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.”
Ironic that an app monitored and controlled by the Chinese communist party allowed more freedom of speech for Americans. How the turn tables.
Lol, that’s not how it fucking works.
Key words like that don’t just accidentally get filtered out with a “bug”.
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.
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.
I’m not expert and I call BS. No need to be an expert for this hahaha
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/
Once again, they are using this mainly to censor anti-Israel content. No one is mentionning this in the articles and comments.
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/
I hope tik toc loses so many users it goes bankrupt
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…
Hey, now I am not able to watch videos about my favorite fast train from Germany, the InterCityExpress, ICE. /s
“Fast” train, going 150km/h half the trip duration lmfao
Always remember: If you flip the Deutsche Bahn logo, the customer is depicted.
Also:
deleted by creator
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
Every time. Facebook said the same thing when things that upset the powers got hidden or deleted.
Translation: “We got caught”
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.
If you are uninstalling, you can try the federated alternative: loops
What? MySpace never tried to topple a democracy.
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.
Also, he only owned it for the latter half of the decade before it got sold off again.
Oh, I guess that means it never happened then. 🙄
Said no one ever.
They didn’t have the opportunity. They absolutely wanted to,
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.
youtube seems to be peddle what tiktok is doing.
It’s probably either sunk-cost fallacy or outright denial
Try UpScrolled. It ranks higher than TicToc and claims to be politically neutral.
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.
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
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…masked Gestapo goons
Honestly they’re more like the SA
That type of stuff only happens in shit-hole countries - FTFY.
Nothing to do with the fact that Larry Ellison is a jew and the largest individual contributor to Israel, right?
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. 🤷
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.
