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Comment by inetknght

8 hours ago

> 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.

What words were China filtering? I've never seen reports of censorship like this on TikTok before Ellison bought it.

  • 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".

    • 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.

      2 replies →

    • 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?

  • 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..

  • 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.

    • 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.

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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?

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.

  • No, the forced bipartisan support TikTok sale was to suppress discussion of Palestine.