When I was 11, on 17th Nov 1989, in Czechoslovakia, my father was watching the evening news on our (black and white) TV, as usual.
There was a protest and the state media was reporting on it. When the reporter said, "our camera broke down and we can only show black and white pictures", my father IMMEDIATELY jumped up and angrily said, "that's bs, you don't want to show how they [the protesting students] got beaten up [by the police]!"
This was an interesting life lesson. So yeah, sure, technical difficulties..
As a fellow Eastern European of similar age, I suddenly feel quite nostalgic.
I really wonder how my life would be different if someone told be that the US, which for me was as close to a paradise as it gets, will go down the same road in the future - I think it would shatter quite a lot of my dreams of a better life.
US is nowhere near as bad as it was on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain, but it's on a fast track to it for sure.
As someone who's lived in a SEA military dictatorship and has been through the same shenanigans - including protestors who've given their lives - I think the best way to honor their memory would be to heed those lessons in the spirit of prevention. Once we say "well, now we can compare this to Eastern Europe/the (former) third world", it's far too late.
> I really wonder how my life would be different if someone told be that the US, which for me was as close to a paradise as it gets, will go down the same road in the future - I think it would shatter quite a lot of my dreams of a better life.
That reminds me of one of the things that stuck with me from The Man in the High Castle (the book). The main story is an alternate timeline where the Nazis/Japanese won WWII and conquered America. Then there's an alternate-timeline-within-the-alternate-timeline where America/Britain won WWII, but it's not our timeline (and it's hinted there that the liberal US was eventually defeated by a British Empire gone full authoritarian). Everything passes away. The good guys sometimes win, but eventually they lose too.
That alternate alternate timeline sounds like what leads to V for Vendetta.
Wow, thank you for the effort in typing out that this synopsis! Seems like quite the compelling read.
I have already retrieved the book & will start it tonight.
It's a great book. Phillip K Dick, there is no author like him.
It's a fantastic book, highly recommend to read.
There is also a TV series based on it (on Amazon Prime I think), but as usually, it's not as good as the book.
I also enjoyed the TV series equally.
There's a similar feeling story in a later League of Extraordinary Gentlemen book* where it's a history of England in that universe. The part that really stuck with me was the description of the government from 1984 as just another strange period in history. Eventually, Big Brother just falls and the next government takes over. Compared with how the system in 1984 feels hopeless and eternal it gives me a strange kind of hope.
* The Black Dossier
Heh, I was watching the series two days ago. That reminds me that I have to buy both Ubik and The Man in the High Castle, preferabily cheap but commented (with footnotes) ones in Spanish. PKD it's very tedious to readin English for non natives. And sometimes in Spanish too.
maybe it's not too late to find out that US was always like this and the fairy tale our parents listened on CIA's RadioFreeEurope was just - a fairy tale for gullible grown-ups ;)
I'm contemplating it, but I'm not that old yet !
Of course there was always a bit, sometimes a lot, of propaganda everywhere. But at least it was (mostly) for the right causes and ideals. Right now, US is being governed by what I see as the worst possible people, with 0 morals.
The story of the United States is one of genocide, racism, imperialism, and oppression of the working class. For an American, to confuse rhetoric for history is an easy mistake to make - an Eastern European does not have that excuse.
Before Trump, at least we had the hypocrisy —like, at least people would pretend to have a moral higher ground. Now there are just completely shameless thugs in charge. They don’t even bother to lie convincingly anymore; just listen to Kristi Noem in interviews, contradicting herself from sentence to sentence without a care in the world. They won’t be held accountable for anything, and they know it.
One may genuinly debate the genocide, racism, imperialism etc. But I can guarantee you that the 'opressed working class' in the US had it 100 times better than the non opressed Eastern European one.
Unfortunately it is true that the working class does seem to always get the short end of the bargain.
Dare I say, the Revolution will not be Televised.
I do love this song and I find it resonates to read the lyrics as though revolutions are censored by media (which is true). Though I found an interview with Gil Scott-Heron about the meaning of the lyrics and I find it more interesting; The revolution will not be televised because the revolution starts in your mind, at the dinner table, or reading books in the library. It won't be captured on TV because the revolution occurs when you question your own beliefs and understand something bigger.
One of the joys of poetry is that it can contain multiple hard-to-describe facets of the same concept.
* The revolution won't be televised because they won't show it to you.
* The revolution won't be televised because it's not a passive, external experience that you just consume.
* The revolution won't be televised because it starts inside yourself.
* The revolution won't be televised because we don't watch TV anymore (and are fragmented and increasingly don't even have those common touch points anymore).
I'll watch the revolution when the whole season comes to Netflix and I can binge it over a weekend.
Art in general is this way. It's no wonder the more we abstract away our lives and society (through screens, deliveries, etc) the more abstract art feels more relevant to our experience.
There's a recording from the 80s where he makes the same point in the middle of reciting the poem. It's a really good version.
"A lot of times people see battles and skirmishes on TV and they say 'Ah-ha! The revolution is being televised!' Nah. The results of the revolution are being televised. The first revolution is when you change your mind, about how you look at things, and see that there might be another way to look at it that you have not been shown. What you see later on is the results of that, but the revolution, that change that takes place, will not be televised."
Yes man you got it.
That's clever.
That's from the good old days where truth mattered. Like how many action movies are about "getting the truth out" where that act in itself brings consequences, cut, happy ending?
Compare with now: revolution may be televised, but its spread not amplified and its authenticity denied. And if you have sufficient tribalism, it will not make a dent.
Something similar happened in the 1988 President Election in Mexico which is widely considered to have been stolen. There was a very memeable phrase, “se cayó el sistema” which was used to describe how the computing system to count votes was glitching out or failing.
I think history has shown that this is a fruitful intuition to have
As always, it depends. More often than not, the opposite is true, hence the existence of Occam's razor.
> More often than not, the opposite is true,
Interestingly enough, it doesn't matter in the slightest if some times the excuse is actually true. The intuition is good to have at all times, as Intel's founder Andy Grove used to say - "Only the paranoid survive".
> hence the existence of Occam's razor.
Occam's razor has nothing to do with the topic at hand, you're probably thinking of Hanlon's razor which is a dumb idea 99% of the time, regardless of what actually produced it - stupidity or malice.
There is no way to know if you are applying Occam's razor correctly because we always have invisible cultural assumptions that are hard to escape.
Relevant story: my mother grew up in the Soviet Block where they taught her about American Segregation in elementary school. She said she and all her friends immediately dismissed it as made-up propaganda
In that case she was wrong. But I think the intuition is the correct "rule of thumb" to take. By your application of Occam's razor, you would end up believing most propaganda the Soviet education system pushed as long as it offered a simpler explanation. I don't think that's a good intuition to have either.
It is sad. It's now happening west of us. In Europe we have been trying to protect ourselves by not saying too much and attracting the attention/wrath of the bosses. I don't think it will work.
If you are in Iran - keep your head down.
The rise of AI is going to make this even worse. Think Running Man instead of 'technical difficulties.'
Yeah I can't fathom what sort of technical issues would produce this result. I'd love to read a detailed article about it. Your move ByteDance or whatever org owns you now. The only thing that would make sense to me is a partial outage of some sort, but that would not be permanent and very rare for Tik Tok.
