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.”
59 Comments
reddig33@lemmy.world · 129 pts · 197d
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.
VeryVito@lemmy.ml · 32 pts · 197d
reddig33@lemmy.world · 26 pts · 197d
Remember when MySpace was owned by Rupert Murdoch? Wikipedia remembers…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myspace
tonytins@pawb.social · 17 pts · 197d
Most of us were teens during the 2000s. No one with fond memories of Myspace knew who Murdoch was.
Also, he only owned it for the latter half of the decade before it got sold off again.
reddig33@lemmy.world · -6 pts · 197d
Oh, I guess that means it never happened then. 🙄
tonytins@pawb.social · 18 pts · 197d
Said no one ever.
treesquid@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 197d
They didn't have the opportunity. They absolutely wanted to,
felixwhynot@lemmy.world · 11 pts · 197d
If you are uninstalling, you can try the federated alternative: loops
EndlessNightmare@reddthat.com · 8 pts · 197d
It's probably either sunk-cost fallacy or outright denial
Tollana1234567@lemmy.today · 5 pts · 197d
shortform content, is addictive to people.
chaogomu@lemmy.world · 5 pts · 197d
And Tiktok isn't the only place for that exact type of content.
People are already jumping ship to other platforms.
Tollana1234567@lemmy.today · 1 pts · 196d
youtube seems to be peddle what tiktok is doing.
rayyy@piefed.social · 2 pts · 197d
Try UpScrolled. It ranks higher than TicToc and claims to be politically neutral.
Zoot@reddthat.com · 4 pts · 196d
Or Loops? The federated, no special interests version of TikTok. You're already on lemmy, why advocate for yet another corporate social media company?
Wispy2891@lemmy.world · 4 pts · 196d
I like the idea of a federated version of that, but there are many problems:
mic_check_one_two@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 1 pts · 196d
Saw “no censorship” in the description, and had suspicions because it’s a common dogwhistle for “we’ll allow the most vile people as long as they’re not technically breaking the law”. Got the app, and immediately scrolled past a “Jews secretly run the world” post followed shortly by a “Hitler was right about the Jews” post. Yeah, the problem with “no censorship” is that it inevitably falls prey to the Nazi bar problem.
Ebby@lemmy.ssba.com · 90 pts · 198d
Yeah. Right.
"If you get caught, call it a bug." seems to happen a lot this administration.
BurgerBaron@piefed.social · 15 pts · 197d
My bet is they tweak the backend instead to derank content they don't like softly next.
chaogomu@lemmy.world · 16 pts · 197d
They're already doing that. There are reports that content from the DNC isn't being served anymore, even to subscribers.
BurgerBaron@piefed.social · 10 pts · 197d
AmbitiousProcess@piefed.social · 61 pts · 197d
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
jaennaet@sopuli.xyz · 9 pts · 197d
Tuscy@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 192d
What a big oopsies, y’all found out about our behind the scenes Zionist propaganda. You weren’t suppose to see that. Pretend you ever say anything.
Telorand@reddthat.com · 54 pts · 198d
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.
grue@lemmy.world · 18 pts · 197d
We're not the ones who need to hear it, though.
Telorand@reddthat.com · 1 pts · 197d
You're not, but as counterintuitive as it may seem, there are people who use the Fediverse and big platforms like TikTok, Xitter, etc. My words are for them.
Tollana1234567@lemmy.today · 3 pts · 197d
especially one that reaches a wider range of young gen z people who had not been captured by other alt-right social media yet.
ArgumentativeMonotheist@lemmy.world · 43 pts · 197d
This is TikTok in America as managed by Larry Ellison and the US government btw. They Iron Curtained y'all.
D_C@sh.itjust.works · 25 pts · 197d
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...
rayyy@piefed.social · 12 pts · 197d
That type of stuff only happens in shit-hole countries - FTFY.
jaennaet@sopuli.xyz · 3 pts · 197d
BoJackHorseman@lemmy.world · -1 pts · 197d
ArgumentativeMonotheist@lemmy.world · -1 pts · 197d
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. 🤷
Chozo@fedia.io · 26 pts · 197d
Weird timing these bugs seem to have, eh?
4grams@awful.systems · 19 pts · 197d
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…
artyom@piefed.social · 17 pts · 198d
Okay good so they're going to fix it then?
