". But really you should delete the
| app, and find an alternative. Vote with your
| attention/wallet.
| estearum wrote:
| Yeah, agreed. I'm not a TikTok user but good advice in
| general
| cbeach wrote:
| There have been a number of fake AI-generated videos of police
| confronting ICE officers lately:
|
| https://gothamist.com/news/ai-videos-of-fake-nypdice-clashes...
|
| I suspect these are some of those that have been banned from
| TikTok, and there's probably heightened moderation around this
| content at the moment since people are sharing AI-generated
| propaganda and riling others into violent confrontation with ICE.
| estearum wrote:
| TikTok: Notoriously tough on bullshit ragebait
| nixass wrote:
| Some guys from the other French thread will tell me that
| government should legislate social networks.. yeah, sure bud.
| mekdoonggi wrote:
| Anecdotally my feed dramatically shifted. My politics are very
| leftwing, and prior to the transfer virtually every video was
| discourse on ICE. Following the transfer, I get content that is
| all over the place. At one point, I got 8-9 tiktoks in a row of
| obviously bot-created rightwing text.
|
| At least on the surface level, I could believe this is just a
| full algorithm reset and they are having problems with it. But
| even after other algorithm resets that I believe I've
| experienced, Tiktok figured it out extremely quickly. If this
| continues, I will believe in the heavyhanded censorship theory.
| telotortium wrote:
| As a former employee in TikTok US Data Services, the division
| that was stated working to separate the US TikTok service and
| infrastructure, I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss the algorithm
| reset theory, because the reset this time is qualitatively
| unlike the others.
|
| Since 2020, when the first Trump administration attempted to
| ban TikTok, work has been ongoing to separate out the TikTok US
| business in all aspects from the parent company Bytedance.
| Setting up dedicated infrastructure for US users was already
| accomplished by 2023 for the most part, and this included the
| restriction that US user data couldn't be used to train or
| otherwise influence non-US user operations.
|
| However, there were a few major caveats. First, all the actual
| videos, at least if they're public, were considered to be
| Bytedance data, even those created by US users (although the
| actual user intent signals - likes, watch behavior, and the
| like, were considered to be US user data). This allowed them to
| be used to train the main Bytedance-owned algorithm. Second,
| the Bytedance-trained algorithm continued to form the basis of
| the algorithm to serve US users. At least when I was there, US
| user data was used to tune the algorithm for US users, but the
| algorithm was not necessarily trained from scratch only on US
| user data in practice.
|
| One of Bytedance's main conditions for the TikTok US sale has
| always been that they own the algorithm (both the code and the
| models) and would not transfer it to the US, so this was
| definitely a foreseeable issue. With the chaos of the TikTok Us
| divestment between the Biden and Trump administrations, though,
| I suspect that it was hard to hire and retain ML engineers that
| could build a proper replacement for the algorithm in time for
| the divestment, let alone build one that matches the behavior
| of the previous algorithm.
|
| If the algorithm is separated between US and non-US as strictly
| as the TikTok US Data Services mission always aimed for, then
| TikTok for US users is in many respects a new service entirely
| that shares the same UI and features. I also don't know how US
| users get trained on non-US content, or if they're even
| exposed, nor if any other countries use the US algorithm. So
| this change in content may last at least into the medium term,
| if not permanently. The question will be if you start seeing
| more left-wing anti-ICE content in the coming weeks or months.
| jauntywundrkind wrote:
| Will US folks still get other nation's video's? Will other
| nations get US videos?
| telotortium wrote:
| From the divestiture announcement, the answer appears to be
| yes to both: https://newsroom.tiktok.com/announcement-from-
| the-new-tiktok...
| iugtmkbdfil834 wrote:
| Allow me to offer some words of wisdom. If you help building
| weapons to be used against $currently_designated_bad_people, you
| can rest assured that given enough time, those weapons will be
| used against you. I am watching all this with a mild sense of
| bemusement.
| mekdoonggi wrote:
| A NYT columnist Jamelle Bouie suggested (in jest) that the next
| Democrat administration send armed IRS agents to gated
| communities in Florida, to "investigate tax fraud".
|
| But this is exactly why all citizens should be concerned about
| the infringement of rights happening in Minnesota. If it is
| allowed without prosecution, you are next.
| iugtmkbdfil834 wrote:
| Zero disagreement. Rules of engagement should be clear to
| everyone. How can you possibly play the game if the rules
| keep changing based on political expediency. And we all
| know.. that that kind of a game is rigged from the start.
|
| That said, I was thinking more about people all of us
| building tools that got us into the situation we are in now.
| hsuduebc2 wrote:
| People rarely recognize that force can be turned on them
| until it happens. If one side uses force and the other
| refuses to, you cannot expect the first to grasp that force
| is always a two way street, because for them it is not real
| until they feel it.
| tom_808 wrote:
| First they came for the Communists And I did not speak
| out Because I was not a Communist
|
| Then they came for the Socialists And I did not speak out
| Because I was not a Socialist
|
| Then they came for the trade unionists And I did not
| speak out Because I was not a trade unionist
|
| Then they came for the Jews And I did not speak out
| Because I was not a Jew
|
| Then they came for me And there was no one left To speak
| out for me
| direwolf20 wrote:
| Force can be turned on even if there was no force before.
| Biden didn't have anything like the current ICE, but
| Trump just made one out of thin air and then turned it on
| people.
| terespuwash wrote:
| His brilliant columns is the only reason I would ever
| consider a NYT subscription.
| antonymoose wrote:
| Why would anyone be opposed to the IRS catching tax cheats?
| This seems like such a bone-headed take.
|
| In any case it's also historically illiterate, the IRS has
| long been used as a political weapon, infamously against "Tea
| Party" activists.
| tock wrote:
| > Why would anyone be opposed to the IRS catching tax
| cheats? This seems like such a bone-headed take.
|
| And ICE says they only go after illegals.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Speaking of historically illiterate...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRS_targeting_controversy
|
| > Conservatives claimed that they were specifically
| targeted by the IRS, but an exhaustive report released by
| the Treasury Department's Inspector General in 2017 found
| that from 2004 to 2013, the IRS used both conservative and
| liberal keywords to choose targets for further scrutiny.
| fwip wrote:
| I feel like you can both want illegal aliens to get
| deported, but not approve of how ICE is executing
| protesters in the street, entering homes without warrants,
| and kidnapping people in unmarked vans.
|
| Similarly, you can think it would be good to catch tax
| fraud, but think that it should be handled without
| executing folks.
| mekdoonggi wrote:
| "Why would anyone be opposed to deporting criminals" is
| verbatim what I've read from conservative commenters.
|
| That isn't the issue being discussed. This is illustrating
| that armed, masked goons as a political weapon is a
| pandora's box that will get turned against everyone,
| regardless of status. Some people just don't care about the
| violence in Minnesota because it isn't happening to them.
| gadders wrote:
| Obama managed to deport more illegal immigrants than
| Trump. The difference is the local cities and states were
| working with ICE, rather than weaponising it to try and
| get a Democrat president.
|
| Obama even gave Tom Homan a medal for his work.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| You forget that Obama wasn't an idiot and did everything
| above board. Sanctuary cities existed back then, federal
| agents still enforced immigration rules just without
| Gestapo-like sh*t stirring. Trump wanted to provoke
| Minneapolis with aggressive highly visible tactics, and
| he got what he wanted.
| buellerbueller wrote:
| The difference is that the Obama version was done with
| due process, i.e. constitutionally.
| sowbug wrote:
| Almost every major US criminal constitutional rights case
| started with an actual criminal, or at least someone
| unsavory. Miranda was a rapist. Gideon of _Gideon v.
| Wainwright_ was a burglar. Brady of _Brady v. Maryland_
| was a robber and possibly a murderer. These cases helped
| form the foundation of what due process actually means in
| the United States. But contemporary discussion surely
| included a lot of commentary like "Why would anyone be
| opposed to prosecuting murders, rapists, and violent
| criminals?" And that commentary was just as irrelevant
| then as it is now.
|
| It's not about _whether_ the US deports criminals. It 's
| about _how_ we go about doing it.
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| There's nothing wrong with catching tax cheats as long as
| due process is followed and the person's rights are not
| infringed. However, selective enforcement can be used as a
| weapon - never investigate people "on your side" and always
| investigate "enemies" even if there's no evidence of fraud.
| Another way to weaponise enforcement is to have a law that
| is almost never prosecuted and rarely followed (e.g. only
| using bare hands to eat chicken in Gainesville, Georgia),
| so then a law enforcement officer can threaten to prosecute
| for it unless the victim complies.
| plorg wrote:
| Another great way to do this would be to preemptively
| arrest your political enemies with a pretext of assumed
| fraud and use that as a fishing expedition. Then you
| could spread your retribution by trying to violently
| suppress anyone who got in your way and use _that_ as a
| pretext to send in the army to raid some billionaires '
| compounds.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| > infamously against "Tea Party" activists
|
| that claim was disproved by the way
|
| but, it is famously how the feds managed to get Al Capone
| bena wrote:
| No, they went after tax cheats and it wound up that there
| were a lot more people cheating taxes hiding behind
| conservative-sounding fronts than there were hiding behind
| liberal-sounding fronts.
|
| This was spun as "targeting conservatives".
| gadders wrote:
| Not massively different to Obama weaponising the IRS against
| the Tea Party.
| direwolf20 wrote:
| A democratic administration would be extremely unlikely to do
| that, I think. Democrats are usually middle-of-the-road,
| don't-upset-anyone types. Radical centrists, if you will.
| That's why the elections of people like Mamdani are so
| shocking.
| __loam wrote:
| People who care about their community?
| goatlover wrote:
| There's going to be a lot of pressure on Democrats from
| their base to hold people accountable for what happens
| during Trump's 2nd term. And there is going to be some new
| blood that runs on that. You have state governors like
| Newsom, Pritizker and Waltz documenting abuses with future
| accountability in mind.
|
| What baffles me is how conservatives supporting the current
| government overreach aren't worried about the coming
| backlash. Do they think they'll just win all the future
| elections? Even when there is no more Trump?
| ModernMech wrote:
| > Do they think they'll just win all the future
| elections?
|
| There's a degree of that. But really it's learned
| behavior; MAGA literally sacked the Capitol in a violent
| insurrection and Democrats managed to botch the response
| to that. The only reason we're talking about future
| malfeasance is because Democrats didn't punish past
| malfeasance, thereby shifting the Overton window. And of
| course this goes back further than Jan 6 -- Trump might
| actually get a pardon from the next Democratic president
| if history repeats.
| rurp wrote:
| Right, if a future democratic president starts sending masked
| government thugs out to assault and kidnap American citizens
| we all know that 100% of the people who are defending the
| current ICE atrocities will suddenly be outraged about
| government tyranny.
