TikTok claimed bugs blocked anti-ICE videos, Epstein mentions; experts call BS
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I don't believe that it was a glitch. My comment was directed generally towards the common journalistic practice nowadays, not asking what's the truth in this case (which is very obvious, as the commenter I replied to said).
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Censor? More like actively brainwash the young. So basically the GOP blatantly doing what they accused China of doing, except China never did, amd the GOP disguised it as "bugs".
It seems the GOP's Orwellian brainwashing apparatus is now worse than China ( or even Russia ) and is back to 70's style state based mccarthyism propaganda
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X, CBS, WaPO, WSJ, now TikTok.
This is why independent media is the future. The major media companies are all in pocket and are being opently transformed or coerced into becoming propaganda outlets.
A new social media will emerge and people looking for objective content will find another platform.
And the formerly robust, independent outlets are already dead, they just don't know it yet. Neither X, TikTok or CBS news will ever be remotely close to what they once were.
This is why independent media is the future. The major media companies are all in pocket and are being opently transformed or coerced into becoming propaganda outlets.
A new social media will emerge and people looking for objective content will find another platform.
And the formerly robust, independent outlets are already dead, they just don't know it yet. Neither X, TikTok or CBS news will ever be remotely close to what they once were.
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I don't use tiktok but my wife does, a little to much, she was complaining to me Sunday night that any video with ice mentioned the comments magically couldn't load due to Internet issues.
She showed me by flicking through several videos finding ones about frozen water and ICE the agency. Both failed to load comments because the Internet was down.
Funny since the Internet was working to pull the videos and comments for every other non-ice video.
My son and daughter then joined in saying they are now getting tons of Christian apologetics videos. Which made the laugh because the arguments are just terrible.
She showed me by flicking through several videos finding ones about frozen water and ICE the agency. Both failed to load comments because the Internet was down.
Funny since the Internet was working to pull the videos and comments for every other non-ice video.
My son and daughter then joined in saying they are now getting tons of Christian apologetics videos. Which made the laugh because the arguments are just terrible.
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It's about repetition. Even trash arguments will find fertile ground if repeated enough.
The problem is that every piece of independent media has a gatekeeper or needs massive capital to build network effects. The ones a rich person wants you to see will be large or free. The rest will be small or hard to find.
Most blogs are on substack (and a few on wordpress). Most forums are now reddit. The ones that have their own site have to be found through a search engine as the network effects. Vox required massive infusions of capital and now is mostly paywalled. I believe our new attempt at a State newspaper, the great NC Assembly Mag has had significant charitable investment. It will be hard for independent news to thrive without large organizing bodies to feed them members, money, or both. These were really the roles that unions and political parties used to play.
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Small independent media means that no one is vetting them. They can still be propaganda, it just might be harder to know who they are serving.
X and TikTok were never a source of "objective content" in any case. Everyone is posting what they post for a reason. The reasons may vary but that doesn't mean you can trust it.
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But, I read that, worldwide, something like 60-70 million videos are uploaded to Ticktock every day! So…..sample size?
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Sure but the young aren't exactly stupid.
You will have little pockets of ignorance that will have varying levels of outsized impact, this is normal for every human generation, but you have two, coming up on three generations that are either slowly or quickly rejecting Tiktok and Twitter both (at the same time as Twitter's competition appear to have all reached maximum saturation by the community-chosen filtering).
Since they are not on Facebook either, it stands to reason there is a market that is going to open up very soon for the 16-25 crowd within the next 5 years for pop cultural/generational identity and have Gen Z and millennials also follow them onto it for a bit after that.
Then the cycle of enshittification will continue as a matter of course when the political class identifies a new platform in any country on Earth with outsized psychological manipulation of engagement and infinite scrolling to replace bored or late night TV channel flipping of old.
I do wonder what happens when three generations all witnessing rapid technological upheaval, advancement, innovation, and now primarily Orwellian corruption, decide the shit has hit the fan, they are tired of it and going to eviscerate as many governments as it takes to get it stopped or regulated. There's a slight likelihood nothing will actually happen but the risk of global upheaval of the entire world deciding to upend social media all at once as a middle finger to billionaires can't be discounted. Especially when the misuse and poor implementation of Tiktok is a lesson they can't quite ignore like they could Twitter's buyout.