As an aside, if you check in on r/tiktok every time something major like this is happening with Tik Tok you can see how users feel about it. I've seen different waves of users flat out deleting their Tik Tok accounts in protest.
You don't understand.
Its different: _they_ were doing it. The Bad Guys. Now _we_, the Good Guys, are doing it. Therefore, the thing itself is no longer Bad - it is Good.
The comment above was ironic. I have to specify because supposedly intelligent people really think that way: https://x.com/garrytan/status/1963310592615485955
Taking away people's guns is unamerican, unless you're taking them away from someone I consider to be unamerican, like an immigrant or a liberal; in that case, it's for the good of America that we take away their guns, and the people who wrote the constitution never intended for it to apply to all people the way it says, but only white people and non-white people those white people find to be convenient allies for the time being.
In extreme cases: "I’m not licking the boot. It’s my boot. I voted for it. I’m the one stomping…" [0]
People imagine that they are part of the in-group, and not the out-group that gets the boot for exercising basic rights that the in-group gets. And perhaps they are, if they have enough money and power. But ultimately most of these people know that they are not in power but that as long as they see the boot stomping on others, and they can imagine a boundary that keeps them in the in-group (skin color, political ideology, gender, etc.), they approve as long as that group boundary is clear.
Now, when that boundary begins to blur, and people understand that the person getting the boot could be themselves, then attitudes start to change.
[0] https://bsky.app/profile/joshuaeakle.com/post/3mdfsnpy57k26
What you're describing here (ironically) is unironically the basis for Western political thought.
What I'm referring to here is idealism [1]. Whether it's European colonial powers or the US, the basis for foreign intervention is, quite simply, that we are the Good Guys. Why? Because we're the Good Guys. Even slavery was justified in Christianity by converting the heathen and saving their immortal souls, a fundamentally idealistic argument.
What's the alternative? Materialism [2], the premise of which is that there is not anything metaphysical that defines "goodness". Rather, you are the product of your material circumstances. There is a constant feedback loop if you affecting your material surroundsina and those surroundings affect you.
This has been proven wrong again and again. My grandparents were subsistence farmers. They had much less material wealth than any working class American and the vast majority of unhoused Americans. Yet, I can assure you that back then they were much more satisfied with life than the vast majority of working class and unhoused americans today. Second point, no amount of material wealth can compensate for severe mental illness. When people have severe mental illness, medical interventions must be performed against their diminished "free will." For those of you of American descent ask your parents or grand parents how their grand parents lived. I am certain you will be shocked at their extreme poverty and general hopefulness. Conclusion: once basic needs are met, the perception of "material" is more important than the material.
> This has been proven wrong again and again
[does not offer evidence]
> Yet, I can assure you ... they were much more satisfied with life than the vast majority of working class and unhoused americans today
How do you know this? How is this convincing to this audience?
> no amount of material wealth can compensate for severe mental illness
Are you asserting that mental illness occurred at lower rates in the past?
> I am certain you will be shocked at their extreme poverty and general hopefulness
There is no shortage of writing from the Great Depression expressing great hopelessness. The generation was popularly called the Lost Generation for decades by writers of the time.
We cannot conclusively know the overall happiness level of humanity at any time before the Industrial Revolution. But we can use general proxies, such as starvation rates, violent deaths, and child mortality. Those metrics have, by all knowable measures, improved by an order of magnitude after the Industrial Revolution when compared to all previous history.
My great grandparents could buy enough land to feed themselves for the equivalent of a few months salary. And they could live in whatever size building they wanted on it. Some amount of agency is a requirement for happiness, and when you have it you can be satisfied living under a rock.
nobody said happiness was proportional to dollars
woosh
It's one thing to analyze the world with this lens, which is perfectly fine, as long as it's part of a bigger analysis. But materialist views have never stopped the boot. Materialist political ideology has produced some of the finest jack boots history has seen.
Hey, that's because _their_ materialistic view is faulty . _Our_ materialistic is perfect. Now, if only i have the power...
/s
i personally find presenting a black and white "it's either one way or the other" perspective to be problematic.
yes, materialism and cause and effect etc. etc. agreed on that. it is a thing. interestingly though, as people sit static and just work on becoming more aware of that feedback loop you mentioned it can lead to people trying to not be so much of an arsehole -- through refraining from doing a thing -- because they can see their part in causing things to happen in the world. and that's not just limited to immediate surroundings. i know that i affect everything with every action i do (or do not do).
idealism becomes useful at that point. it can provide people with a set of loose guidelines on how to "not be an arsehole" aka how to not affect everything in a way that's going to cause problems.
the problems come when people do idealism without being aware of that materialistic feedback loop. they're usually doing it out of rule based dogma based on tribalism. sometimes it's "we're better than you are" or sometimes it's "outsiders are not welcome".
caveat: this is all just my personal experience, but i think it would scale if enough people became aware that their actions matter and have profound consequences, so try to not be an arsehole to anyone today
> What you're describing here (ironically) is unironically the basis for Western political thought.
It's not just "western" political thought if such a thing even exists. It's political thought.
For example, Japan's stated goal in ww2 was to liberate asia from european invaders. They portrayed themselves as the good guys. The liberators. That's true for every empire and war in history, "western" or "eastern" or "northern" or "southern". It was always the self-proclaimed "good guys" fighting self-proclaimed "good guys". The winner gets to keep the "good guy" handle while the loser gets assigned the "bad guy" handle.
Had japan won ww2, that's how history would have taught ww2. Instead, japan lost and the US won and hence we get to claim to be the good guys while japan does not.
Marxism, a materialist ideology, is western political thought as well.
Wow. I thought this was going to be one of those false comparisons, you know, like when someone says censoring conspiracy theories is the same thing as censoring science. But no — it's mass surveillance on both sides. He says mass surveillance is good when the US does it and bad when China does it. Wtf
>I have to specify because supposedly intelligent people really think that way
It is the right way to think (with caveats).
Basically, no matter which way you put it, people need some form of government (or more abstractly a state that has authority over people with those people having reduced set of freedoms compared to anarchy). Human nature doesn't bode well with long term planning. For example, with unrestricted capitalism, you have a price on human labor hours that doesn't account for the value of human life - i.e as long as someone can do the job, it doesn't matter what their health is at the end of the job as long as they are replaceable, as this is the most optimal in terms of labor spending. So you need people to collectively form an entity with power of enforcement that is agreed upon by everyone, so that the entity can step in and take action.
Therefore, the goal shouldn't be to restrict the entities power. Doing so is essentially very selfish, which is on par with any libertarian/conservative mindset - as history shows, everyone on the right wing who was crying about censorship on social media for social/political issues has no problem when their side censors it, and broadly oversteps in their alloted power, ignoring the law.
The goal should be to determine whether or not the restricted access makes sense given the current status of the country, and the most importantly, ensuring that the state follows the code of law before anything else. I.e on a very broad sense, instead of arguing who is right and who is wrong, argue what is the metric by which you can get the answer, and then codify it as law.
