US TikTok ban linked to pro-Palestine content rather than China threat, insiders reveal
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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...
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Combining posting activity and views per posts yields us with this perspective of total views. Different rates of amplification mean that the already big differences in posting activity are magnified. So this is what happened. We can easily see how we get to TikTok, as an environment, having much more Pro-Palestinian content than Pro-Israel content. We can also see that for much of October 2023, General content was by far the most dominant. But these data alone cannot tell us why there were such meaningful differences in views per post. There is at least one thing we can rule out, however. This effect doesn’t appear to be tied to user engagement.
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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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Yeah, I'm sure all the other countries that banned it also banned it for the same reason. Absolutely nothing to do with the Chinese commies trying to take over the world. /s
I'll believe it wasn't being "banned" because of China when Felon Musk removes his Tesla Swatstikar giga factory out of China. I have an easier time seeing this as a greed driven distraction run by the multi billion dollar disinformation campaign China has been putting on for decades.
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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.