Tuscy@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 192d
“Oopsies, come back guys!”
Samsy@lemmy.ml · 14 pts · 197d
Hey, now I am not able to watch videos about my favorite fast train from Germany, the InterCityExpress, ICE. /s
hakunawazo@lemmy.world · 14 pts · 197d
Always remember: If you flip the Deutsche Bahn logo, the customer is depicted.
jaennaet@sopuli.xyz · 9 pts · 197d
Riverside@reddthat.com · 1 pts · 196d
ZILtoid1991@lemmy.world · 13 pts · 197d
Translation: "We got caught"
EndlessNightmare@reddthat.com · 12 pts · 197d
How convenient.
me_myself_and_I@lemmy.world · 12 pts · 196d
Ironic that an app monitored and controlled by the Chinese communist party allowed more freedom of speech for Americans. How the turn tables.
Anarki_@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 11 pts · 197d
Every time. Facebook said the same thing when things that upset the powers got hidden or deleted.
neukenindekeuken@sh.itjust.works · 10 pts · 196d
Lol, that's not how it fucking works.
Key words like that don't just accidentally get filtered out with a "bug".
ranzispa@mander.xyz · 2 pts · 196d
We were developing a feature to push for those posts, but a bug made it so that they were blocked.
I guess this is one of the few cases in which that could be the result of a bug.
neukenindekeuken@sh.itjust.works · 3 pts · 196d
Not a chance. Not even remotely possible if they have automated testing (which they do) and qa staff verifying features (which they also do), and smoke/regression tests after deployment (which they do).
I've worked in this industry for 30 years, and the chance that that's what happened, immediately after a takeover by people who really don't want those terms searched on, and the feature was released in that state, and stayed in that state without a hotfix or patch going out and it wasn't caught by their own testers, is practically nil.
Formfiller@lemmy.world · 7 pts · 196d
Hopefully the Streisand effect takes place and people wake up to the fact that Israel was blackmailing our politicians with trafficked children and bribing the rest. History will call these people traitors https://www.trackaipac.com/
DrDickHandler@lemmy.world · 6 pts · 196d
Once again, they are using this mainly to censor anti-Israel content. No one is mentionning this in the articles and comments.
Formfiller@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 196d
It’s because our government is literally occupied by this genocidal state that was blackmailing our politicians with trafficked children. History will call these people traitors https://www.trackaipac.com/
FukOui@lemmy.zip · 5 pts · 197d
Might not be a lie. They might be silently rolling a feature to selectively censor/ show ICE fascists and accidentally censored all by mistake lol
pimpampoom@lemmy.zip · 5 pts · 196d
I’m not expert and I call BS. No need to be an expert for this hahaha
Archangel1313@lemmy.ca · 4 pts · 197d
Not "bugs"..."features."
Tollana1234567@lemmy.today · 4 pts · 197d
it was one of the last platform that allows significant criticism against ISrael without being censored, thats why.
chaogomu@lemmy.world · 6 pts · 197d
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.
Zwrt@lemmy.sdf.org · 7 pts · 197d
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.
felixwhynot@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 197d
There is If a federated alternative: loops
Riverside@reddthat.com · 1 pts · 196d
Formfiller@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 196d
I hope tik toc loses so many users it goes bankrupt
Tuscy@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 192d
Sure. “Bug”. It’s just a way of them begging people to come back to their Zionist spyware bullshit.
dylanmorgan@slrpnk.net · 2 pts · 197d
You mean “experts” who have even the slightest understanding of how software works?
myfunnyaccountname@lemmy.zip · 2 pts · 197d
By bugs they mean bending over backwards to please daddy.
not_that_guy05@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 197d
A bug right. Just EA is blocking/censoring the name as well.
kamen@lemmy.world · -1 pts · 196d
WhyIHateTheInternet@lemmy.world · -3 pts · 197d
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.
IronBird@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 197d
it was the only place to get actual unspun news about the genocide in gaza, which is so heavily censored in the west that a couple livestreams threatens the whole house of cards. obviously the chinese have their own censorship but if your in the west your trying to escape western propaganda not chinese propaganda
same reason why chinese kids flock to discord/other services. though from what i hear chinese doesn't really care so much if you know/speak about X internal-propaganda subject, just long as you don't "agitate" or try to orginize against it.