In a lot of cases, censorship makes sense. And as with any rule, there is going to be some cases where its applied and the outcome is worse than if it wasn't applied. That should be acceptable. In the end, friction in the process still means that things are moving forward, but it also prevents much worse effects if things start moving backwards. Removing that friction means you can go backwards very quickly, like US has done.
Wouldn't it be awesome if that X post was satire? Wishful thinking ...
You can also reverse it.
(Western) Internet was mostly censorship free, unlike places like Iran, China and the like. Things were removed only if outright illegan, and then just because of a court order.
Then about ten years ago things changed.
ISIS videos about the Syrian revolution removed from Youtube because they were radicalizing people.
Conspiracy theories about COVID purged because they were dangerous.
Posts against Woke ideals down-ranked, purged or the people posting themselves canceled.
"Be careful, once the tables turn, it will be your turn" some people said.
Guess what, the tables turned, and the result is ugly.
> Then about ten years ago things changed.
No, they didn't.
We had McCarthy in the 50s. We had Focus on the Family and the Catholic League getting shows canceled. The Simpsons had a public feud with George Bush Sr.
Cancel culture long predates the internet. Hell, it predates humans; plenty of other species kick antisocial members out of group gatherings.
Yes they did. I am talking about the Internet.
It used to be that anybody could post anything on the Internet. If it was something illegal sooner or later the state FBI/a Judge/Whatever would come for you, but it was a matter between you and the law. Your Internet provider, your hosting provider, etc. couldn't care less because they were not involved in your activity, in the same way that the post office is not to blame if you send an explosive letter using their service.
That's Section 230. While it's an USA-specific law it was in the spirit followed also in most of the other Western countries.
> It used to be that anybody could post anything on the Internet.
This was never the case. We had occasional law enforcement contact back in the 90s when I ran a gaming vBulletin board in high school. Your IP was trivially traced to a physical landline location and VPNs were in their infancy, and Facebook.com didn't get HTTPS by default until well into the 2000s (after https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firesheep).
Section 230 protects the ISPs and websites from liability, not the posters. It made it safer to host potentially actionable user-generated speech at scale, not harder.
> Section 230 protects the ISPs and websites from liability, not the posters.
I know. That's not what I am complaining about.
I am not an anarchist. I am fine with enforcement asking an ISP, a website, a forum, whatever to remove content because it breaks some law.
What I am complaining about is: it used to be that a platform would let you use it as you saw fit. If you were doing something illegal sooner or later law enforcement would come after you but then the platform wouldn't care much because it was YOUR fault not theirs.
The exception to this was very high level. e.g. phpBB forums with moderators. But those where not platform. They were quite small in size. I consided something like Youtube closer to an ISP or a Registar than a bulletin board. You cannot really escape them.
It used to be that those would only act after the fact (as you said). Only recently (past 10 years) they started to proactively censor their content. It is not completely their fault, they have been pressured to do so, but still they have.
They used to not even bother to hide behind technical difficulties, so this is an improvement: https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/tiktok-pledges-to-do-more-t...
Lets remember that tech bros have been explicitly funding the oppression
25 Million donation to MAGA from Brockman alone! I suspect he is a single issue donor (AI infra above all)
https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/867947/o...
Its insane how immoral people can be - anyone can see Trump is a conman
These "single issue donors" are the most morally corrupt. I can understand someone who genuinely believes in the cause, even if that cause is disgusting. But this guy...this guy knows that the things happening are wrong, and he doesn't care as long as he gets what he wants from this administration.
These people should be made social pariahs.
Do you condone all actions made by all people claiming to be part of your party? We're all told that we must pick the "lesser evil", and if you truly believe that one particular issue is more important than the rest, is it not your moral obligation to pursue that?
I'm confused about what are you asking (404 CAFFEINE_MISSING), and it helped me to reframe in terms of what the parent and grandparent write.
My reframe was, "If you're a Dem, don't you think Brockman should donate $25M to Trump, because I'm told I have to vote Dem if I don't like GOP, because Dems are the lesser evil, thus, Dems believe it is okay to support evil if it is in your self-interest?"
Assuming that, then turning back to theory, "Lesser evil" is a constraint on imperfect choices, not a moral voucher that turns any tactic into virtue. If you can justify writing a $25M check to someone you think is dangerous because it helps your side, then your issue was never "good vs. bad" - it was "my team wins," and you’re just shopping for a cleaner-sounding label.
I think donating that amount of money to a political candidate is unethical no matter who that candidate is.
I reject the premise that whatever this guy wants from Trump is a moral good greater than the harm that is being wrought. It is almost certainly not about pushing the common good, but ensuring that his wealth continues to grow unabated by government interference.
I find this motivation especially despicable, because he has "donates $25m to political campaigns" level wealth already. He could quit Open AI today and live out an early retirement in unparalleled luxury. But that isn't enough for him. He has to keep pouring gasoline on the dumpster fire that is American politics, leaving the rest of us to suffer, because he doesn't think hundreds of millions of dollars is enough for one person.
You can pretty much lump all of the billionaire bootlickers in the same category. Almost none of them have any ethics, whilst of course proclaiming the opposite.
It's like the old Sim City game where you can cheat in unlimited funds. This causes you to get bored and suddenly the disaster menu starts to become interesting.
That sounds like a classroom experiment. Let kids play the game. Tell them they now have to cheat with unlimited funds. Track at what time each kid launches a disaster. End of class, discuss billionaires.
Thank you. You just blew my mind.
This might be the best (compressed) analogy / short-cut when trying to educate others about WTF is going on here.
I will totally steal and use that.
Again, thank you.
The forced US hosted tik-tok sale is all about hiding information from the US public that most people in the rest of the world have easy access to.
It isn't so much as the rest of the world having easy access. It is what the Chinese want the rest of the world to see. If you are in a South American country using a residential IP in new incognito session, doom scroll, after the initial disturbing content, you will start to notice videos of the United States government physically attacking people born in the country of the residential IP address.
The TikTok algorithm in South America. Content about Tiananmen Square and Tibet gets filtered out. Content about the United States government rolling through protesters in armored vehicles, killing people in Venezuela with bombs, and threatening Greenland, straight to top of feed.
The most brutally honest propaganda is always the most effective propaganda.
> Content about Tiananmen Square and Tibet gets filtered out. Content about the United States government rolling through protesters in armored vehicles, killing people in Venezuela with bombs, and threatening Greenland, straight to top of feed.
There's also the degree of relevance. Tiananmen was over a quarter of a century ago. The USA is killing protestors, bombing Venezuela, threatening Greenland now.
The persecution of Uighurs continues apace. Even if it is not allowed to be called genocide on TikTok. The political elements to this are pretty obvious, but conflating two terrible Minneapolis ICE killings in 3 weeks to the horror that occurred in Xinjiang is beyond the pale. While we may go down the authoritarian path with a Clown King, we're still at least 10-15 years behind China.
https://www.rfa.org/english/uyghur/2024/11/05/uyghur-tiktok-...
Radio Free Asia is USA funded propaganda.
But since that's all been defunded by DOGE then by your own argument, it doesn't count any more. Ignoring history is a good way to repeat it, just because it didn't happen this year.
Do you remember the last Vietnam War? Oh no, not the one you're thinking of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Vietnamese_War
Several hundred thousand Chinese troops invaded Vietnam with 500 tanks in 1979.