| order-matters wrote:
| a surprising amount of people seem to genuinely believe law
| enforcement (generally, not just police) is at its core
| based on discretionary actions guided by their moral values
| and not a morally neutral action upholding agreed upon
| contracts
|
| that is to say, the law only applies to you if you do "bad"
| things. and ill be honest, there is a level of truth to
| this to me. from a practical standpoint, it is infeasible
| to formally understand every nuance of every law ever
| created just to be a citizen. The underlying core social
| contract does appear to be one of "if you do 'good' things,
| generally the law will agree with you and if it doesnt then
| we wont hold it against you the first time"
|
| *the important caveat here is that this leaves a rather
| disgustingly large and exploitable gap in what is
| considered good vs bad behavior, with some people having
| biases that can spin any observable facts into good or bad
| based on their political agenda. Additionally, personal
| biases like racism for example, influence this judgement to
| value judge your actions in superficial ways
| goatlover wrote:
| The other caveat is if you're a historically persecuted
| minority group, then those assumptions toward law
| enforcement don't usually apply. And now the political
| opposition to the current US administration is also
| feeling that way.
| mekdoonggi wrote:
| I have never considered this perspective, but this fits
| very well with people's actions. Thank you for sharing.
|
| To me, the system of codified law and courts makes
| intuitive sense, and most people misunderstand or abuse
| the system. But other people's intuitive understanding of
| the law as you mentioned is a much easier way to
| understand and actually IS a rough approximation of what
| the system does.
| kingstnap wrote:
| > from a practical standpoint, it is infeasible to
| formally understand every nuance of every law ever
| created just to be a citizen
|
| I feel like this is basically the case in everything.
|
| * A lot of people don't read the article before
| commenting.
|
| * Nobody reads TOS for things.
|
| * Most people don't read academic papers.
|
| * MIT or BSD license is easy, but how many people here
| have actually read the whole GPL, Apache, or Mozilla
| licenses.
|
| * Voter turnout in Municipal elections here in Ontario is
| incredibly low.
|
| There is too much information out there for one person.
| Everything is done with value judgements.
| order-matters wrote:
| Which is why its backwards and makes no sense that we
| allow / cater to "well nothing said I _couldnt_ do that "
| as a reasonable defense. The value judgement system
| should go both ways. then a lot less would need to be
| written down to begin with, because it wouldnt be an
| arbitrary set of rules on every front but the
| codification of a specific value judgement system with
| clarifications on how to align yourself to it.
|
| We really shouldnt be allowing things like, "this is a
| location dedicated to peace and non-violence" and then
| section 32 subsection C part 2 (a) says "we can kick the
| shit out of you if you photograph the premises". Just a
| random made up example for communication purposes, but it
| applies to all sorts of things. Personally, I think it
| should apply to social media. there was a implied sense
| of privacy to it, that people could not see my
| information if i did not approve it - and then the fine
| print says except for the company running the page who
| can sell the information to whoever they want. Like WTF
| was that about? I wont say its an ignored thing, there
| plenty of outrage over it - but i think its incredibly
| fundamental to whats going wrong and feeding this
| information overload in a dangerous / stressful way.
|
| Companies shouldnt _need_ 10 pages of TOS to say all the
| obvious things, and appealing to this idea that only
| whats written down is what matters shouldnt allow for
| just any arbitrary set of things to be written down and
| called reasonable
| thephyber wrote:
| > Everything is done with value judgements.
|
| Less about value judgements. More about outsourcing to
| people/brands we trust.
|
| When it comes to software licenses, we aren't lawyers, so
| the informed people will use a primer created by a
| trusted 3rd party. Maybe GitHub's "which license is right
| for me?" Page.
|
| Who to vote for in local elections is usually decided via
| one of the following: (1) I know/met the person, (2) I
| trust the party they affiliate with, (3) I trust the
| newspaper/news source which recommended them.
|
| Academic papers are usually thick, long, and inaccuracies
| are difficult for anyone not in that field of expertise
| (or something relevant like statistics) to identify. Most
| people require an overview of the article by an expert.
| Hopefully (but unlikely) they can choose one which is
| impartial / minimally biased and who can give an opinion
| on how definitive or significant the findings are.
| direwolf20 wrote:
| The last 2 decades have been spent with companies
| learning to exploit this. For example, every large tech
| business would prefer all your code was MIT/BSD and they
| have spread advice to this effect.
| nebula8804 wrote:
| They are acting with the expectation that Democrats are too
| spineless to do anything because thats all they have seen
| their entire lives and they are probably right.
| rurp wrote:
| Yeah I also expect they are correct on that assumption.
| If history is any guide Dems will take very few if any
| concrete actions to correct these wrongs if/when they
| ever get back into power again. I'm sure they'll give
| some rousing speeches and press conferences though.
|
| What _should_ happen is that everyone who is flagrantly
| violating the law and looting the federal govt right now
| should be quickly and aggressively prosecuted. Real
| concrete legislative reforms should be enacted to limit
| future corruption and dangerous adventurism by demented
| leaders.
|
| I expect none of that to actually happen.
| Forgeties79 wrote:
| I would be remiss if I didn't suggest everyone go watch the
| _Watchmen_ series on HBO
| iugtmkbdfil834 wrote:
| Honestly, and I say it without a shade of irony, it might
| be for the best, if the collective 'we' stop attempting
| re-enact fictional events and lives in alternate worlds.
| It would do everyone, and I do mean everyone, a good
| solid needful, should they just stopped and thought about
| what they are doing and the likely course of the events
| given their actions.
|
| It would be orders of magnitude more productive if we did
| that.
| eunos wrote:
| If Dem could win big soon the lawfare against Trump business
| could be huge. DOGE purge alone was making a lot of bad
| blood.
| jimbokun wrote:
| Would probably be very popular, outside the kind of people
| whose donations fund political campaigns.
| lingrush4 wrote:
| And you think they won't be used against me if I don't help
| build them?
|
| Seems unlikely.
|
| If the implication is that the tools won't exist if I don't
| build them, that's beyond a pipe dream. We'll never get a globe
| of 8 billion people to agree unanimously on anything. Let alone
| agreeing not to build something that gives them power over
| their adversaries.
| iugtmkbdfil834 wrote:
| I will offer a benign example. A new team member was given a
| task to generate a dashboard that, as per spec, in great
| detail lists every action of a given employee within a system
| that generates some data for consumption by those employees.
|
| As simple as the project was, the employee had the presence
| of mind to ask his seniors some thoughtful questions of what
| makes sense, what is too intrusive, what is acceptable. He
| felt uncomfortable and that was with something that corps
| build on a daily basis.
|
| Now.. not everyone wakes up thinking they are building
| database intended to enslave humanity as a whole, but I would
| like to think that one person simply questioning it can make
| a difference.
| nathan_compton wrote:
| How tedious. I don't disagree, fundamentally, with your
| message, but this internet smart guy thing people do where they
| use things like $variables to signal that they are above
| everything and anyone who things X is bad or good just isn't
| smart enough to see things in the abstract really sucks. And I
| am very glad you are mildly bemused by people getting shot in
| the streets, the deterioration of democratic norms that might
| spiral into more violence and actual, real life, people getting
| fucked up. Very cool of you.
| iugtmkbdfil834 wrote:
| On occasion, it is worthwhile to take a step back and
| recognize that what is happening is not new or novel.
| Likewise, it is useful to recognize a pattern when it
| presents itself. It is extra useful ( and helpful ) that this
| is brought to the attention of other people who may still be
| going through the steps of processing of what seems to be
| happening.
|
| If it helps, I appreciate going meta after me, but there is
| not much to dissect here. I stand by my bemused. You may
| think it is some soft of grand struggle and kudos for you for
| finding something to believe in, but don't project onto
| others.
| nathan_compton wrote:
| I don't think its any sort of "grand struggle" in any sense
| other than the human condition is a grand struggle for
| peace in a world which perhaps fundamentally encourages
| conflict, but it doesn't have to be a grand struggle to
| appreciate the fact that people are dying and being treated
| inhumanely.
|
| I really do think you're fundamental warning is spot on:
| people really should consider how power is going to be used
| against them when calculating how much of it to give up in
| the pursuit of a goal. I also happen to think its sort of
| ridiculous (and impossible) for us all to wail and gnash
| our teeth each time a person dies unjustly. But I also
| think its probably wrong to be amused by it, even if it is
| commonplace in human affairs.
| iugtmkbdfil834 wrote:
| << But I also think its probably wrong to be amused by
| it, even if it is commonplace in human affairs.
|
| This may be the source of disconnect. While it might seem
| like I am amused by suffering, this is explicitly not the
| case. I shudder at the thought that people would take my
| argument as meaning that.
|
| All I am saying is: things exist after their original
| purpose has been served ( or not served ). But those
| things continue to exist, because we, as a species, can't
| seem to help ourselves.
|
| That weird drive within us is what I would call bemusing
| ( and not amusing ).
| guywithahat wrote:
| The $currently_designated_bad_people however are criminal
| illegal aliens. Sometimes we have to create mechanisms to go
| after pedophiles and rapists, and we just have to trust the
| system well enough to assume these tools won't be used to go
| after good people. I mean the bar for ICE is so outrageously
| high it's hard to see a world where it's lowered far enough to
| go after someone like me.
| iugtmkbdfil834 wrote:
| Sure, but I was under impression those mechanism already
| exists. The question, as it were, comes to enforcement.
| dmix wrote:
| The mechanism to do it properly is the feds working with
| local and state officials where there's a full breadth of
| accountability and judicial coverage. Some states and
| cities have explicitly rejected doing this, some opting to
| purposefully make it harder. Trump instead of being
| diplomatic and trying to work with them has aggressively
| sent goons in to do flashy operations and pushed federal
| enforcement to the limits of the law.
|
| ICE and border patrol wasn't really designed either legally
| or in training for these sorts of large operations, so it's
| created lots of dangerous situations like how to do crowd
| control broadly under laws like "interfering with a federal
| investigation", while commanders are pushing them hard for
| results.
| iugtmkbdfil834 wrote:
| I am not disagreeing with you. Paraphrasing your own
| words, the mechanisms exist, but they have been
| intentionally blunted. We can argue whether it was a good
| idea to blunt it, but it does not help that the
| administration used that blunt tool regardless.
| dudefeliciano wrote:
| How fitting that you bring up pedophiles and rapists, and
| trusting the system, while Trump is sitting in the white
| house. Do I need to point out the irony?
| ActorNightly wrote:
| Tik Tok wasn't built to be used as a weapon though.
| pixelatedindex wrote:
| Weapons can come in all forms and sizes. When wielded with
| the blend of censorship and propaganda, (social) media is
| absolutely a weapon. Is there a reason why it won't be?
| buellerbueller wrote:
| Are you sure about that?
| ActorNightly wrote:
| Yeah.
|
| I don't subscribe to the hypocritical vies that people are
| expected to have "free will" and "freedom", while also
| being "influenced by the algorithm".
|
| Its either one or the other. Personally I think its the
| former, and Tik Tok is just confirming to people what they
| want to hear.
| iugtmkbdfil834 wrote:
| << Its either one or the other.
|
| Why would that be a given? If we remove tiktok and
| replace it with anything else, that replaced influence
| does not automatically negate my will? Case in point,
| when I call my mother to talk a new car purchase, does
| her disliking my choice automatically mean I either
| influenced and therefore have no will?
|
| I am not certain you considered edge cases here.
| culi wrote:
| This is called "boomerang theory" in sociology
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_boomerang
| Etherlord87 wrote:
| > The imperial boomerang is the theory that governments that
| develop repressive techniques to control colonial territories
| will eventually deploy those same techniques domestically
| against their own citizens.
