cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/59392382
TikTok wants users to believe that errors blocking uploads of anti-ICE videos or direct messages mentioning Jeffrey Epstein are due to technical errors—not the platform seemingly shifting to censor content critical of Donald Trump after he hand-picked the US owners who took over the app last week.
However, experts say that TikTok users’ censorship fears are justified, whether the bugs are to blame or not.
Ioana Literat, an associate professor of technology, media, and learning at Teachers College, Columbia University, has studied TikTok’s politics since the app first shot to popularity in the US in 2018. She told Ars that “users’ fears are absolutely justified” and explained why the “bugs” explanation is “insufficient.”
This is TikTok in America as managed by Larry Ellison and the US government btw. They Iron Curtained y’all.
Balderdash! That type of stuff only happens in dictatorships.
Next you’ll be telling me there’s a bunch of masked Gestapo goons running around shooting innocent people and kidnapping non whites…That type of stuff only happens in shit-hole countries - FTFY.
masked Gestapo goons
Honestly they’re more like the SA
Removed by mod
Everything to do with it because TikTok is bad for Western imperialist optics and radicalised the youth as the genocide in Gaza was getting livestreamed. Nothing religious or ethnic though, this is just a money move. 🤷
Wow, a bug that specifically automatically chose keywords like “ICE”, and “epstein”, then blocked them from appearing, while leaving literally all other content unharmed??? How conveniently specific and well-timed! /s
Like someone else said, it might legitimately have been a bug: maybe they didn’t mean for the censorship to be visible to the person using those keywords, and it’d just be everyone else who can’t see them. That way you’d think everything is fine but mysteriously your Epstein / ICE content just doesn’t get any views
it was one of the last platform that allows significant criticism against ISrael without being censored, thats why.
Ah, but that’s the thing. There are always new platforms.
The current winner seems to be a new one called Upscrolled.
The guy behind it is a Palestinian out of Jordan, with Australian citizenship?
Anyway, that’s all I currently know about it, the app is being hugged to death by tens of thousands of new users over the last day or two.
Not Open Source…
It is considerably more open and build on open source technologies and they do want to become decentralized “once the open protocols mature (?)” but still, can someone educate the kids on software freedom please.
There is If a federated alternative: loops
Yeah. Right.
“If you get caught, call it a bug.” seems to happen a lot this administration.
My bet is they tweak the backend instead to derank content they don’t like softly next.
They’re already doing that. There are reports that content from the DNC isn’t being served anymore, even to subscribers.
Okay good so they’re going to fix it then?
Maybe—and I’m going out on a limb here—just maybe, using centralized media to document State-sponsored domestic terrorism is a fucking stupid idea. Especially since the very same platform is co-owned by the State.
Y’all, we already went through this with Xitter. Sorry you fell for it again, but this won’t be the last time if you continue to cling to platforms owned by the very people who want to censor you.
We’re not the ones who need to hear it, though.
especially one that reaches a wider range of young gen z people who had not been captured by other alt-right social media yet.
Find. Another. Service.
TikTok is dead — just like Twitter. I don’t understand people who cling to these services. Might as well post on MySpace while you’re at it.
What? MySpace never tried to topple a democracy.
They didn’t have the opportunity. They absolutely wanted to,
Remember when MySpace was owned by Rupert Murdoch? Wikipedia remembers…
Most of us were teens during the 2000s. No one with fond memories of Myspace knew who Murdoch was.
Oh, I guess that means it never happened then. 🙄
Said no one ever.
It’s probably either sunk-cost fallacy or outright denial
Try UpScrolled. It ranks higher than TicToc and claims to be politically neutral.
Or Loops? The federated, no special interests version of TikTok. You’re already on lemmy, why advocate for yet another corporate social media company?
I like the idea of a federated version of that, but there are many problems:
- When people scroll, they need an algorithm to choose content for them.
- 99% of average TikTok content is low quality shit and it’s the algorithm to find and promote what works
- All that 99% of shit is occupying exabytes on bytedance servers. Users are uploading terabytes of shit every hour, it’s impossibile for a federated instance to keep all this shit on disk. Look how Lemmy is designed for example. I upload an image and then it’s stored forever in hundreds of instances. For videos is untenable. Only companies that are profiting from this (for example using such videos for training ai models, or using this videos to hook people and serve them highly personalized ads) can host a TikTok clone
shortform content, is addictive to people.
And Tiktok isn’t the only place for that exact type of content.
People are already jumping ship to other platforms.
If you are uninstalling, you can try the federated alternative: loops
So people are upset that they can’t get the info or propaganda they want on tick tock…
Which tells me that these people think that tick tock is a reputable place to get this kind of information
I have heard more about this tick tock bullshit than I have heard about the ice bullshit today and that should say a lot about nature of our society here in America.
Not “bugs”…“features.”
Weird timing these bugs seem to have, eh?
How convenient.
You mean “experts” who have even the slightest understanding of how software works?
Translation: “We got caught”
Why doesn’t anyone see this for what it is. They put monitoring for certain keywords but fucked up the code and it blocked some users through incompetence. They fixed the filters, but I guarantee they are sending reports to the White House…
By bugs they mean bending over backwards to please daddy.