Add in tech price inflation across the entire fucking globe thanks to AI grift mills and the patently stupid 'smart money' investors finally waking up to the gap between promised revolution and the less than glamorous realities of logistics and scaling and we're about to finally see the ceiling or proverbial cliff of algorithmic engagement-based media culture and its oversaturation nearly fully bringing the Dead Internet Theory to the fore.
Tiktok's illegal and coerced co-option (the Chinese could easily have fought this harder if they actually gave a shit) just happens to be an in your face reminder that the world might regress a couple generations of tech back to the 90s before moving forward again due to self inflicted innovation and inflationary failures of the rich (and the tech understanding/competency ceiling across the world at large that varies slightly by generation and country).
I'd like to go to an era where 195 countries globally more or less all have a roughly equal shot at taking the world by storm with innovation to temporarily disrupt and harm the enshittification cycles three or five times every ten years instead of what this insipid Tiktok buyout and its inevitable backfire represents. (the Twitter backfire is still in progress even if xAI can basically lose money on it forever just to keep it out of its political opponents' hands until it becomes obsolete like AOL or Yahoo shortly)
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yeah, it's almost like as soon as the deal closed, the new trump acolyte owners, with all the precision and subtlety of a sledgehammer, cranked the right-wing-bias knob up to 11. and now they're frantically trying to adjust and fine-tune down so it's not so glaringly obvious--no! no! look over here at this cough power outage cough. i mean, they need at least a little plausible deniability in their bias so they can claim anyone who complains is an unhinged leftist radical. so over this timeline
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Fun fact, middle-aged/older people are more likely to be swayed and indoctrined than the young (broad generalisation but follow me for a minute).
Older people who led a comfortable life with routine and predictability are suddenly fed some triggering content and they have a sort of epiphany like "WE WERE LIED TO ALL THE TME" and suddenly blame everyone outside of their group of comfortable old people for a bunch of fantasy grievances and it goes downhill quickly from there.
Younger people grow in this so are much more accustomed to the nuances, there's not really much of a before/after shock.
Of course, it still doesn't change the fact that "social" media is a bane on society but that's part of a broader debate.
Older people who led a comfortable life with routine and predictability are suddenly fed some triggering content and they have a sort of epiphany like "WE WERE LIED TO ALL THE TME" and suddenly blame everyone outside of their group of comfortable old people for a bunch of fantasy grievances and it goes downhill quickly from there.
Younger people grow in this so are much more accustomed to the nuances, there's not really much of a before/after shock.
Of course, it still doesn't change the fact that "social" media is a bane on society but that's part of a broader debate.
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Actually there's always been vivid debates at the height of the "cancel culture" movement, reduced by right-wingers to "no one complained then, here's your payback" which is false. By going with that binary thinking, you're exactly in the "tribal" mindset you claim to decry.
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For a country founded on the concept of freedom it seems ironic that America is effectively building a sovereign Internet.
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chaos215bar2
Ars Praefectus
This was also never an entirely one-sided phenomenon.
But regardless, the entire comment you're responding to is just classic justification for right-wing bullying tactics. "You called me a bad person, so now I'm going to shoot you in the face as fair payback."
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ChrisMarshallNY
Ars Praetorian
I guess that this is it, for TikTok, then. A platform loved by teens and young people, starts serving content that is tailored for red-faced old gammons.
TikTok became as popular as it
If they think they can use it to suddenly start encouraging a completely orthogonal mindset, they’re in for a bit of a shock.
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abeinspace
Smack-Fu Master, in training
Yes and no: It was the GOP and the Democrats. It passed easily with support from both parties, and Biden happily signed it into law. Democrats helped the Republicans destroy our free speech in order to suppress our criticism of their mutual support for a genocide.