|
| This is different from what parent post describes. Parent
| means developing tools by one side of a barricade, that the
| other may eventually use against them, e.g. when the power
| shifts to them. Whereas you speak about developing the tools
| to be used abroad, but those tools eventually also get used
| domestically, but the administrator remains the same.
| topspin wrote:
| > those weapons will be used against you
|
| On the matter of social media "moderation," this is the phase
| you're actually in, right now.
| gcanyon wrote:
| The problem I was listening to a historian discuss the other
| day is that we're stuck in a cycle of: 1.
| Republican breaks norms/laws 2. Democrat cleans up
| after, but by *not* breaking norms, doesn't go far enough to
| actually undo all the damage 3. We end up with a more
| broken governmental configuration, and head back to (1)
|
| They said this pattern goes back to Nixon.
| Jcampuzano2 wrote:
| Theres a reason 99% of actions taken by democrats are just
| "strongly worded letters" and how they consistently come up
| with the exact small number of Democrats needed to push
| legislation and bills that the party proposes to be against.
|
| Most Democratic politicians are in on the game too. Its all
| just political theater and their in-group rotates out who
| gets to be the bad guys.
|
| Yes Democrats clean-up by not breaking norms, but as
| mentioned they never go far enough because they legitimately
| do not want to go too far due to corporate interests and the
| elite.
|
| I am left leaning but do not align with the majority of the
| Democratic party because they are in on this too. They have
| the tools to be much more antagonistic to the GOP but they
| purposely don't use them
| gcanyon wrote:
| I think this take is on the cynical side. A more charitable
| interpretation would be what they say (but maybe I'm being
| naive): that they don't want to break the rules to fix what
| someone else broke by breaking the rules.
|
| I'm not sure what you mean by "they consistently come up
| with the exact small number of Democrats needed to push
| legislation and bills that the party proposes to be
| against" -- if you mean the Republicans manage to get some
| Democrats to "switch sides" -- it's important to remember
| that this is how _everything_ used to get done. Check the
| old votes: party-line was less common back in the day. And
| even now, Democrats tolerate members with differing
| opinions far more than the GOP does, and it shows in their
| voting patterns.
| dogleash wrote:
| Corollary: building a benign system that doesn't make the
| levers of control as small and close to the user as possible,
| is inviting someone with ulterior motives to use those
| controls.
| jimbokun wrote:
| This seems to be an argument that defense spending is never
| legitimate?
| agilob wrote:
| >If you help building weapons to be used against
| $currently_designated_bad_people
|
| Democrats would really love some extra help from WikiLeaks
| right now, if only not Bidens administration who helped to
| extradite Julian.
| cosmicgadget wrote:
| Afaik only one side of the aisle asks for Russia's help with
| offensive cybersecurity.
| Hasz wrote:
| I have been arguing this point for several years now -- but wrt
| to the Democratic party's relationship with guns. The same
| justification used to limit the second amendment is the same
| justification that can be used to limit the 1st, 4th, etc.
|
| Both parties seem to be on an authoritarian bent over the last
| 10-15 years, which sucks.
| xve wrote:
| It looks like some are moving over to upscroll, anyone know
| anything about upscroll? what other apps are you using?
|
| I remember when everyone migrated from MySpace to Facebook and I
| assumed everyone was going to just keep moving over to the next
| big thing every few years but that actually didn't happen.
| Facebook became an institution.
| LightBug1 wrote:
| Thanks for the heads up ... we're really entering some shitty
| internet times
| xve wrote:
| Yeah, but there might be some kind of opportunity arising
| too, I try to focus on that.
| lingrush4 wrote:
| Nothing. These apps are mental poison. They're designed to be
| addictive. Healthy adults don't use TikTok or any equivalent.
| xve wrote:
| I would agree with you, but its pretty disturbing that the
| general public doesn't have a good outlet, especially to
| discuss unconstitutional ICE actions. It's unfortunately very
| convenient that at a time when the pros outweigh the cons
| (open discussion vs. addiction) that some might stay offline.
| I would encourage you to overlook the mental poison and
| continue to support open communication. That's more important
| right now.
| wvenable wrote:
| What do you suggest then to stay informed for those without
| televisions?
| lawn wrote:
| Regular news sites?
| data-ottawa wrote:
| A subscription to multiple news sources is a good way to
| consume news.
| fassssst wrote:
| A news subscription
| xve wrote:
| I have been using feedly to slowly build up a good news
| "diet" using sources from all over the world. Anytime, I
| come across an article on hn from a good news source I look
| into that website and add it to my feed. I look for
| criteria like independent journalism, representation of
| perspectives I don't already have in my news portfolio and
| general quality. I do think of my news as an investment
| portfolio, you want a good balance of stocks,
| diversification, hedging, risk management.
| aqme28 wrote:
| Traditional news sites ideally. I don't think that people
| are more informed from using short-form social video. A
| TikTok user is not any more informed than someone who does
| not use TikTok.
| wallst07 wrote:
| Try reading?
| btmiller wrote:
| Really? I have bookmarked:
|
| - 758 posts on home construction and interior design - 487
| posts on cooking - 58 posts on relationship health - 605
| posts on leadership - 58 posts on fitness - 19 posts on
| woodworking
|
| , and countless others on travel and dining.
|
| Would you like to restate your claim with more nuance? I have
| collected a vast amounts of knowledge through TikTok. Their
| algorithm is insanely good at capturing whatever it is you're
| after. It's a challenge to put the app down and I think any
| person that can't impose their own healthy limits or can't
| modulate their topical interests is going to have an even
| harder time. Let's remember that amidst the real negative
| aspects, there is a really great system for learning buried
| in there.
| EinigeKreise wrote:
| Have you learned 758 things about home construction and
| interior design? Bookmarking certainly isn't learning. I
| should know; my collection of bookmarks contains countless
| papers, documentation, and tutorials, yet I've hardly
| glanced at most of them and the majority will remain in
| that state for eternity.
| xve wrote:
| Please revisit those bookmarked items and you will be
| learning. I find it hard too sometimes to get back to all
| the shiny new things I find but I guarantee you have a
| few gems worth revisiting, then you can share them on
| here and we can all learn something.
| xve wrote:
| It's great that you're using these tools for expanding your
| knowledge. Share some of the highlights! Sometimes I think
| people who claim everything on these platforms is bad are
| telling on themselves, or not very savvy at getting the
| best out of a tool and blaming the tool.
| vaindil wrote:
| > Healthy adults don't use TikTok or any equivalent.
|
| This is a pretty obnoxious comment. You're welcome to your
| opinion that the apps are harmful, and I'm inclined to agree
| with you even though I use TikTok myself, but a blanket
| statement that only unhealthy people are on the apps is just
| inflammatory.
| kmfrk wrote:
| I checked out the website, and it looks more like Instagram
| than TikTok. We've had a few TikTok-like apps, and it didn't
| work out. Even the people behind Vine couldn't make their own
| Byte app take off:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huddles_(app)
|
| TikTok showed that the platform lives and dies by the algorithm
| and ease of use. I'm not even a huge fan of TikTok's
| recommendations these days with too much slop slipping through
| the cracks. And their comment moderation is some of the worst.
|
| If another platform ever gets popular enough, I'm sure the same
| people will find another way to neutralize it.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| Yeah, I read about this thing called network effects on blue
| sky.
| stronglikedan wrote:
| Nit, but it's upscroll _ed_
| xve wrote:
| thank you!Seems I can't edit.
| lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote:
| That is available only for two hours after posting.
| js8 wrote:
| When I was 11, on 17th Nov 1989, in Czechoslovakia, my father was
| watching the evening news on our (black and white) TV, as usual.
|
| There was a protest and the state media was reporting on it. When
| the reporter said, "our camera broke down and we can only show
| black and white pictures", my father IMMEDIATELY jumped up and
| angrily said, "that's bs, you don't want to show how they [the
| protesting students] got beaten up [by the police]!"
|
| This was an interesting life lesson. So yeah, sure, technical
| difficulties..
| culi wrote:
| I think history has shown that this is a fruitful intuition to
| have
| stronglikedan wrote:
| As always, it depends. More often than not, the opposite is
| true, hence the existence of Occam's razor.
| bigbadfeline wrote:
| > More often than not, the opposite is true,
|
| Interestingly enough, it doesn't matter in the slightest if
| some times the excuse is actually true. The intuition is
| good to have at all times, as Intel's founder Andy Grove
| used to say - "Only the paranoid survive".
|
| > hence the existence of Occam's razor.
|
| Occam's razor has nothing to do with the topic at hand,
| you're probably thinking of Hanlon's razor which is a dumb
| idea 99% of the time, regardless of what actually produced
| it - stupidity or malice.
| culi wrote:
| There is no way to know if you are applying Occam's razor
| correctly because we always have invisible cultural
| assumptions that are hard to escape.
|
| Relevant story: my mother grew up in the Soviet Block where
| they taught her about American Segregation in elementary
| school. She said she and all her friends immediately
| dismissed it as made-up propaganda
|
| In that case she was wrong. But I think the intuition is
| the correct "rule of thumb" to take. By your application of
| Occam's razor, you would end up believing _most_ propaganda
| the Soviet education system pushed as long as it offered a
| simpler explanation. I don 't think that's a good intuition
| to have either.
| lbrito wrote:
| You don't understand.
|
| Its different: _they_ were doing it. The Bad Guys. Now _we_,
| the Good Guys, are doing it. Therefore, the thing itself is no
| longer Bad - it is Good.
|
| The comment above was ironic. I have to specify because
| supposedly intelligent people really think that way:
| https://x.com/garrytan/status/1963310592615485955
| jmyeet wrote:
| What you're describing here (ironically) is unironically the
| basis for Western political thought.
|
| What I'm referring to here is _idealism_ [1]. Whether it 's
| European colonial powers or the US, the basis for foreign
| intervention is, quite simply, that we are the Good Guys.
| Why? Because we're the Good Guys. Even slavery was justified
| in Christianity by converting the heathen and saving their
| immortal souls, a fundamentally idealistic argument.
|
| What's the alternative? Materialism [2], the premise of which
| is that there is not anything metaphysical that defines
| "goodness". Rather, you are the product of your material
| circumstances. There is a constant feedback loop if you
| affecting your material surroundsina and those surroundings
| affect you.