China had the less sophisticated tools of groups like the Stasi in that era.. 3 weeks of terror was not much more in retrospect.
Americans who are currently protesting should consider if the apparatus will be subtly manipulating their environment not just in the next months or years but from now on with high quality data it will have perfectly categorized mined and will re-mine.
That doesn't mean it should be ignored. That doesn't make it normal.
Does China go around the world invading countries in the name of freedom?
> Content about the United States government rolling through protesters in armored vehicles, killing people in Venezuela with bombs, and threatening Greenland, straight to top of feed.
None of this is propaganda, it's just facts.
China: for Taiwan, they are in the planning phase. (Vietnam, Hong Kong, Tibet, Aksai Chin, Korea, Scarborough Shoal do not count in your view of course). Not saying they are worse than the US.
What China did to the Han Chinese makes them worse than ANY other modern country. The great leap forward and the cultural revolution have not comparison. Add in the chinese invasion of Tibet in 1959 and 1979 invasion of Vietnam and they are butchers and imperialists.
the Han? are you sure you didn't mean a different group?
Propaganda can be entirely factual. In fact, the best propaganda is.
In Portuguese we use the same word for ad and propaganda! In fact that word is just propaganda!
In Serbian too: EPP - Ekonomske Propagandne Poruke | Economic Propaganda Messages
PR departments used to be called propaganda departments
I think you're being sarcastic, but just in case you're not
> Propaganda is the deliberate, systematic manipulation of information—including facts, half-truths, or lies—to influence public opinion, attitudes, and behaviors toward a specific cause, ideology, or agenda.
A large percentage of Americans are convinced that police will just shoot them if they happen to feel like it.
Even including ICE in this statistic, you will never even meet someone who knows someone who was murdered by a cop. Police encounters that turn deadly, not even blatant murder, are on the order of 1 in 50,000.
However, that stream of police murder videos are definitely real.
Propaganda is often stoking tiny sparks into large raging forest fires.
> police will just shoot them if they happen to feel like it.
Well that's exactly the problem. There's nothing stopping them: no accountability, no justice. Many cops just don't feel like randomly shooting people, and that's good. The problem is if they do, and even if they brag about it, little will be done.
Take for example the latest Sainte-Soline repression scandal revealed a few months back by Mediapart [1] where videos show dozens of riot cops making a contest about maiming the most people, encouraging one another to break engagement rules, and advocating for outright murder. Everybody knew before the bodycam videos, but now that we have official proof, we're still waiting for any kind of accountability.
If i go around and shoot people, there is no way i will avoid prison. If a cop goes around and shoots people, or strangles people to death, prison is a very unlikely outcome.
> you will never even meet someone who knows someone who was murdered by a cop
That's not how statistics work. Police abuse tends to happen in the same low-income social groups (and ethnic minorities). As an example, living in France, i've met several people who had a family member killed by police. Statistically unlikely if i only hung around in "startup nation" or "intellectual bourgeoisie" circles, which is not my case.
[1] https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manifestation_du_25_mars_2023_...
Being killed by police is different than being murdered by police.
Police in the US kill somewhere around 1000 people a year. But of those, it's something like 5-10 that are murders. There is maybe 1 every few years where the cop is itching to shoot someone who is clearly compliant and not a threat.
The 990 police killing videos that become available every year now are not particularly compelling, because its bad actors trying to kill police and getting themselves killed.
Sorry, I don't know anything about France and police though. The US has a different dynamic because guns are everywhere, especially where crime is. Every cop knows about the ~50 cops who are killed by guns every year.
The dynamic doesn't look very different here, at least from reading the news. I don't know about the US (though i suspect <1% murder out of all police killings is a gross under-estimation), just for anyone's curiosity, in France police killing of a threatening person is the outlier. [1]
We don't have guns circulating freely around here (though some people have them such as for hunting). Many police murders take place in police custody (such as El Hacen Diarra just this month). According to the most comprehensive stats i could find [2], out of 489 deaths by police shootings (1977-2022), 275 victims were entirely unarmed.
[1] Not very scientific method: any case of police being assaulted and using "self-defense" is widely spread in the media, and those few cases per year don't account for the dozens of deaths every year.
>Even including ICE in this statistic, you will never even meet someone who knows someone who was murdered by a cop. Police encounters that turn deadly, not even blatant murder, are on the order of 1 in 50,000.
That just shows that people's social circles aren't that wide. 1 in 50,000 is rare in your personal bubble. For a town of 1 million people, thats 20 people.
Sounds tiny, but if we were to line up 20 people and have them murdered by law enforcement, it'd pretty much end the careers of anyone in that chain of command. Because that's not a behavior you want to let spread and expand.
Sometimes what you choose to show, even if true, can impact how people see a situation or fact. That is what the OP is referring to. Your quote even mentions that propaganda can be made of "facts" and "half-truths" (a half-truth is usually a fact with a portion omitted to change the interpretation of the fact).
>including facts
> deliberate, systematic manipulation of information
And, what are we doing with those facts? We're manipulating them lol
It's using information to influence public opinion in a calculated manner. Said information can include facts. It can even be entirely factual.
Manipulating the feed of a social media website for the purpose of swaying the viewer's opinion is a cut and dry example of propaganda. Doesn't matter who does it or whether the information displayed is factual or not. Those things make zero difference.
This really doesn't pass the sniff test. It reminds me of a recent post I saw: "what are movies people like only becsuse it is good?", calling it "quality slop". It's contradictory.
If people are given a wide perspective of a situation and adjusts bias for the Overton window (aka, we don't let Nazis have an equal platform to a more progressive group), then we just call that good reporting. The act of convincing people isn't inherently a bad thing. How you do it matters a lot.
I am not being sarcastic at all. It is a common misconception that propaganda means lies. Propaganda is information designed to get you to believe a certain thing or feel a certain way. The best propaganda uses entirely truthful statements to manipulate your beliefs and emotions.
One of the best examples of this were the endless photos and information about stocked store shelves, filled with fresh goods at dirt cheap prices, during the Cold War. In general truth is the best propaganda, because when you lie there's always a rubber-band effect when somebody realizes, sooner or later, that they've been had.
Propaganda is information which supports a specific cause, whether true or false.
If you think "propaganda" is defined as something being lies, then you have misunderstood the word.
Product advertising is the most widespread form of propaganda. And in some non-english countries it is called "propaganda" and not "marketing".
So literally what he just said. Propaganda can be factual.
You should see how some people justify Tibet..
I mean China is not exactly a poster child for a benevolent hegemon - tibet / taiwan / uyghurs to name a few
all 3 places you mentioned have been integrated into china longer than the us has been a country
You don’t think that there could be purely organic reasons why content showing US hypocricy might be immensely popular in South America?
> TikTok users can't upload anti-ICE videos.
I am responding to the fact US TikTok does not show videos of an armored vehicle driving through a crowd of protesters standing in front of it like the lone man in Tiananmen Square. They are being removed.
This ability to control what information TikTok users are presented with is the reason TikTok was originally banned in the United States.
