US TikTok ban linked to pro-Palestine content rather than China threat, insiders reveal
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The main reason behind the United States' push to ban social media application TikTok is due to Israel’s image rather than fears of Chinese infiltrations, congressional insiders have revealed.
At the Munich Security Conference, US Senator Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the intelligence committee, said he wished to reveal what he called the “real story” behind the recent legislations to restrict the Chinese-owned application.
“So we had a bipartisan consensus,” Gallagher said. “We had the executive branch, but the bill was still dead until October 7th. And people started to see a bunch of antisemitic content on the platform and our bill had legs again.”
A memo produced by the State Department for its Near East Affairs diplomats, which Klippenstein obtained, describes how Israel's deputy director general for public diplomacy at the foreign ministry, Emmanuel Nahshon, blamed the youth’s opposition to the war on Gaza on TikTok’s algorithm.
“Some wonder why there was such overwhelming support for us to shut down potentially TikTok or other entities of that nature,” he said in May. “If you look at the postings on TikTok and the number of mentions of Palestinians, relative to other social media sites - it's overwhelmingly so among TikTok broadcasts.”
Nikki Haley, another former Republican presidential candidate who last year infamously signed an Israeli bomb meant for Gaza with “finish them”, said she believed that simply watching videos on TikTok would make a user antisemitic.
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Shocking no one but the most dense apologists of the move.
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Israeli interests control US policy. See also: grass is green.
Further reading: puppet state
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The word "antisemitic" is being misused in a disgusting way here. The victims of the Israeli genocide are also a Semitic people.
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Which state is the puppet? Because it seems like it's America at this point.
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Thank you! I've been saying this since forever, and all I ever got was (in a shorter form) "Antisemite doesn't include those people anymore, it's only for the jewish people".
Like hell it is! Israel is the biggest antisemite nation of them all.
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"We had a bipartisan consensus that this needed to be done, but there wasn't enough enthusiasm until Israel was threatened"
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Makes perfect sense. Unfortunately.
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America, a wholly owned subsidiary of Israel, Inc. since 1947
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There is no such thing as a semitic people.
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Not going to say I told you so but...ah fuck it I told you so.
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Also a fair critic of Israeli government action isn't antisemitic just like a fair critic of Iranian governments isn't islamophobia.
While there is an antisemitic critic of Israel, raising concerns regarding human rights isn't antisemitic nor supporting the hamas.
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The implication here seems to be that Chinese state interests are promoting content related to Palestinian liberation. Is there actual evidence for this or is it just conjecture? Is it even true that there is more Palestinian content on TikTok than other platforms? Has anyone measured this?
I don’t really trust anyone involved in this fight to speak truthfully.
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I use tiktok quite a bit and anecdotally tiktok definitely promoted Palestinian content. Especially as a lot of it was quite vile and tiktok censor is super sensitive for example Ukraine content never became as big even when it's a much bigger geopolitical issue.
I feel like we shouldn't accept or trust any closed source algorithm that can't be audited. Period. It's all manipulation because why wouldn't it be? Who on earth could resist such power? Especially when there's basically zero risks.
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There are also antisemitic supporters of Israel. The Christian Nationalists want somewhere to banish the US's Jewish population to.
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There are suggestions that that the algorithm is imbalanced on the subject, though 'why' it is is pure conjecture.
https://cybersecurityfordemocracy.org/getting-to-know-the-tiktok-research-api
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It's a language family. How the fuck did you manage to think of biology.
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Can you explain a bit more what you mean by this? This article in my understanding of it does not suggest the algorithm is favoring pro-Palestinian narratives. If anything, the extreme imbalance of post count between the two sides suggests a preexisting pro-Palestinian viewpoint among the userbase rather than one that was artificially boosted.
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I agree with you regarding platforms that lack transparency. However a lot of these algorithms are so complex that it’s not clear to me how easily they can be manipulated. I’d like to see actual evidence of this before jumping to conclusions, especially since the people making these claims are very untrustworthy.
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Yeah, no shit? We all saw that, when the chants for bans started coming after the anti-genocide protests...