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idealism
|
| [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Materialism
| epistasis wrote:
| It's one thing to analyze the world with this lens, which
| is perfectly fine, as long as it's part of a bigger
| analysis. But materialist views have never stopped the
| boot. Materialist political ideology has produced some of
| the finest jack boots history has seen.
| j16sdiz wrote:
| Hey, that's because _their_ materialistic view is faulty
| . _Our_ materialistic is perfect. Now, if only i have the
| power...
|
| /s
| saubeidl wrote:
| Marxism, a materialist ideology, is _western political
| thought_ as well.
| hearsathought wrote:
| > What you're describing here (ironically) is unironically
| the basis for Western political thought.
|
| It's not just "western" political thought if such a thing
| even exists. It's political thought.
|
| For example, Japan's stated goal in ww2 was to liberate
| asia from european invaders. They portrayed themselves as
| the good guys. The liberators. That's true for every empire
| and war in history, "western" or "eastern" or "northern" or
| "southern". It was always the self-proclaimed "good guys"
| fighting self-proclaimed "good guys". The winner gets to
| keep the "good guy" handle while the loser gets assigned
| the "bad guy" handle.
|
| Had japan won ww2, that's how history would have taught
| ww2. Instead, japan lost and the US won and hence we get to
| claim to be the good guys while japan does not.
| rluna828 wrote:
| This has been proven wrong again and again. My grandparents
| were subsistence farmers. They had much less material
| wealth than any working class American and the vast
| majority of unhoused Americans. Yet, I can assure you that
| back then they were much more satisfied with life than the
| vast majority of working class and unhoused americans
| today. Second point, no amount of material wealth can
| compensate for severe mental illness. When people have
| severe mental illness, medical interventions must be
| performed against their diminished "free will." For those
| of you of American descent ask your parents or grand
| parents how their grand parents lived. I am certain you
| will be shocked at their extreme poverty and general
| hopefulness. Conclusion: once basic needs are met, the
| perception of "material" is more important than the
| material.
| horacemorace wrote:
| _woosh_
| direwolf20 wrote:
| nobody said happiness was proportional to dollars
| throwaway173738 wrote:
| My great grandparents could buy enough land to feed
| themselves for the equivalent of a few months salary. And
| they could live in whatever size building they wanted on
| it. Some amount of agency is a requirement for happiness,
| and when you have it you can be satisfied living under a
| rock.
| dijksterhuis wrote:
| i personally find presenting a black and white "it's either
| one way or the other" perspective to be problematic.
|
| yes, materialism and cause and effect etc. etc. agreed on
| that. it is a thing. interestingly though, as people sit
| static and just work on becoming more aware of that
| feedback loop you mentioned it can lead to people trying to
| not be so much of an arsehole -- through _refraining from_
| doing a thing -- because they can see their part in causing
| things to happen in the world. and that 's not just limited
| to immediate surroundings. i know that i affect
| _everything_ with every action i do (or do not do).
|
| idealism becomes useful at that point. it can provide
| people with a set of loose guidelines on how to "not be an
| arsehole" aka how to not affect _everything_ in a way that
| 's going to cause problems.
|
| the problems come when people do idealism without being
| aware of that materialistic feedback loop. they're usually
| doing it out of rule based dogma based on tribalism.
| sometimes it's "we're better than you are" or sometimes
| it's "outsiders are not welcome".
|
| caveat: this is all just my personal experience, but i
| think it would scale if enough people became aware that
| _their actions matter and have profound consequences, so
| try to not be an arsehole to anyone today_
| epistasis wrote:
| In extreme cases: "I'm not licking the boot. It's my boot. I
| voted for it. I'm the one stomping..." [0]
|
| People imagine that they are part of the in-group, and not
| the out-group that gets the boot for exercising basic rights
| that the in-group gets. And perhaps they are, if they have
| enough money and power. But ultimately most of these people
| know that they are _not_ in power but that as long as they
| see the boot stomping on others, and they can imagine a
| boundary that keeps them in the in-group (skin color,
| political ideology, gender, etc.), they approve as long as
| that group boundary is clear.
|
| Now, when that boundary begins to blur, and people understand
| that the person getting the boot _could be themselves_ , then
| attitudes start to change.
|
| [0]
| https://bsky.app/profile/joshuaeakle.com/post/3mdfsnpy57k26
| mrighele wrote:
| You can also reverse it.
|
| (Western) Internet was mostly censorship free, unlike places
| like Iran, China and the like. Things were removed only if
| outright illegan, and then just because of a court order.
|
| Then about ten years ago things changed.
|
| ISIS videos about the Syrian revolution removed from Youtube
| because they were radicalizing people.
|
| Conspiracy theories about COVID purged because they were
| dangerous.
|
| Posts against Woke ideals down-ranked, purged or the people
| posting themselves canceled.
|
| "Be careful, once the tables turn, it will be your turn" some
| people said.
|
| Guess what, the tables turned, and the result is ugly.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > Then about ten years ago things changed.
|
| No, they didn't.
|
| We had McCarthy in the 50s. We had Focus on the Family and
| the Catholic League getting shows canceled. The Simpsons
| had a public feud with George Bush Sr.
|
| Cancel culture long predates the internet. Hell, it
| predates _humans_ ; plenty of other species kick antisocial
| members out of group gatherings.
| mrighele wrote:
| Yes they did. I am talking about the Internet.
|
| It used to be that anybody could post anything on the
| Internet. If it was something illegal sooner or later the
| state FBI/a Judge/Whatever would come for you, but it was
| a matter between you and the law. Your Internet provider,
| your hosting provider, etc. couldn't care less because
| they were not involved in your activity, in the same way
| that the post office is not to blame if you send an
| explosive letter using their service.
|
| That's Section 230. While it's an USA-specific law it was
| in the spirit followed also in most of the other Western
| countries.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > It used to be that anybody could post anything on the
| Internet.
|
| This was never the case. We had occasional law
| enforcement contact back in the 90s when I ran a gaming
| vBulletin board in high school. Your IP was trivially
| traced to a physical landline location and VPNs were in
| their infancy, and Facebook.com didn't get HTTPS by
| default until well into the 2000s (after
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firesheep).
|
| Section 230 protects the ISPs and websites from
| liability, not the posters. It made it _safer_ to host
| potentially actionable user-generated speech at scale,
| not harder.
| mrighele wrote:
| > Section 230 protects the ISPs and websites from
| liability, not the posters.
|
| I know. That's not what I am complaining about.
|
| I am not an anarchist. I am fine with enforcement asking
| an ISP, a website, a forum, whatever to remove content
| because it breaks some law.
|
| What I am complaining about is: it used to be that a
| platform would let you use it as you saw fit. If you were
| doing something illegal sooner or later law enforcement
| would come after you but then the platform wouldn't care
| much because it was YOUR fault not theirs.
|
| The exception to this was very high level. e.g. phpBB
| forums with moderators. But those where not platform.
| They were quite small in size. I consided something like
| Youtube closer to an ISP or a Registar than a bulletin
| board. You cannot really escape them.
|
| It used to be that those would only act after the fact
| (as you said). Only recently (past 10 years) they started
| to proactively censor their content. It is not completely
| their fault, they have been pressured to do so, but still
| they have.
| ActorNightly wrote:
| >I have to specify because supposedly intelligent people
| really think that way
|
| It is the right way to think (with caveats).
|
| Basically, no matter which way you put it, people need some
| form of government (or more abstractly a state that has
| authority over people with those people having reduced set of
| freedoms compared to anarchy). Human nature doesn't bode well
| with long term planning. For example, with unrestricted
| capitalism, you have a price on human labor hours that
| doesn't account for the value of human life - i.e as long as
| someone can do the job, it doesn't matter what their health
| is at the end of the job as long as they are replaceable, as
| this is the most optimal in terms of labor spending. So you
| need people to collectively form an entity with power of
| enforcement that is agreed upon by everyone, so that the
| entity can step in and take action.
|
| Therefore, the goal shouldn't be to restrict the entities
| power. Doing so is essentially very selfish, which is on par
| with any libertarian/conservative mindset - as history shows,
| everyone on the right wing who was crying about censorship on
| social media for social/political issues has no problem when
| their side censors it, and broadly oversteps in their alloted
| power, ignoring the law.
|
| The goal should be to determine whether or not the restricted
| access makes sense given the current status of the country,
| and the most importantly, ensuring that the state follows the
| code of law before anything else. I.e on a very broad sense,
| instead of arguing who is right and who is wrong, argue what
| is the metric by which you can get the answer, and then
| codify it as law.
|
| In a lot of cases, censorship makes sense. And as with any
| rule, there is going to be some cases where its applied and
| the outcome is worse than if it wasn't applied. That should
| be acceptable. In the end, friction in the process still
| means that things are moving forward, but it also prevents
| much worse effects if things start moving backwards. Removing
| that friction means you can go backwards very quickly, like
| US has done.
| direwolf20 wrote:
| Wow. I thought this was going to be one of those false
| comparisons, you know, like when someone says censoring
| conspiracy theories is the same thing as censoring science.
| But no -- it's mass surveillance on both sides. He says mass
| surveillance is good when the US does it and bad when China
| does it. Wtf
| noitpmeder wrote:
| Wouldn't it be awesome if that X post was satire? Wishful
| thinking ...
| danudey wrote:
| Taking away people's guns is unamerican, unless you're taking
| them away from someone I consider to be unamerican, like an
| immigrant or a liberal; in that case, it's for the good of
| America that we take away their guns, and the people who
| wrote the constitution never intended for it to apply to _all
| people_ the way it says, but only white people and non-white
| people those white people find to be convenient allies for
| the time being.
| IIAOPSW wrote:
| Dare I say, the Revolution will not be Televised.
| mothballed wrote:
| Sometimes it is
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TcRWiz1PhKU
|
| https://static.independent.co.uk/s3fs-
| public/thumbnails/imag...
| Almad wrote:
| That's from the good old days where truth mattered. Like how
| many action movies are about "getting the truth out" where
| that act in itself brings consequences, cut, happy ending?
|
| Compare with now: revolution may be televised, but its spread
| not amplified and its authenticity denied. And if you have
| sufficient tribalism, it will not make a dent.
| animal_spirits wrote:
| I do love this song and I find it resonates to read the
| lyrics as though revolutions are censored by media (which is
| true). Though I found an interview with Gil Scott-Heron about
| the meaning of the lyrics and I find it more interesting; The
| revolution will not be televised because the revolution
| starts in your mind, at the dinner table, or reading books in
| the library. It won't be captured on TV because the
| revolution occurs when you question your own beliefs and
| understand something bigger.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZvWt29OG0s
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| That's clever.
| olelele wrote:
| Yes man you got it.
| toyg wrote:
| One of the joys of poetry is that it can contain multiple
| hard-to-describe facets of the same concept.
|
| * The revolution won't be televised because they won't show
| it to you.
|
| * The revolution won't be televised because it's not a
| passive, external experience that you just consume.
|
| * The revolution won't be televised because it starts
| inside yourself.
| staplers wrote:
| Art in general is this way. It's no wonder the more we
| abstract away our lives and society (through screens,
| deliveries, etc) the more abstract art feels more
| relevant to our experience.
| palmotea wrote:
| * The revolution won't be televised because we don't
| watch TV anymore (and are fragmented and increasingly
| don't even have those common touch points anymore).
| danudey wrote:
| I'll watch the revolution when the whole season comes to
| Netflix and I can binge it over a weekend.
| AIorNot wrote:
| Lets remember that tech bros have been explicitly funding the
| oppression
|
| 25 Million donation to MAGA from Brockman alone! I suspect he
| is a single issue donor (AI infra above all)
|
| https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/867947/o...
|
| Its insane how immoral people can be - anyone can see Trump is
| a conman
| babypuncher wrote:
| These "single issue donors" are the most morally corrupt. I
| can understand someone who genuinely believes in the cause,
| even if that cause is disgusting. But this guy...this guy
| knows that the things happening are wrong, and he _doesn 't
| care_ as long as he gets what he wants from this
| administration.
|
| These people should be made social pariahs.
| jacquesm wrote:
| You can pretty much lump all of the billionaire bootlickers
| in the same category. Almost none of them have any ethics,
| whilst of course proclaiming the opposite.
| joquarky wrote:
| It's like the old Sim City game where you can cheat in
| unlimited funds. This causes you to get bored and
| suddenly the disaster menu starts to become interesting.