I am being objective discussion how TikTok is being used as a propaganda tool whether or not I personally agree with China influencing people in South America or whether or not what the United States government is doing to protestors is good or bad. I'm not putting a value on it. I'm pointing out that when I'm in South America and someone links a video in a text message and I start to doom scroll after a while I will start to be introduced to videos of the Unites States government committing violence against Spanish speaking people.
> might be immensely popular in South America
Objectively the current United States regime was hugely popular in Spanish speaking countries like it was in Spanish speaking Florida. Up until a couple months ago, people would tell me how much they support and admire the current regime in the United States. That has changed recently which likely has to do with the content they receive via TikTok which is controlled by the Chinese government which is why it was banned in the United States. After being sold, it is not surprising that the United States is using it the way they accused the Chinese of using it.
> Content about the United States government rolling through protesters in armored vehicles, killing people in Venezuela with bombs, and threatening Greenland, straight to top of feed.
Aren't these recent events? A better example would be showing US atrocities from the last 50 years, but not Chinese.
Or hiding the suffering of Ukranian and Iranian peoples.
I'm in South America.
If I doom scroll TikTok without cookies from a residence in South America, after a while, I will be presented with anti American propaganda showing videos of recent events or people speaking in Spanish about the atrocities that the United States is committing against Spanish speaking people that is recent.
I'm am describing objectively what I see.
The United States didn't want TikTok controlling what is visible to people in the United States so they banned TikTok. Later the United States offered allowing it to be sold to an American company.
Currently, there are two extremely influential forces for people under 25 years old in Spanish speaking Latin America, TikTok, a Chinese company, and an American music artist, Bad Bunny, who likely is the single most influential person in the Spanish speaking world. Let's stay tuned for the Superbowl.
I think most media is talking about the mess the US is in with ICE right now. For what’s worth I am in Europe and on X more than half of what I see is about American cops and ICE , most against ICE but some in support of it.
On mastodon, with the non-algorithmic feed, following mostly accounts that aren’t particularly political, those things are still at the top of the feed. If you’re not seeing those topics at the top of your feed you’re probably being misled by your algorithm.
Another reason why feed ranking algorithms should be published. If we can see the algorithm we can stop playing these yes/no games. The real enemies are social media companies, not the other side of politics.
> the United States government rolling through protesters in armored vehicles
I'm sorry, did I miss something? Is this something that's happened (ever)?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qbMRywfYiM8&t=105s
e:
1. tracking string removed per request.
2. it's a video of a WCCO news (local MSP TV station) segment which shows an armored vehicle pushing protesters out of the way.
You may wish to remove the ?si=… tracking string from your URL. It might also be worth editing in some context: right now, it's a bare YouTube link (which I don't particularly want to click on). Is this footage? A video essay? A pop song?
Nice subtle twisting of words.
There’s an enormous difference between driving slowly through a crowd of protestors with no injuries versus running over protesters with a tank.
I didn't twist anything. If anything, I would argue YOU are twisting words of the original comment to which I responded:
>> the United States government rolling through protesters in armored vehicles
> I'm sorry, did I miss something? Is this something that's happened (ever)?
It's the first three lines of the Narcissists Prayer[1]
That didn't happen.
And if it did, it wasn't that bad.
And if it was, that's not a big deal...
I honestly don't understand why you posted the Narcissist's Prayer; however, to clarify: the original comment I responded to referred to another comment that said, "the United States government rolling through protesters in armored vehicles," to which I replied, in part, "it's a video of a WCCO news (local MSP TV station) segment which shows an armored vehicle pushing protesters out of the way."
The person who said I was twisting words said (emphasis mine), "There’s an enormous difference between driving slowly through a crowd of protestors with no injuries versus running over protesters with a tank."
At no point did I nor the comment I responded to use the words, 'running over protesters with a tank'.
No, no, no--you're the one who's right. The others are running with the "prayer."
"United States government rolling through protesters in armored vehicles"
"Did this really happen?"
You: Video of it actually happening.
Response: Yea, but that video didn't show them "running over protesters with a tank"
Got it; thank you for the clarification.
I'm confused. I thought there was Douyin in China and TikTok for the rest of the world. TikTok used to be under Chinese control but now is essentially under US control. Isn't western TikTok a single entity?
The news only dropped about 5 days ago about the US partnership. Its still a Chinese app. Now the deal with Oracle will have them designing the algo, storing US users data, and doing US moderation. It wasn't this way before.
Nah, the writing is on the wall for a long time and they nearly got shut down several times. I can’t imagine that the permission to continue operations came without major concessions.
I see people saying this a lot, but I've also seen videos demonstrating that you can easily post and search for Tiananmen Square content. I don't use Tiktok myself but it seems like this is basically untrue.
key word is "search," tianamen square will never be recommended in a feed. This is the illusion of "choice." Most people think they can "train" their feed, this is not true.
I think the more concerning thing here is the US government attacking people of different ethnicities.
TikTok US it no longer controlled by the Chinese.
Sounds like you're in agreement with the parent - outside the US, people see content that reflects poorly on the US, and which is blocked for US citizens
The painful to answer question is whether the intention is to block the spreading of lies or the spreading of truth?
> The painful to answer question is whether the intention is to block the spreading of lies or the spreading of truth?
What it should be about is preventing someone else from blocking the spreading of truth.
"Block the spreading of lies" is something authoritarians say when they want to declare any criticism of themselves to be a lie and censor it. You can't block the spreading of "lies" without ordaining someone as the decider of truth and there is nobody you can trust to have that power.
But if we were actually doing what we should then what we would be doing is developing censorship-resistant uncentralized systems rather than fighting over the keys to the censorship apparatus.
When you have a personality disorder like NPD, you'll believe to your core that every criticism of you is a lie.
When you're in an abusive relationship they say intentions don't matter, only impact does. Because victims often focus on the intentions of their abuser and stay in the cycle of abuse.
Let me repeat it, intentions don't matter, only impact does.
The intention is to block the spreading of anything that doesn't conform to dear leader's narrative. Accuracy has nothing to do with it.
Both. It’s controlling the narrative. Project 2025.
That's some very obtuse thinking.
The US has been applying soft power and hard power in South America - to put it euphemistically, as the most recent US intervention was just days ago - for close to a century. The Chinese... haven't.
Why should people in South America give a shit about Tiananmen or Tibet and at the same time not give a shit about the escalating authoritarian grip of the US regime, which is infinitely more relevant to their lives?
How can you say the Chinese "haven't"? They've been using soft power for some time with Venezuela. They've been importing Venezuelan oil. They have been making loans as well. The loans a are a huge part of "soft power". They've also replaced a lot of items impacted by Trump's tariffs from South America.
Things the US could also do if it unsanctioned them.
I threw my computer off the balcony. I look at a web design business. "No fair!" I think to myself, "if only I had a computer I could have a web design business too!"
I smash the web designer's computer out of spite.
The US could? The US has used soft/hard influence for a long time. We've crop dusted Colombian fields attempting to eradicate cocaine. We've eliminated leaders in Central and South America. We've influenced elections trying to get specific leaders elected. We've sanctioned the shit out of one little island, we blockaded the island when it was allowing itself to be used/influenced by another government we didn't like. We've allowed US corps to invest and build infrastructure within these countries. We've given them millions/billions in various ways including straight cash injections.
