Comment by dataviz1000
8 hours ago
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.
> 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.
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-...
Radio Free Asia is USA funded propaganda.
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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.
That doesn't mean it should be ignored. That doesn't make it normal.
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.
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.
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.
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Propaganda can be entirely factual. In fact, the best propaganda is.
In Portuguese we use the same word for ad and propaganda! In fact that word is just propaganda!
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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.
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You should see how some people justify Tibet..
I mean China is not exactly a poster child for a benevolent hegemon - tibet / taiwan / uyghurs to name a few
all 3 places you mentioned have been integrated into china longer than the us has been a country
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You don’t think that there could be purely organic reasons why content showing US hypocricy might be immensely popular in South America?
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> the United States government rolling through protesters in armored vehicles
I'm sorry, did I miss something? Is this something that's happened (ever)?
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.
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.
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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?
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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?
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.
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.
I think the more concerning thing here is the US government attacking people of different ethnicities.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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>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
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.
TikTok US it no longer controlled by the Chinese.
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
The painful to answer question is whether the intention is to block the spreading of lies or the spreading of truth?
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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
>Turning Americans stupid might count.
Don't need tiktok for that. Besides, a certain party prefers it that way.
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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.
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.
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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.
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.
> 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.
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