| Fischgericht wrote:
| Thank you. You just blew my mind.
|
| This might be the best (compressed) analogy / short-cut
| when trying to educate others about WTF is going on here.
|
| I will totally steal and use that.
|
| Again, thank you.
| scottyah wrote:
| Do you condone all actions made by all people claiming to
| be part of your party? We're all told that we must pick the
| "lesser evil", and if you truly believe that one particular
| issue is more important than the rest, is it not your moral
| obligation to pursue that?
| refulgentis wrote:
| I'm confused about what are you asking (404
| CAFFEINE_MISSING), and it helped me to reframe in terms
| of what the parent and grandparent write.
|
| My reframe was, "If you're a Dem, don't you think
| Brockman should donate $25M to Trump, because I'm told I
| have to vote Dem if I don't like GOP, because Dems are
| the lesser evil, thus, Dems believe it is okay to support
| evil if it is in your self-interest?"
|
| Assuming that, then turning back to theory, "Lesser evil"
| is a _constraint_ on imperfect choices, not a moral
| voucher that turns any tactic into virtue. If you can
| justify writing a $25M check to someone you think is
| dangerous because it helps your side, then your issue was
| never "good vs. bad" - it was "my team wins," and you're
| just shopping for a cleaner-sounding label.
| babypuncher wrote:
| I think donating that amount of money to a political
| candidate is unethical no matter who that candidate is.
|
| I reject the premise that whatever this guy wants from
| Trump is a moral good greater than the harm that is being
| wrought. It is almost certainly not about pushing the
| common good, but ensuring that his wealth continues to
| grow unabated by government interference.
|
| I find this motivation especially despicable, because he
| has "donates $25m to political campaigns" level wealth
| already. He could quit Open AI _today_ and live out an
| early retirement in unparalleled luxury. But that isn 't
| enough for him. He has to keep pouring gasoline on the
| dumpster fire that is American politics, leaving the rest
| of us to suffer, because he doesn't think hundreds of
| millions of dollars is enough for one person.
| like_any_other wrote:
| They used to not even bother to hide behind technical
| difficulties, so this is an improvement:
| https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/tiktok-pledges-to-do-more-t...
| layman51 wrote:
| Something similar happened in the 1988 President Election in
| Mexico which is widely considered to have been stolen. There
| was a very memeable phrase, "se cayo el sistema" which was used
| to describe how the computing system to count votes was
| glitching out or failing.
| TheAlchemist wrote:
| As a fellow Eastern European of similar age, I suddenly feel
| quite nostalgic.
|
| I really wonder how my life would be different if someone told
| be that the US, which for me was as close to a paradise as it
| gets, will go down the same road in the future - I think it
| would shatter quite a lot of my dreams of a better life.
|
| US is nowhere near as bad as it was on the wrong side of the
| Iron Curtain, but it's on a fast track to it for sure.
| palmotea wrote:
| > I really wonder how my life would be different if someone
| told be that the US, which for me was as close to a paradise
| as it gets, will go down the same road in the future - I
| think it would shatter quite a lot of my dreams of a better
| life.
|
| That reminds me of one of the things that stuck with me from
| _The Man in the High Castle_ (the book). The main story is an
| alternate timeline where the Nazis /Japanese won WWII and
| conquered America. Then there's an alternate-timeline-within-
| the-alternate-timeline where America/Britain won WWII, but
| it's not our timeline (and it's hinted there that the liberal
| US was eventually defeated by a British Empire gone full
| authoritarian). Everything passes away. The good guys
| sometimes win, but eventually they lose too.
| sam1r wrote:
| Wow, thank you for the effort in typing out that this
| synopsis! Seems like quite the compelling read.
|
| I have already retrieved the book & will start it tonight.
| Gud wrote:
| It's a great book. Phillip K Dick, there is no author
| like him.
| TheAlchemist wrote:
| It's a fantastic book, highly recommend to read.
|
| There is also a TV series based on it (on Amazon Prime I
| think), but as usually, it's not as good as the book.
| 30minAdayHN wrote:
| I also enjoyed the TV series equally.
| elbci wrote:
| maybe it's not too late to find out that US was always like
| this and the fairy tale our parents listened on CIA's
| RadioFreeEurope was just - a fairy tale for gullible grown-
| ups ;)
| TheAlchemist wrote:
| I'm contemplating it, but I'm not that old yet !
|
| Of course there was always a bit, sometimes a lot, of
| propaganda everywhere. But at least it was (mostly) for the
| right causes and ideals. Right now, US is being governed by
| what I see as the worst possible people, with 0 morals.
| I-M-S wrote:
| The story of the United States is one of genocide,
| racism, imperialism, and oppression of the working class.
| For an American, to confuse rhetoric for history is an
| easy mistake to make - an Eastern European does not have
| that excuse.
| TheAlchemist wrote:
| One may genuinly debate the genocide, racism, imperialism
| etc. But I can guarantee you that the 'opressed working
| class' in the US had it 100 times better than the non
| opressed Eastern European one.
| I-M-S wrote:
| Unfortunately it is true that the working class does seem
| to always get the short end of the bargain.
| 9dev wrote:
| Before Trump, at least we had the hypocrisy --like, at
| least people would _pretend_ to have a moral higher
| ground. Now there are just completely shameless thugs in
| charge. They don't even bother to lie convincingly
| anymore; just listen to Kristi Noem in interviews,
| contradicting herself from sentence to sentence without a
| care in the world. They won't be held accountable for
| anything, and they know it.
| RegW wrote:
| It is sad. It's now happening west of us. In Europe we have
| been trying to protect ourselves by not saying too much and
| attracting the attention/wrath of the bosses. I don't think it
| will work.
|
| If you are in Iran - keep your head down.
| silisili wrote:
| The rise of AI is going to make this even worse. Think Running
| Man instead of 'technical difficulties.'
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| Yeah I can't fathom what sort of technical issues would produce
| this result. I'd love to read a detailed article about it. Your
| move ByteDance or whatever org owns you now. The only thing
| that would make sense to me is a partial outage of some sort,
| but that would not be permanent and very rare for Tik Tok.
|
| As an aside, if you check in on r/tiktok every time something
| major like this is happening with Tik Tok you can see how users
| feel about it. I've seen different waves of users flat out
| deleting their Tik Tok accounts in protest.
| MattDaEskimo wrote:
| It feels like federated networks with open-sourced feed
| algorithms are the best path forward.
|
| If AI removes any technical limitations, and automates content
| management, what's stopping a content creator from owning what
| they create and distributing it themselves?
|
| How can centralization continue to survive?
| pjc50 wrote:
| The magic lies in the two-sided coin of promotion vs. spam
| filtering.
|
| The web started off as a pretty peer to peer system, but almost
| immediately people built directories and link farms as means to
| find things. You can make a system as distributed as you want,
| but that only works for content which people know to find.
| Which is great for piracy, as e.g. movies and TV shows are
| advertised everywhere else and can be found by title.
|
| For social media, the recommendation engine is a critical part
| of the appeal _to users_.
| AlienRobot wrote:
| Do you actually believe anything you just wrote?
|
| If TikTok falls TikTokers will just use another centralized
| app.
|
| Content creators don't have peertube instances for a reason.
| jmyeet wrote:
| Why do so many tech people push this "federation is a panacea"
| idea despite all evidence to the contrary? I don't get it.
|
| First, the obvious: if federation was clearly superior, it
| would've won. No medium since email has been federated and even
| that's dominated by a handful of players. Running your own
| email server is... nontrivial.
|
| Second, users don't care abou tthis. Like at all.
|
| Third, supposedly tech-savvy people don't seem willing or able
| to merely scratch the surface of what that looks like and how
| it would work.
|
| Fourth, there's a lot of infrastructure you need such as
| moderation and safety that would need to be replicated for each
| federated provider.
|
| Lastly, zero consideration is given to the problems this
| actually creates. Look at POTS. We have spam and providers that
| are bad actors and effectively launder spam calls and texts.
| You need some way to manage that.
| shimman wrote:
| Well for one we've seen how great and powerful federation can
| be, email is completely federated and the design of email has
| enabled hundreds of multibillion dollar companies.
|
| Why wouldn't this also apply to social media? Why is it
| better for 5 players to exist rather than 1000s?
| MattDaEskimo wrote:
| Running your own email server is not trivial.
|
| Federated networks are theoretically and systematically
| superior to centralized, that's why people push it.
|
| Humanity and social media isn't about technological
| superiority. Current platforms have inertia. Why would people
| fragment when all they care about is basic actions, and their
| network is already built?
|
| Federated networks have been burdened by an onboarding tax,
| but this, along with moderation, can all be abstracted away
| by AI.
|
| Let's see the current reality: social media platforms are
| currently American-dominated. A serious geopolitical problem,
| especially considering the amount of time younger generations
| spend on it.
|
| There is more and more reason for governments to get involved
| and force the fragmentation of these platforms.
| megolodan wrote:
| For almost all of human history information has been
| centralized among a small actors, for some time period we had
| a large independent press but those days are gone.
|
| Everyone has a stake in getting accurate information, and
| therefore they have an interest in owning part of that
| system.
| beepbooptheory wrote:
| If the better, truly good thing was always also the winning,
| "superior" thing, we would live in a very different world.
| ddtaylor wrote:
| The utility of federated networks increases a lot when bad
| actors cause harm to people. What had a minimal value and
| failed to get attention yesterday when they need was low may
| be drastically different today when that need is high.
| smw wrote:
| Isn't the web federated?
| bigfishrunning wrote:
| Sure is! the issue is that people's attention isn't -- most
| people on the web stick to a few web pages; their social
| media of choice (facebook, tiktok, etc...) and their news
| provider of choice (CNN, Fox, NBC).
|
| Putting up a website is easy, pulling traffic away from
| bigger sites is much more difficult
| Barrin92 wrote:
| >if federation was clearly superior, it would've won.
|
| no because we don't live in the best of all worlds. it starts
| to win pretty rapidly when centralized abuses of power become
| apparent. Bitchat (p2p mesh network messaging app) has been
| becoming quite popular in Uganda and Iran.
|
| Decentralization is the basic guarantor for most of the
| freedoms we take for granted in democratic systems. Just
| because the average user doesn't exercise them, just like
| people who only start going on the treadmill when their chest
| starts to hurt at age 50, doesn't mean it isn't the answer.
| megolodan wrote:
| Beyond federated systems, P2P systems seem to have a strong
| advantage here in identifying bad actors.
|
| Ranking posts/comments by the exponential of inverse IPAddress-
| post-frequency would solve bad actors posting behind
| VPNs/proxies like evil bot farms / state actors and marketers.
|
| Real users have their own IP address, and IP addresses are
| expensive like $20-50 a month which would make mocking traffic
| an extremely expensive proposition.
|
| Mocking 1% of reddit's 120M daily active user would cost 58M
| and you wouldn't want to share/sell these addresses with other
| actors since it would ruin your credibility
| skulk wrote:
| > Ranking posts/comments by the exponential of inverse
| IPAddress-post-frequency
|
| Doesn't this just incentivize posting a bunch of comments
| from your residential proxy IP addresses to launder them?
| This smells like a poor strategy that's likely to lead to
| more spam than not. Also, everyone has to start somewhere so
| your legit IP addresses are also going to seem spammy at
| first.
| otterdude wrote:
| I think residential proxy IP's still have the same
| associated cost, and arent those often for bundled traffic?
|
| I'm not much of a blackhat so excuse my lack of knowledge
| on tricks of the trade
| direwolf20 wrote:
| I think it would do the opposite. The regular user posts 5
| times per day, but the spammer has bought access to 65536 IP
| addresses and posts once from each, boosting his posts 5x.
| And the town in South America with one CGNAT IP address to go
| around gets censored.
| otterdude wrote:
| The 65K IP addresses cost 1.638M dollars, thats alot more
| than they would spend doing the exact same thing today.
|
| The idea is to accept bad actors but make it more expensive
| and also you can directly identify cliques by IP ect.
| direwolf20 wrote:
| You don't need to own them. You just need to rent the
| rights to send a spam message on a particular service
| using a proxy.
| smw wrote:
| Yeah, but he's got a botnet of residential ips that he
| didn't pay for.
| hsuduebc2 wrote:
| Surprisingly convenient accident that happened miraculously just
| a few days after ownership transfer to the US owners.
| josefritzishere wrote:
| State-owned social media?
