US TikTok ban linked to pro-Palestine content rather than China threat, insiders reveal
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Well when they say user engagement they seem to be talking about users taking actions to engage with content. But they say elsewhere that the TikTok algorithm doesn’t seem to respond to these actions in general, so it’s unsurprising that this is not the cause. Instead, it seems to optimize for viewing time which doesn’t seem to be part of the available data here, unfortunately.
However, if we start with a very pro-Palestinian user-base (as suggested by the initial post count) then it’s not surprising that these users would be more inclined to watch content that shares their political views and therefore the algorithm would boost these more popular videos to more people. So these numbers really don’t show anything unusual that I can identify.
Maybe that’s all you were saying initially but I was more wondering whether there is evidence that TikTok is boosting certain content above and beyond what is of interest to its users in an attempt to influence them. Given the lack of key data, this analysis cannot directly answer this question, but the patterns here strike me as fairly organic looking.
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However a lot of these algorithms are so complex that it’s not clear to me how easily they can be manipulated.
... Really? That's funny. It's not clear to us because we aren't professionals. It's one thing to question if they are, but they absolutely can. That has been proven many times over
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... The people that made the algorithms can't make changes to the algorithm?
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My guess was that it wasn't boosting Palestinian content but wasn't suppressing it like a lot of other American platforms and news outlets tended to do.
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There's no such thing as any cleanly delineated race or ethnicity, save for maybe some people who've been isolated on an island for a thousand years. But it is a natural response to the weaponized term "antisemitism" being used against defenders of Palestinians, to point out that both groups are described as "semitic".
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AOC made a video revealing some of the backroom talks they had during floor discussions. It’s 100% Palestine driven. The Chinese claims have zero proof and are just conjecture. Like the article says it wasn’t until the pro Palestine rhetoric starting increasing around October/November that this bill really started getting steam.
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It really doesn’t matter if the Chinese were pushing more Palestine content. News is news. Just like MAGAts want to live in an echo chamber on Faux News, others want to have a more liberal news source.
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I think that has more to do with what’s popular. When the Ukraine war first started TikTok had a ton of pro Ukraine content.
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It was obvious to everyone and their cat.
The internet is a massive US PSYOP for which it's going to fight with all its might to not lose control over.
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By that logic, there's no such thing as "golden retriever" and "cocker spaniel" either, since both are canis familiaris.
Words mean things. Use them properly.
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Why not both?
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Most big bills have multiple factions profiting from it. But what pushed the TikTok ban over the bipartisan bill was definitely their stance of (non) censorship on Palestine.
What was also telling is that right after Trumps election TikTok was allowed to stay but it started banning the phrase "free Palestine"
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In your OP you said that "it's unclear how <complex> algorithms could be manipulated" and I've pointed out that wete literally doing that right now with one of the most complex algorithms ever made without having any clue of the source code basically.
If the owner of the algorithm wants to manipulate it then it's absolute piece of cake of a job even if it's a million times more complex than Googles ranking or the current tiktoks algo. The complexity of the algorithm in no way prevents manipulation.