I don't know how much more would need to be done for you to think things are being done.
>It isn't so much as the rest of the world having easy access. It is what the Chinese want the rest of the world to see.
If your prosperity depends on using technocracy to deny 1.3 billion people the ability to communicate and share ideas with your citizens, a few things are true:
1) You have created a digital iron curtain
2) You are doomed because information wants to be free
3) If you succeed the result will be war, the only thing left when communication breaks down
2) Why?
I think some people live in movies where the bad guy always loses. Reality doesn't work this way. Bad situations where information is denied from people can last lifetimes.
With modern technology we may be creating systems that end up imprisoning our minds for generations with no escape because you'll be killed the moment your technological monitor realizes you're going to fight back.
The U.S. government has not publicly presented any concrete evidence showing that TikTok has actually been used to influence US public opinion in line with CCP policy.
If I was a foreign government I would promote division. For the left promote anti-center truth. For the right, anti-center truth. For the center, anti-wing truth. Recommendation systems do this automatically, they are inherently anti-social. This power needs to be controlled domestically were we can force changes to algorithms if needed.
How about just letting the user choose, instead of foisting your own idea of 'right' on them.
If I was the US blessed feed, let me have it. If I wasn't the Chinese maintained one, why not.
Or, even better, let me make my own! Or use one from an open source that I, the user, trusts.
Hell, EXPOSE THE ALGORITHMS. The simple fact that we can't see the weights, or measure inputs to outputs, means we are in total control of whomever currently holds the reins, and they can literally play God behind the scenes if they have control over enough eyeballs.
Wasn't there something about the algorithm pushing brainrot to US audiences while Chinese users got more educational/high quality content? Turning Americans stupid might count.
They said "concrete evidence". Have we also considered that US consumers seek out brainrot, so the algorithm gives them what they want? How is that different from any other US-owned social media?
China has media laws that would make much of what appears on any sort of Western media platform illegal, so they're obviously going to get a very different experience in China. From anything that might violate social ethics, to clickbait titles - all illegal in China. They've even cracked down on overly effeminate men - 'girly guns' [1] and a million other things I'm not listing here. Basically Western style social media simply is impossible there.
In any case, entirely Western oriented platforms also push brainrot to Western viewers, so I don't think there's any conspiracy so much as just cultural differences.
>Turning Americans stupid might count.
Don't need tiktok for that. Besides, a certain party prefers it that way.
Tribalism is part of the brainrot. Divide and conquer. To paraphrase Carlin, wealth and power are are big club and we ain't in it.
China is less interested in turning Americans into carriers of the red banner, and more interested in sowing political discord and instability. Just like Russia was doing in 2016, creating faux Bernie rallies and organizing them across the street from faux Trump rallies.
Using whataboutism doesn't negate the fact that the first amendment is being trampled over by the US administration.
Buying TikTok to censor it is the move of a fascist government.
We should let people know how bad politicians are. If everyone knows every time a politician is a mass murderer, it might provide an incentive for politicians to stop mass murdering people.
The general problem is that people think based on relativity.
Suppose there are thousands of law enforcement officials in the US, some minority of them are violent offenders and as a result of that some minority of police shootings are murders rather than legitimate self-defense or protection of the innocent, where the number of annual illegitimate police shootings is somewhere between 2 and 999, and the propensity for those people to be prosecuted is lower than it ought to be. Suppose further that China has over a million Uyghurs in concentration camps and is using them as slave labor and subjecting them to forced sterilization.
Is the first one bad? Yes. Is it as bad? Uh, no. But you can present a distorted picture through selective censorship.
Obviously what you want is for neither of them to be censored, but not wanting a foreign power to be the ones who decide what people see is fully legitimate.
> Obviously what you want is for neither of them to be censored, but not wanting a foreign power to be the ones who decide what people see is fully legitimate.
It's less legitimate when you don't want a foreign power to be the ones who decide what people see on their own platforms. The US for example shouldn't dictate what US users see when they visit www.bbc.co.uk
The just US got mad because a Chinese owned/operated social media platform got massively popular and they just wanted the ability to control and censor it.
"Their own platforms" is the flaw. Countries and companies shouldn't "own" the means of mass communication to begin with.
How the feed is filtered should be a fungible commodity that anyone can swap out for themselves or offer to others without sacrificing the network effect, because the network itself shouldn't be owned.
Notice that the US doesn't censor bbc.co.uk, because the web is a decentralized system. But then ordinary people end up on Facebook or TikTok, which isn't.
I mean, you're not wrong, but there isn't very much nuance here.
I think there are a number of things occurring all at once and it's going to lead to the destabilization of most democracies (which China is a big winner if this occurs).
Democracy has never really been as free as the people living in democracies believe. The rich and large media entities have always controlled the vote with much more impact than the actual issues individual voters had.
If you believe this previous statement to be true this leads to a number of issues in the modern world.
One is that previous to now most countries demanded some kind of local media ownership, so the message would be more aligned with someone living in the country rather than some other entity (not perfect, but still better than nothing).
Another is media groups tended to be smaller and more fractured. They may hold conflicting opinions on things.
Which bring us to now, with huge foreign media organizations holding massive sway over gigantic audiences. This isn't just about China over the US, it's just as much about the US over many EU entities. These are potential powers that can change course of the world and they have governments behind them directing them where to go.
Also don't forget the US absolutely loves to control what gets in the media. The right in the US didn't just start brining up socialism and communism yesterday, it's been a control mechanism on what can be published and what you can see for over 100 years.
> the rest of the world have easy access to.
Except for China, where TikTok is nothing like the TikTok for the rest of the world
Which used to be seen as "Ew, China has their own version? Crazy censorship" but after some time it seems like the US is aiming for the very same thing. Classy.
It’s more sinister than simple censorship.
The point is brainwashing.
How do you know that conclusion is not the product of brainwashing? MKULTRA is just what we know about with certainty.
Hard to tell for sure, but one data point might be that most people outside of the US probably come to the same conclusion.
I am an open minded, well traveled man. I disagree with the powerful.
> I am an open minded, well traveled man. I disagree with the powerful.
This kind of narrative is actually one of the more popular forms of propaganda.
"We are the side of the revolutionaries. The status quo is wrong but only about the things we want to change and not the things we want to stay the same. Powerful people are our opponents."
All politics is about opposing powerful people, because if they weren't powerful then it would be easy to defeat them. But there are different groups of powerful people, with different interests, and then it rather matters which ones you align yourself with on a given issue. And if it's always the same ones then you're doing partisanship rather than reasoning.
I didn't say I was a revolutionary. I am observing the world.
Censorship is just a form of brainwashing.
I mean, they say it’s not censorship when it’s not the government doing it even when the government has embeds with “suggestions” ala facebook, twitter and reddit somewhere around 2020…
Case-in-point of why we shouldn't have approached China like we did over the last few decades. It normalized totalitarianism in some segments of Western society.
America: does the usual American thing Americanly
Commentators: What are we, some kind of Asians?
That's... not what I'm saying?