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| How many people are willing to even talk about the Twitter
| Files here?
| diggyhole wrote:
| The what?
| buellerbueller wrote:
| You mean https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_Files
|
| These twitter files:
|
| "After the first set of files was published, various
| technology and media journalists said that the reported
| evidence demonstrated little more than Twitter's policy team
| struggling with difficult decisions, but resolving such
| matters swiftly. Some conservatives said that the documents
| demonstrated what they called Twitter's liberal bias...
|
| In June 2023, lawyers working for Twitter contested many of
| the claims made in the Twitter Files in court. According to
| CNN, 'the filing by Musk's own corporate lawyers represents a
| step-by-step refutation of some of the most explosive claims
| to come out of the Twitter Files and that in some cases have
| been promoted by Musk himself.'
|
| "
|
| The nothingburger Twitter Files?
| abraxas wrote:
| You elected yourself oligarchy. Good luck getting rid of it now.
| jmyeet wrote:
| I predict a future showdown over Section 230 because "algorithms"
| are used to cheat on the safe harbor protections. Let me explain.
|
| The general principle of Section 230 is that a platform provider
| isn't _generally_ liable for user generated content. This was a
| key piece of legislation that enabled forums, Reddit and
| ultimately social media. The platform provider does have
| responsibilities like moderating illegal content and responding
| to legal takedowns, etc.
|
| Alternatively if you produce and publish your own content you are
| legally liable. You can be sued for defamation, etc in a way that
| you can't if you simply host user generated content (unless you
| fail to adequately moderate).
|
| REcommendation algorithms (including news feeds) effectively
| allow a platform provider to select what content gets distributed
| and what doesn't. All algorithms express biases and goals of
| humans who create those algorithms. It's not a black box. It is a
| reflection of the company's goals.
|
| So if you wanted to produce content that's, for example, only
| flattering to the administration even if you outright lie, you
| can be sued. But what if your users produce any content you want
| but you only distribute content that is favorable to the
| administration? At the same time, you suppress anti-
| administration content and content creators. It's the same end
| result but the latter has Section 230 protections. And it really
| shouldn't.
|
| This isn't hypothetical. The Biden administration revived the
| dead Trump 1 Tiktok ban to suppress anti-Israel content
| [1][2][3].
|
| What I find most funny about all this is that the American
| administration--both parties--are doing the exact thing they
| accuse China is _possibly doing in the future_.
|
| [1]: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/11/10/tiktok-faces-
| renew...
|
| [2]: https://www.internetgovernance.org/2024/03/18/yes-its-a-
| ban-...
|
| [3]: https://x.com/snarwani/status/1725138601996853424
| therobots927 wrote:
| And HN users can't upload anti-ICE articles or discuss politics
| without getting flagged and downvoted.
|
| So I guess HN was just ahead of the curve.
| ikamm wrote:
| >Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports,
| or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new
| phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal
| pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-
| topic.[0]
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
|
| This has not changed in over ten years
| https://web.archive.org/web/20140702092610/https://news.ycom...
| therobots927 wrote:
| Like I said. Ahead of the curve.
| ikamm wrote:
| Sure, if you want to compare unexplained censorship to
| established guidelines. Whatever helps you feel superior
| devsda wrote:
| It may have not changed over ten years but its enforcement I
| believe has been lacking over the past 1-2 years.
| leke wrote:
| So it went from being a social manipulation tool of one county to
| another and ownership changed hands.
| pickleglitch wrote:
| Dupe of another post that was mysteriously flagged:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46777652
| drcongo wrote:
| Why on earth are grownups using TikTok anyway?
| ikamm wrote:
| Because it has content that's enjoyable for them and they like
| to interact with the community. Same reason you're on
| hackernews.
| adi_kurian wrote:
| Hopefully people will start seeing social media as what it is:
| a cheap, shitty, and extremely addictive drug. I am confident
| that in time, the opposite opinion will be viewed as insane.
| superkuh wrote:
| As much as I dislike TikTok, I dislike this dangerous
| mischaracterization even more. If you start propagating the
| meme that screens are like chemically addictive drugs the
| governments of the world will feel emboldened to use violence
| force to 'regulate' them. Screens are not drugs. They do not
| directly manipulate the biochemistry of incentive salience
| regardless of valence of perceived stimuli. They just provide
| enjoyable stimuli. It is VASTLY different. Conflating them is
| playing in to the hands of the authoritarians.
| drcongo wrote:
| I'm sorry, but "playing in to the hands of the
| authoritarians" is using shite like TikTok, generating
| revenue for the authoritarian billionaires who are
| currently destroying the world.
| superkuh wrote:
| We are not disagreeing. Definitely do not use TikTok for
| those and many other reasons. But calling an audio visual
| stimuli an addictive drug is just as wrong and dangerous.
| That will lead to those same authoritarians controlling
| screens with use of force justified by the false
| metaphor.
| NoGravitas wrote:
| I dunno, why do grownups watch TV?
| rcpt wrote:
| Nuts that the whole company is in on it. Missing such a huge
| story is something that rank and file engineers would notice. But
| nobody is saying anything.
|
| Perhaps on the tiktok Blind?
| megolodan wrote:
| I used to think that most engineers had strong ethics, but It
| seems thats not the case.
|
| I wonder if it is widespread knowledge internally or if just
| the select few know.
| spacechild1 wrote:
| > I used to think that most engineers had strong ethics
|
| Civil engineers maybe. Software "engineers" were never known
| for their strong sense of ethics.
| pickleRick243 wrote:
| Why would you think that engineers have stronger ethics than
| the population at large? Following this logically, some
| profession would have to have lower than average ethics or
| perhaps only the unemployed do?
|
| I don't think that one's personal moral compass and one's
| profession have much correlation at all. Otherwise, moral
| philosophy professors would be near saints. Moreover the
| moral philosophers at Harvard would be more ethical than
| those at Ohio State.
| philipwhiuk wrote:
| You need remarkably few engineers in the loop to actually pull
| a thing like this off (if it is/was true).
| rcpt wrote:
| Implement the filter? Yeah that's like one guy. But then all
| the internal dashboards and experiments have this big obvious
| miss that everyone sees
| intermerda wrote:
| The Blind community is one of the most toxic communities out
| there. It made me sick even before the tech industry had its
| mask off moment 1+ year ago. Since then they've only amped up
| the racism and hate. I wouldn't expect to find any serious
| discussion there.
| rcpt wrote:
| Blind is fine. It's close to the forums of the ancient
| Internet.
|
| If there was some "mask off" moment I don't know what it was,
| and I've been in this industry for a while. Perhaps you're
| just projecting out from Elon? It's a popular thing to do
| nowadays.
| intermerda wrote:
| Blind is the 4chan of tech, so in some way you're right. I
| guess some kind of people might find that "fine". Not me.
|
| Perhaps you're one of those pro-Gestapo people? It's a
| popular thing nowadays.
| SilverElfin wrote:
| Not just anti ICE videos - you can't even mention Epstein
|
| https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/tiktok-epstein-trump-cens...
| actionfromafar wrote:
| Thankfully, I learned from our leaders that was just a hoax!
| timpera wrote:
| It's also blocking the word "test":
| https://www.theverge.com/news/868362/tiktok-epstein-ban-hoax...
| Looks like it's just a bug.
| throwaw12 wrote:
| I will save this for the future, when people complain about
| Chinese open models and tell me: But this Chinese LLM doesn't
| respond to question about Tianmen square.
| ndkap wrote:
| Currently, Tiktok US is owned by US Companies
| throwaw12 wrote:
| that's exactly why I said, I am going to save this.
|
| Then I will ask: what about TikTok US owned by US companies
| censoring anti-ICE and anti-Israel narrative, do they have
| freedom of speech?
| hnfong wrote:
| [Let's simulate the discussion for old times sake.]
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism
| hnfong wrote:
| That's the GP's point.
|
| At this stage it's the kettle calling the pot black.
| philipwhiuk wrote:
| Glowing endorsement for the Oracle investment
| jnovacho wrote:
| How is TikTok able to screen this en masse? Are they going after
| tags? Political issues aside, I am really interested in the
| technical background in this.
| financetechbro wrote:
| The only thing I could come up with, assuming this isn't a
| _technical_ glitch, is that TikTok already had the infra to
| silence anything they want on the platform and as soon as the
| keys were handed over they turned that filter up to 100%
| jnovacho wrote:
| Sure, but are they running audio recognition and image
| recognition models on each upload just to classify it?
| testing22321 wrote:
| Surely they do that to filter out Tiannamen Square content
| already.... Now they're good to go for any authoritarian
| gov who wants to restrict what their citizens can see their
| own government doing.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| Social media platforms have been doing that for years to
| keep advertisers happy, so yes.
| mkmk wrote:
| How would you distinguish this from the case where they
| turned the 'magnify dissent' filter down from 200%?
| sudosysgen wrote:
| Every large social network has fairly advanced mass screening
| setups for advertiser-sensitive topics. They just need to
| change the configs. On YouTube for example they will transcribe
| audio and run OCR on text to flag sensitive topics using MLP in
| order to flag certain topics (ex: Palestine/Israel), and
| prevent most ads from being shown (and demonetize and down
| rank).
|
| Basically every large advertiser requires this so it's pretty
| trivial to turn on.
| tomaskafka wrote:
| So, US has their own Tiananmen Square. How the turntables.
| ndkap wrote:
| TikTok easily bends over backwards authoritarian government. In
| Nepal, during the GenZ protest, TikTok disabled the search for
| "NepoBabies" which is the term people used for the affluent
| lifestyle of leaders' children and which was why the GenZ protest
| happened. Every other social media was banned but not TikTok
| because they happily censor whatever the government tells them to
| b00ty4breakfast wrote:
| even setting aside the particulars of a US-controlled tik-tok,
| that our entire view of the world is through these narrow
| balistraria controlled by a few platforms is extremely
| detrimental to a free society, especially one so dependent on the
| flow of information.
|
| You could leave tik-tok but that's where folks are at and the
| average tik-tok viewer is unlikely to leave their dank maymays
| just because of some "alleged" (and I use that term lightly)
| censorship
| jacquesm wrote:
| This is building an interesting case for those that say that the
| rest of the world can not build successful competitors to US
| entities: they can, but then they get taken away. I wouldn't use
| TikTok, but I find the whole situation a bit strange, ostensibly
| the rest of the world has a capability problem, but then when
| they are successful that can't left to stand.
| letmetweakit wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_They_Came stays relevant
| hammock wrote:
| Someone I know told me they think about this when they see the
| people who voted for gun bans talk now about how they need guns
| to defend against unlawful ICE folks
| mvdtnz wrote:
| But not a single person has actually done so. Until it can be
| shown that armed citizens are making a genuine difference
| against government agents it's still just bluster.
| quailfarmer wrote:
| Disagree. The most valuable feature of a fraction of people
| having guns is that the risk of someone having a gun
| discourages the most extreme harassment, even if no gun is
| ever fired.
| misnome wrote:
| If only there was an extremely high profile example of
| how this isn't at all true in the past several days!
| GrinningFool wrote:
| Yes, just like government operators were recently
| discouraged from escalating with that one protestor who
| had a legal gun that he wasn't using.
| mvdtnz wrote:
| Two protesters were murdered by government agents (one of
| them armed!). How much more extreme do you want to get?
| saubeidl wrote:
| The Black Panther Party proved this works decades ago:
| https://www.wbur.org/npr/442801731/director-chronicles-
| the-b...
| stevenwoo wrote:
| Not the same thing or even country, but the guy killing Abe
| with the handmade gun changed the handling of Moonie
| infiltration of Japanese government and society.
| https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/02/02/how-shinzo-
| abe...
| jmorenoamor wrote:
| Classic big. You just have to set the MANIPULATE env var to false
| in the container. It's true by default.