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The GOP managed to successfully brainwash the Boomer generation via TV like Fox News because they grew up with the likes of Walter Cronkite on the evening news. They grew up and learned that "if it's on TV, it MUST be true." End of thought process.
Young people today grew up with the understanding of you can't trust anything because they're likely lying to you in some way, whether actively or by omission. I was taught in school to not even trust Wikipedia. It's not going to be nearly as easy with young people today compared to the very simplistic upbringing the Boomers had.
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Thank you. People who think "that independent 'journalist'" on <insert platform here> is good and I'm like "where are they getting their data? Who is vetting it?" and met with blank stares.
That and don't you think they're just as susceptible as anyone and can start throwing bias in and leading you a certain way to get more views so they get more money?
Realistically the solution is for people to realize that just because it's on the internet doesn't mean it should be free. You are expected to pay for a jug of milk from the market, a movie from blockbuster (yes, I'm old), etc. You will be paying one way or another for things on the internet and I think it's long past time to decide that we should be paying for quality, especially in journalism. There are certainly a few good outlets out there still doing honest journalism, just much fewer and far in between,
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The push for this started under Trump, but electeds Dem bought it hook line and sinker because of Sinophobia and they themselves being pissy that people were seeing the truth about what was going on in Gaza, and it got signed by Biden.
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Given that Twitter and Facebook usage hasn’t collapsed while being definitively biased for MAGA, I think people (young people included) are unfortunately more pliable than you think.
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Their accusation that TikTok was for distributing Chinese propaganda was always a signal of intent to distribute their own propaganda once to app changed hands.
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Yup. Definitely "you can't beat up my little brother, only I can beat up my little brother!" energy.
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I've been ringing alarm bells and making my friends and family uninstall the app since I heard about the acquisition, which to be fair, was a week ago. I'm a bit behind. A lot of them are in vulnerable groups and watch metric data alone is incredibly powerful, not to mention all the other data the app is no doubt gathering.
I hate how this timeline has turned me into a tinfoil hat wearer.
I hate how this timeline has turned me into a tinfoil hat wearer.
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RickRoyLeonPrisZhoraRacha
Ars Scholae Palatinae
This. So easy. Delete all your content and then the app. Then get a new email address and setup new UpScrolled. Continue your addiction of posting nonsense.
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Experts are exactly who we should be looking toward for that truth, where the names of said experts are listed, with accreditations germane to the subject.
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If it's going to be run by MAGA, can we change the name to tok tik (because it goes backward)?
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Trump doesn't joke, he doesn't have a sense of humor. He throws out colossally stupid and clearly self-serving bloviations (see: Canada as the 51st state, U.S. invasion of Greenland, he's now the leader of Venezuela, etc. ad inifinitum) to test how far people will let him go, to see who accepts these bloviations or not, and then to effect the colossally stupid and self-serving bloviations if he doesn't get any pushback. Let's stop giving him cover by attributing humor to a person who has none.
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A harmless pie
Ars Centurion
There are more than enough people who crave the sludge that spills out of tiktok (not that it's all sludge, for now) that even if every ounce of content to the left of steve bannon was deleted, they'll still have a massive user base. It's just easier to believe comforting lies than complex truths, always has been, and that is the bread and butter of maga. The USA will go through the hell it needs to go through to learn that lesson, and it will or it won't. Hard times are here, harder times ahead.
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Ironic to think that TikTok had free speech and balance when it was supposedly controlled by China.
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The push to either force a sale or ban it was there before, and it had more support than opposition in Congress (and I think the general public, though I don't have the poll on me), but opponents of banning TikTok or forcing a sale did have enough pull to stall the ban by tying it up in Congressional gridlock. The attempts to censor the Gaza genocide overcame that gridlock.
Where do you get the idea that China, infamous for internet censorship, didn't censor? Even if we ignore their domestic censorship, a few years back it made the rounds in news that someone got past the censorship algorithms on the Uyghur genocide by disguising her TikTok video as a make-up tutorial.
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Just like with banking/money issues, the bugs never seem to be in favor of the end user, it's always in favor of the institution running how. Conveniently.
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