The US has traditionally had at least some counterweight to the state, in the form of a free press, free speech, opposition parties, checks and balances in branches of government, and an armed populace. The effectiveness of these measures has varied over time but there has never been a point when any single institution had control over the United States to the point that the CPC has control over mainland China.
People are concerned that the US is taking an authoritarian bent under Trump, and many of the tactics being used would lead to a state far more similar to the PRC than the historical US.
There still isn't. If a single institution had the level of control over the US that the CCP has over mainland China, you wouldn't be allowed to talk about it on HN, as Paul Graham would have his webserver license revoked for allowing it. Webserver licenses are a thing in China.
Although... Actually... There are many conspiracy theories that fit this description.
He's not engaging in a discussion with you, he's just re-posting a troll comment frequently spammed on various platforms whenever somebody discusses China. It's an attempt to turn a good faith discussion into a race debate.
I lived in China as an American a while back and had a similar take. Their ability to grow successfully and manage their populace definitely presented a new model to a lot of countries.
What does their treatment of the Uyghurs present to other countries?
The opportunity to get rid of non-state sanctioned people and get free organs
Oceania gets tech tips from Eastasia.
Oceania has always gotten tech tips from Eastasia.
I guess rest of the world should take notes and adjust the approach to China and those segments of Westerd society where totalitarianism got normalized.
Why blame China? This dire situation is not on foreign nations seeking to destroy US democracy, it's entirely on domestic robber barons capturing the State for their own gains. China has very little soft power among the general population, while Musk, Ellison and the other propagandists run the show.
Our domestic robber barons are building the capacity to monitor and control Americans in ways similar to those used by China to monitor and control their population.
China isn't to blame, but they are a frightening example of where things are headed and they're giving the robber barons screwing us a blueprint to follow.
Indeed, thankfully it seems this admin and its allies are nowhere near as competent and diligent as the CCP.
> Case-in-point of why we shouldn't have approached China like we did over the last few decades. It normalized totalitarianism in some segments of Western society.
An interesting thought I read a couple days ago: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/24/opinion/trump-carney-chin...:
> Finally, and most controversially, I suspect the same “if not America, then China” logic applies to political ordering as well. The United States under Trumpian conditions has allowed populism to come to power, bringing chaos and authoritarian behavior in its train. Recoil from that by all means — but recognize that it happened through democratic mechanisms, under freewheeling political conditions.
> Meanwhile, the modes through which Europe and Canada have sought to suppress populism involve harsh restrictions on speech, elite collusion and other expression of managerial illiberalism. And what is China’s dictatorship if not managerial illiberalism in full flower? When European elites talk about China as a potentially more stable partner than the whipsawing United States, when they talk admiringly about its environmental goals and technocratic capacity, they aren’t defending a liberal alternative to Trumpian populism. They are letting the magnet of Chinese power draw them away from their own democratic traditions.
China is not publicly espousing conquering Canada and Greenland (Europe). Who would you choose, the people threatening to invade you, or the other guys?!?!
China claims parts of India, occupied some parts already in Ladakh, has conquered and subjugates Tibet, subjugates Xinjiang and has disputes with almost all other neighbors.
As a person whose country is being threatened by China, I support the US.
If China were as developed as the US, a lot of China’s threats would have been reality.
China is threatening invade other places, which are of more value to them.
It would not surprise me in the least to discover that China is the true source of the current internal attack on the US, and Russia is a cut out.
It would be efficient for China to have Russia undermine the US while Russia also weakens itself.
China has made huge inroads in Africa, which gives it access to essential metals and other raw materials, and also puts it in a strong position diplomatically.
America's history is basically one long story of internal divisions, briefly overcome primarily during economic booms. The last economic boom, the computing/internet boom, was particularly long lived and helped create the longest window of internal stability we've had. That boom's coming to an end, and the era of stability it brought probably isn't that far behind. And this is before you even stop to consider things like social media which helps amp up and accelerate divisions by orders of magnitude.
If the root cause is external, it’s easier to stomach. But what if this is just America, attacking itself? That’s a lot harder.
>China is threatening invade other places...
Taiwan and where else?
There's also the whole South China sea thing, where they're making claims on international waters and the territorial waters of their neighbors: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Territorial_disputes_in_the_So...
But I have a feeling your position is basically "Except for all the cases where they're threatening their neighbors, they're not threatening their neighbors at all."
>I have a feeling your position is basically...
No, not at all. I don't follow China closely, and was genuinely asking.
Arunachal Pradesh.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna245797
Tibet and Xinjiang already conquered and we have forgotten about them.
Xinjiang conquered? If you go that far back you can blame every big power for having conquered some of their territory.
Pretty much anything that happens to abut the South China Sea.
I suppose you could also make the argument that they already did invade Tibet and Hong Kong, though that's splitting hairs.
Hong Kong was always Chinese, and was leased at gun point.
The government that leased it couldn’t really have less to do with the government that took it over in recent times. Things got considerably worse for Hong Kong, and the citizens didn’t want to join China.
It’s certainly not a given that donating it to China was the right call.
And now the agreement that they'd be given a more liberalistic government is being torn up at gun point.
India, Bhutan. South China Sea. East China Sea/Japan.
If a large outside power is intent on screwing with your populace I think the only way to really stop it is with diplomacy or a crackdown on free speech.
Authoritarianism has been starting to become normalized because China and Russia are increasingly able to mess with our society in the same way our leaders always messed with theirs.
True, true, so true. Actually when a large outside power is screwing with your populace you gotta crackdown on the whole constitution. Yep, that's the only solution i think, sign of the times, I guess!
Unfortunately so. Niceties like civil rights and free elections were great before the rise of mortal enemies like Russia and China. Now we have to curtail those for a time to protect our democracy.
Don’t worry, everything will return to normal one day. Pinky swear.
The U.S. government has not publicly presented any concrete evidence showing that TikTok has actually been used to influence US public opinion in line with CCP policy.
> Which used to be seen as "Ew, China has their own version? Crazy censorship"
It used to be marketed as that by "China evil" people. Western politicians have always seen this as an arms race. They claim infinite brutal censorship and suppression in China in order to claim that not having it here is a strategic disadvantage. Meanwhile, China's "social credit" is just like a US credit score, which in most countries is an illegal thing to do.
This is completely bipartisan, both US parties take turns shitting on their two greatest enemies: the Bill of Rights and (almost completely defeated at this point) antitrust law. Those are painted as China's advantages: that they don't have to respect anyone's rights and that their government directly runs companies. 1) Neither of those things are true, and 2) they just ignore that China manufactures things and invests in infrastructure (which US politicians as individuals have no idea how to do because they are lawyers and marketers), and pretend that everything can be reduced to gamified finance and propaganda tricks.
It's the "missile gap" again. The US pretended and marketed that Russia had an enormous amount of nuclear weapons in order to fool us into allowing US politicians to dedicate the economy to producing an enormous amount of nuclear weapons.
The result, the child of the Oracle guy owns half the media, and uses it for explicitly political purposes that align with the administration (whichever it may be.)
"The result, the child of the Oracle guy owns half the media"
I guess in 90ies version of polymarket nobody would have had that result on their bingo sheet. But, well, they probably also didn't have "something like polymarket could exist in the free world" on those bingo cards, either...