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| If there's a flash of light and a town in North Korea suddenly
| vanishes and becomes a giant crater, and the North Korean
| government claims it was a natural disaster, I'm going to guess
| they accidentally nuked themselves.
|
| If TikTok suddenly blocks videos on a topic, and they say it was
| "technical issues", I'm going to guess the new US overlords
| accidentally pressed the wrong button.
|
| Wonder how long before that button comes for HN. If Dang starts
| talking like ChatGPT we'll all know.
| Rastonbury wrote:
| This was quick, it was never about the money, who needs Truth
| Social and Twitter when you have tiktok. Best of luck America
| btown wrote:
| See also re: censorship of messages containing the word Epstein:
| https://xcancel.com/krassenstein/status/2015911471507530219
|
| Per https://www.npr.org/2026/01/27/nx-s1-5689104/tiktok-
| epstein-... :
|
| > "We don't have rules against sharing the name 'Epstein' in
| direct messages and are investigating why some users are
| experiencing issues," a spokesman for TikTok's U.S. operation
| told NPR in a statement.
|
| But the evidence in that Twitter thread should be weighed against
| the spokesperson's statement.
| BatteryMountain wrote:
| I wonder when Americans will wake up and see their system for
| what it is. It is almost too late to fix it. What comes next is
| going to change the rest of our lives (everyone, the whole
| world).
| kayodelycaon wrote:
| A large number of people don't want the existing system.
|
| They want Jesus on the throne, enforcing morality and making
| sure the poor people to work instead of being lazy grifters
| that take good people's hard-earned money.
|
| This isn't a hot take. I'm a Christian who grew up that
| community. :(
|
| It's everywhere. And I hate what they are doing to my LGBTQ
| friends.
| NewUser76312 wrote:
| Meta comment: it seems like you can only voice a particular
| direction on the politic topic of immigration enforcement on this
| thread without getting downvoted. The opinion is obvious because
| everyone automatically jumps to malice as opposed to incompetence
| as the prevailing theory for the article's claim.
|
| I had a condescending response from a HN mod the other day
| telling me that HN isn't all that left wing, just a 'slight
| skew'. Well OK buddy, exhibit A, read through the diversity of
| opinions that aren't flagged in this thread. I'd go as far to say
| that HN is basically like Reddit, except more of you happen to
| have computer science degrees.
|
| And that's fine, it is what it is, but let's not pretend this
| website doesn't have a heavy bias in a particular direction.
| Almad wrote:
| From what I know, politologists are analyzing the situation in
| US from a perspective of "mid intensity civil war".
|
| So what you're writing is aligned with tactics you'd expect...?
| vfclists wrote:
| What happens if the creators load the video first with a
| different title and different contextual information, then if the
| video gets loaded, they change the title and the content
| afterwards?
| areoform wrote:
| Ladies and gentlemen, the frog has been boiled.
| jauntywundrkind wrote:
| My bet is that too many frogs are gonna leap, that this is far
| too shitty a situation right now. They are gonna work extra
| overtime to cool it down some for now, collect & put some frogs
| back in the pot. And then slowly turn up the heat again.
|
| I also do believe this is an incredibly hard technical moment.
| Elli-Tok has nearly no chance of suceeding in building their
| own algorithm, from square 1, since they don't have access to
| the ByteDance algorithms. I don't know what access they have to
| international content and internstional viewing habits, don't
| know if US content flows to TikTok actual and if they get any
| algorithmic help from that. This feels like a suicidal
| business, buying a brand name but lacking any and all of the
| means to maintain product quality.
|
| There probably are real technical problems here. And feed
| preferences are probably just gone, while Elli-Tok rebuilds its
| own perhaps isolated perhaps loosely connected fork, while as
| said above probably lacking the content and viewer data to work
| from.
|
| But just as Ellison's bought CBS then let it be overrun &
| destroyed by the hollow Free Press propogandists (pretending to
| be neutral, I say as my eyes roll out of my head), I also tend
| to think they thought they could get away with doing what they
| want. Maybe they will get away with this project. Maybe it is
| all isolated US only content, maybe it is swamped with right
| wing agitprop from here on out. Maybe half those viewers here
| keep scrolling forever and that's good enough to make the
| incredibly fantastically rich happy with their US government
| facilitated acquisition, that sundering an interesting diverse
| well tuned network is maybe or maybe not a delight but a
| necessary thing to claw under for this desired class
| propoganda. But I tend to think they're alas probably smart
| enough to learn quickly this is not how you boil a frog, and
| tend to think Elli-Tok is going to (suck for a long while
| either way, but work to) dial down the right wingism &
| divisionism a lot, then slowly work it back up.
|
| (But man, watching these buffons mishandle CBS, watching
| ridiculous bald faced "salute to Mark Rubio" sure makes it hard
| to believe they have any competence at all.)
|
| Different topic but the extremely critical _TikTok v. Garland
| and the First Amendment Anticanon_ by Evelyn Douek skewering
| the unanimous Supreme Court decision that ok 'ed this absurd
| international media property theft is amazing to read.
| https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6118706
| actualwitch wrote:
| Turns out, all you needed to do was say "jumping out of boiling
| water is woke" and frogs will turn up the heat themselves.
| naikrovek wrote:
| what a bunch of enormous pussies ICE are, to have tiktok do
| this... lol, they're children, man. children with guns.
| nashashmi wrote:
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/conormurray/2026/01/26/tiktok-c...
|
| Upscrolled looks like a promising alternative.
| eunos wrote:
| Lmao, I know that 2020 Trump was the first to brought up banning
| TikTok but it was Biden and Democrat who were vigorous in
| "controlling" TikTok.
|
| Worthy for fell for it again award.
| gcanyon wrote:
| I'm not seeing this. I uploaded a video earlier today comparing
| sending in Tom Homan to replace Greg Bongino to sending in
| Ghostface to replace Jason Voorhees -- both still murderers.
| Unless they're lying to me about the view count and fabricating
| comments, something like 400 people have seen it and a dozen have
| commented -- most calling me an idiot, but whatever.
| alexc05 wrote:
| it seems like our software engineers included `censorship=true`
| in the latest build when someone filed a JIRA ticket that said
| "censor stuff"
|
| we're going to class this one as low priority / won't fix.
| tastyface wrote:
| Just say no to any/all forms of corporate owned social media.
| They are toxic and antithetical to freedom of speech and true
| community building. Inevitably, all of them will eventually be
| used to disseminate propaganda.
| JohnTHaller wrote:
| Sure, 'technical issues'. Just like the filtering around epstein,
| mussad, etc. Right-wing billionaires like to ensure the speech
| matches their preferences.
| cdrnsf wrote:
| They weren't concerned about privacy of US citizens so much as
| they were about their ability to directly influence the platform.
| EngineerUSA wrote:
| The purchase of TikTok is interesting. Ellison is first and
| foremost pro Trump, and pro-Israel. TikTok was one of the few
| companies that allowed videos against the status quo (the
| propaganda our media pushes), which has only grown more biased
| now that Bari Weiss (again, a Pro Trump, pro Israel shill) is
| heading a large media organization. Censorship and controlling
| the media is one of the first tenets of bad actors. By
| controlling the flow of information, the truth can be obfuscated
| (that is why for instance, Israel has a total ban on covering
| Ghaza for western media. So that war crimes can go unnoticed, and
| thereby, it is as if they never occured). If we do not share
| anti-Ice videos, then they simply do not occur. For is the truth
| really factual, if it is left in darkness. A war on facts is
| concerning. I see videos of Mr Preti in drag on my feeds, clearly
| generated by AI, and shared by boomers. Disparaging the dead and
| the war on facts is highly concerning. That is why Noem does not
| release body cam footage of the ICE execution of Good and Preti.
| The only comfort I can find is that Noem and Ellison, and the
| Trump admin and Israel, are just plain bad at their job. Many
| years ago, Ellison was well known in SV circles to badly desire
| to be called like Jobs, in an almost comical way, like a kid
| asking his parents whether he is like that wrestler he saw on TV
| when he imitated one of his moves (he used to dress like him, and
| ask anyone around at his parties about the similarities between
| the two). They still miserably fail at controlling public
| sentiment, which is only growing against them day by day, as it
| rightfully should. Whether or not that leads to a tangible action
| against these bad actors is to be waited for. Rarely does
| anything happen though. The war criminals that lied and killed
| civilians in Vietnam and Iraq enjoyed their ranches. Netanyahu
| and trump will someday retire and enjoy their old days, after
| wrecking havoc on the innocent.
| notepad0x90 wrote:
| Where is that HN thread where everyone was saying how bad it
| would be for Biden to ban Tiktok? Let's see how it can be used to
| manipulate the upcoming elections in the US this year. Except now
| they can't be banned, they're American!
| onetimeusename wrote:
| _TikTok said in a statement that glitches on the app were due to
| a power outage at a US data center. As a result, a spokesperson
| for TikTok US Joint Venture told CNN, it's taking longer for
| videos to be uploaded and recommended to other users. The tech
| issues were "unrelated to last week's news," TikTok said._
|
| There was a major storm over the weekend. I think the issues have
| been resolved. Is it still the case anti ICE videos can't be
| uploaded? Seems easy to test.
| brailsafe wrote:
| It seems to me that the hard part to test would be whether or
| not videos are allowed to circulate in the same way they would
| be if they were of a different subject. Upload status seems
| like red herring
|
| Much like how even relatively innocuous comments on many
| subreddits will just be shadow-deleted.
| throwaway5752 wrote:
| If someone demonstrates they are liars, there is a reasonable
| default reaction. Most people can ignore what they say, because
| liars made the conscious decision not to be credible.
|
| It is an incredible time-saving productivity hack to disregard
| what habitual liars say.
| Animats wrote:
| Can't mention "Epstein", either.[1]
|
| It was better when TikTok reported to the Third Department of the
| People's Liberation Army. They don't censor outside China.
|
| [1] https://www.npr.org/2026/01/27/nx-s1-5689104/tiktok-
| epstein-...
| mandeepj wrote:
| Well, besides that TikTok is censoring "Epstein" now. Is that a
| tech issue as well?
|
| If you can upload any video but ICE brutality then I want to
| conduct system design session with their architect, tech lead,
| and CTO!
| _Donny wrote:
| A few weeks ago, I reported a compilation video of ICE officers
| beating people. The description included the phrase "The
| deportations will continue :)".
|
| I reported it for promoting violence, but TikTok found no
| violation of its guidelines.
|
| It probably didn't help that the video was posted by the official
| White House TikTok account..
| rsolva wrote:
| Do not expect your rights to be honored on large platforms. They
| are fenced gardens regularly weeded, using algorithms with very
| specific preferences.
|
| The only information outlet where we can have a reasonable
| expectation of freedom is the web itself, a good old websites on
| your own domain. Could be a txt file if you want to keep it
| simple ;)
| jauntywundrkind wrote:
| I really want to know which directions data is flowing. How much
| of an island is Elli-Tok? Do videos from the US appear
| internationally? International to US? ByteDance famously isn't
| giving up the algorithm, but what user data does Elli-Tok get and
| what do they send, or does Elli-Tok have to totally rebuild the
| algorithm from scratch using only US viewers?
|
| This whole thing is such a shit show. The US government right now
| looks like a total ass of all asses on the world stage, but this
| TikTok business of the US demanding our country get to take over
| a social network preceeds this era of major fuckery by a good
| tick. And is just so stupid, so not what governments should do.
| Even if we hadn't had Trump just hand it over to his preferred
| "buyers" the Ellison's, it's just a grade a fuckup, absolute
| bedlam to do this, completely delegitmizes the US.
|
| _TikTok v. Garland and the First Amendment Anticanon_ paper by
| Evelyn Douek just came out, talking to what a first class First
| Amendment fuck up the unanimous Supreme Court decision was.
| Excellent read. Just could not have done a worst job,
| unbelievable nonsense that let this madness just persist &
| amplify.
| https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6118706
| Spooky23 wrote:
| We didn't go after TikTok because of PRC propaganda. We wanted a
| platform for US propaganda.
| EchoReflection wrote:
| And yet "intellectuals" and "enlightened" people in "the West"
| still seem to think that "glorious socialism" will save
| civilization from the "evil capitalists"
|
| https://museumofcommunistterror.com/
|
| https://museumofcommunistterror.com/importing-class-war-the-...
|
| https://museumofcommunistterror.com/even_the_grass_was_bourg...
|
| https://museumofcommunistterror.com/what-millenials-should-k...
|
| Ironically, CNN's "agenda" is part of the "problem" here as well:
| https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/left/cnn-bias/
|
| "let's make people really upset about ICE so that we can help
| usher in the glorious utopia of socialism!"
| bradgessler wrote:
| Remember all the grievances about the previous executive
| administration's "Twitter Files" censorship? Rules for thee, but
| not for me.
|
| To be clear, I think both censorship regimes are not good, but I
| can't say I'm surprised.
| barbacoa wrote:
| The pendulum is in full swing. Soon it will be ban worthy
| offense to suggest there are more than two genders.
|
| Though I am morbidly enjoying the irony of seeing those on the
| left suddenly discover an interest in free speech, and those on
| the right discover their love for campaigning to get people
| deplatformed.
| bradgessler wrote:
| I'm beginning to put together that party-lines are strictly
| about gaining and holding power at all costs. Irony
| disappears through that lens and the way people act makes
| much more sense.
| johnsimer wrote:
| for what it's worth many solopreneurs on the X/twitter
| solopreneur committee were reporting their uploads to TikTok were
| failing, and I saw at least one conservative complaining that
| their (conservative political) videos were not uploading to
| TikTok either
| raydev wrote:
| At least within Canada I'm continuing to get anti-ICE content
| from various creators.
| throwaway87543 wrote:
| TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC is only within the US (controlled
| by Larry Ellison). You still get ByteDance.
| wtcactus wrote:
| I believe everyone here realizes there are several highly used
| media platforms (some bigger than TikTok, like Instagram), that
| are posting the videos without any issues. You also realize that
| there are US TV stations playing those videos almost non-stop,
| right?
|
| People laugh at MAGA conspiration theories backed by Fox News,
| but their conpiration theories - backed by CNN - sound just as
| insane for anyone that didn't buy into any of the 2 extremes...
| OpFour wrote:
| A riff on "The Revolution Won't Be Televised"...
|
| the revolution won't be televised because the bastards who own
| the networks won't let you see it and you probably wouldn't watch
| it anyway-- you're too busy with your beer and your phone and
| your comfortable numbness.
|
| the revolution won't be televised because it's not entertainment,
| not something you can half-watch while you're scratching your ass
| and wondering what to eat for dinner.
|
| you can't consume revolution like you consume everything else--
| passive, bored, already thinking about the next thing.
|
| the revolution won't be televised because it happens in the place
| you're most afraid to look: inside your own goddamn skull.
|
| it starts when you stop lying to yourself, stop swallowing their
| garbage, stop pretending this is fine. it's not on TV. it's not
| coming to save you. it's just you and the choice to keep sleeping
| or finally wake the hell up. nobody's going to film that.
| siliconc0w wrote:
| You also can't talk about Epstein apparently.
| robflynn wrote:
| The new TOS also says it tracks: immigration status, political
| affiliation, whether you identify as non-binary or transgender,
| religion, activist content you consume, etc.
| JohnMakin wrote:
| What's disappointing is that this precise thing was happening
| during people trying to report on Gaza issues, and were
| encountering ghost "technical issues" and shadow
| bannings/outright bannings, but any such discussion about it here
| seemed to be getting flagged.
| tsoukase wrote:
| CEOs and boards of directors treat the regular public as either
| slaves or stupid. I don't know if they believe that or pretend to
| believe.
| dmix wrote:
| I'm happy anti-censorship is becoming more popular generally.
| Tiktok blanket banning terms and aggressive moderation of
| political topics didn't start here, but if it gets people
| talking...
| rustymonday wrote:
| So this was uploaded only 6 hours ago and has over 1,000 points
| and is at the very bottom of the front page (#28 right now).
| jjice wrote:
| Comments like this appear on every single post like this.
| Hacker New's algorithm lowers posts that have too much
| engagement too fast as a way to prevent flame wars. Is it
| perfect? No. But I highly doubt this is HN demoting this on
| purpose.
|
| From the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
|
| > The basic algorithm divides points by a power of the time
| since a story was submitted. Comments in threads are ranked the
| same way.
|
| > Other factors affecting rank include user flags, anti-abuse
| software, software which demotes overheated discussions,
| account or site weighting, and moderator action.
|
| This could very well be marked as an overheated discussion.
|
| This comes up on HN constantly. The reason I feel confident
| that this is actually the case and not selective moderating is
| that these same exact comments pop up across posts from the
| entire political spectrum.
| TheAlchemist wrote:
| I believe the reasons for this system where initially good -
| don't want too many political discussions, keep it on tech
| only.
|
| The issue is, that the tech is not a niche thing anymore -
| the biggest companies on earth are all tech now, and they
| played a very major role in installing the current US
| government. This topic is a great example too. Any current or
| future authoritarian state will be a very heavy user of
| technology, so it may very well be worth it debating these
| things here on HN.
| rustymonday wrote:
| Thanks for explaining this.
| pessimizer wrote:
| When you force the sale of a company in order to control the
| political messages that its users post, the wailing and gnashing
| of teeth that comes when that power is exercised is entirely
| performative.
|
| Weren't anti-ICE people just calling it "freeze peach" a minute
| ago? This is what that looks like. This is the group that
| repeated _" nothingburger"_ over and over again when you said
| that government directly and publicly threatening private
| businesses if they didn't censor individuals was bad.
|
| This is political. The Democrats began their open hatred of the
| left in the 90s when the Democrats cracked down on free speech
| during the anti-globalization protests (the introduction of
| fenced-in "free speech _zones_ "), the party went all in on Iraq
| against the wishes of all people who were paying attention,
| Hillary Clinton mocked the left for objecting to a wall between
| Mexico and the United States, and Rahm Emanuel described people
| who wanted single-payer as "fucking retards."
|
| Now the bizarre group of media-addicted partisans that now calls
| themselves the "left" fight _for_ free trade and imported slave
| labor. They remind you that there are jobs that are too awful for
| Americans that are totally appropriate for Mexicans. That
| manufacturing is actually worthless, and we should import
| everything because as a reserve currency there 's no need to
| produce anything. Trade deficits can be infinite, and America is
| meant to be a black hole, sucking in the worlds production and
| handing it to the rich. But the rich are bad, although we're
| giving them every single thing they want. Their politics judged
| on policy are to the right of Nixon. The only illegal immigrants
| they know are their employees. They've left behind Floyd, Illegal
| is the new Black.
|
| Now, on HN, this isn't politics. This is something else. Only
| black people and women are politics. The creation of a masked,
| militarized federal police force filled with morons to enforce
| federal immigration law because Democratic cities and states are
| refusing to enforce it themselves? Not politics. The performance
| of Trump's street roundups to rally his base (and the working
| people in this country that are undercut by illegal labor, and
| the racists who think every Mexican is a rapist) while ignoring
| and writing exceptions for the corporations that employ illegal
| labor? Not politics.
|
| Sorry, I meant something something something Russia, China, Iran,
| Nazis. And some specious, offensive comparison of people who just
| got here in order to make money to Black Americans enslaved and
| segregated over centuries.
| afpx wrote:
| I became entralled and hypnotised by 90s liberalism. Convinced
| that their 'change' would actually happen, I backed their
| candidates and media for 30 years waiting for a solution to
| even the lowest hanging fruit. Instead of getting any solution
| at all, I watched them rope in more rubes for 'bigger and
| better issues'. The self-righteous, like the younger me, are so
| easily redirected.
| fudged71 wrote:
| It's insane right now browsing tiktok and seeing every 3rd or 4th
| video on my feed have consistent glitches (in the same places of
| a video, as if my internet was slow which it isn't), on only the
| videos mentioning resistance topics from the US. Very black
| mirror. Feels like it's meant more to send a message that your
| content is flagged, and to watch what you say and do. Otherwise
| they would just block it or hide it from your feed.
| sys32768 wrote:
| Glitch or not, anything that helps get people off TikTok and
| hopefully off their phones is a good thing.
| loudmax wrote:
| Under the current administration, the US is in the process of
| throttling long term economic growth, cutting itself off from its
| traditional allies, and pulling back as a global power. China's
| Communist Party has the most to gain from the end of American
| greatness.
| pbiggar wrote:
| Meanwhile, UpScrolled was #1 in social media App Store charts in
| the US, and #2 overall.
| atoav wrote:
| The free speech crowd who demanded to stop censorship of vile
| racism and bigotry (while pretending to not believe in it
| themselves) are awefully silent when _actual_ state censorship
| happens.
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