> This is completely bipartisan, both US parties take turns shitting on their two greatest enemies: the Bill of Rights
Ignoring the magnitude to draw a false equivalence is a great way to discredit your position. Neither party is perfect but only one of them is denying the full personhood of over half the population, having armed men threaten the public with lethal violence over constitutionally-protected activities, or saying that the executive should be able to direct private industries for profit. Debates about things like how much the government should ask private companies to enforce their terms of service are valid but it’s like arguing over a hangnail while you’re having a heart attack.
Police in all states systemically violate it. MAGA ramped it up to 11 though.
Most of the country is genuinely committed to the bill of rights. The Trump administration is determined to ignore every single amendment, but even a lot of the Republican party I don't really think wants this. People are genuinely worried about Chinese media control. But Trump obviously wants to control the media and censor things. I hope the right turns around. Assuming that everyone in politics is working in bad faith is how we become an authoritarian country like China. It is hard when the leadership is obviously working in bad faith and the entire Republican party deliberately chooses bad faith and lies over any reasonable alternatives.
> Most of the country is genuinely committed to the bill of rights.
I'd like to see evidence of that. A third of the country voted to burn the bill of rights, and another third voted they don't care but they'd be ok with it happening.
TikTok is different in China, but the rest of the world isn’t getting a completely free TikTok.
TikTok is known for tipping the scales on political keywords everywhere. In the past they haven’t outright censored because that’s too obvious, but uploading videos on the wrong side (according to TikTok, of course) of a political topic will result in very few views.
I wouldn’t be surprised if as part of the transition they’re struggling with the previous methods of simply burying topics, so the obvious ban was their intermediate step.
The comments claiming this is specific to the US are simply wrong. TikTok has always done this everywhere.
> TikTok is known for tipping the scales on political keywords everywhere.
All social media does this. Even HN (through its users flagging articles). This article will be flagged by users and removed from the front page very soon, just as a similar one[1] was already.
> All social media does this. Even HN (through its users flagging articles).
I don't consider user-directed upvotes/downvotes/flags to be in the same category as company or state decided censorship.
The observed effect is the same: A relatively small number of people decide, based on political leanings, what is on-topic and off-topic, on behalf of the rest of the users.
A bunch of people around the world used 小红书 for months when they were worried about a twitter ban.
They got the same version of the app that people in China got. I haven't seen any formal studies but my impression, at the time, was that Chinese people were far better informed about the US than Americans were about China.
Well, yes, China doesn't have open media for its citizens. Chinese people will on average be less well informed about China, even accounting for the extent of Americans who choose trashy propaganda channels.
(reminded of ex-tech influencer Naomi Wu, who basically went dark with a post along the lines of "the police have told me to stop posting")
You're saying Chinese people are less informed than Americans about China?
Compare what is required to learn about the Tiananmen Square massacre from inside and outside the Great Firewall.
Given that they're regularly labeled as "pro democracy protests", I'd venture to say that most people outside the Great Firewall don't know much about it either.
Ni juede zhongguoren bu zhidao tiananmen square 1989 de shihou zuole shenme?
That's HSK2 being generous, if you had to plug it into Google Translate, how can you say you know more than the people who speak the language and live there?
western arrogance is truly astounding. somehow people who consume 0 chinese media and cant speak a lick of the language somehow are intricately aware of not only chinese media, but chinese society.
but of course. the benchmark is minor influencer and HN darling naomi wu.
Well you could say that every educated country is far better informed about the US than vice versa.
You could even say that many foreigners are better informed about the US than US citizens are about the US, but that's not a high bar... I mean, 38% still approve of the current administration so that's already over one in three who don't understand the basic functioning of government or the economy.
I think foreigners tend to be better informed than the locals wherever you go.
As a baseline, they have experience living in about twice as many countries as the locals. They picked up their lives, often learned a second language, and established a home with minimal social support. They tend to be highly motivated people.
In many cases, they know more about the country than the locals do because they've traveled all over said country while the locals never left their home town.
edit: I just realized this might be confusing. By "foreigner" I mean someone who is from a place other than where they currently live. I'm not referring to people who only know about a country through hearsay.
Yeah, it took me a moment to clue in, but I think maybe "expat" is the more common term there.
In any case, I think it also applies to some degree to people who live outside the US just purely based on media diet. We all see clips of CNN and MSNBC and Fox on YouTube, but a person elsewhere will have the additional perspective of BBC, Al Jazeera, Le Monde, The Guardian, etc.
Which is basically what the US also wants.
except with a different brand of fascism.
People in China know. Believe me they know.
Knowing is not enough.
We all know that advertising and marketing is manipulation, yet even the most contrarian among us are still influenced it.
Do you think anti-ICE videos are being blocked in China?
Out of curiosity. What do those videos mean to an average Chinese person?
What are the opinions of illegal immigration over there? How do they police it? (If at all).
Does this look like normal government activity? Or are they appalled at the lack of “freedoms” in America?
I am truly naive on their culture or politics around this and how they would use it to show the US as boogeymen government and how their government is better. Is it a grass isn’t always greener type thing for them or is it a way to actually think we’re evil and should be stopped.
Don't forget that the regular operation of Chinese policing is already much less free than what Americans are used to, plus the restrictions on internal freedom of migration (Hukou, less onerous than it used to be, plus the two SAR of Macao and HK). Mandatory state-issued ID, linked to your phone and bank account and so on.
As well as racial profiling. There's not that much immigration to China in the first place, legal or otherwise.
How so?
My experience in China was that the police were a bit on the bureaucratic side but otherwise far less obtrusive than in the US.
They divide their police forces into civil police and armed police. The civil police tend to be bored looking middle aged guys lounging around in guard booths at museums. They don't have weapons. The only armed police I saw stood at attention at the airport except when they had a changing of the guard ceremony.
As near as I can tell, China only allows immigration if they think that will benefit China. They've been pushing hard on academic scholarships and, in recent years, they've managed to shift net visits from the US to China.
They also seem to be pushing really hard on increasing the number of visiting African scholars. That's likely straight out of the US playbook; they see China as a rising power and want to make sure that their emerging leaders were educated in China and have ties to China.
Isn't it the case that Chinese police don't need to be as visible because everyone fears what they can do, and doesn't commit crimes? A bit like how Iran has to send in military force to kill 50k protestors, but the UK can just spread a few messages that people will be arrested, and then they don't protest.
I doubt it.
As near as I can tell, there are essentially 2 kinds of laws; laws that people agree with and laws that they don't.
For the second type, governments often have trouble enforcing them consistently so they often try to compensate by making the punishments harsher (eg mandatory minimum sentencing). As near as I can tell, that tends to fail miserably.
Our government here has been shooting people in the streets and that hasn't stopped protesters from pouring out.
When you see a bunch of people peacefully following laws the most likely explanation is that they just think those laws are reasonable.
I think the issue there is just that people in the UK have less immediate cause to protest than people living under the Iranian regime. The idea that British people are more afraid of their police than Iranians seems a bit wacky.
That’s kind of my point. through their eyes, is any of this really shocking at all? is kind of my question.
> Do you think anti-ICE videos are being blocked in China?
Of course not, but other stuff is.
Interestingly, my understanding is government pressure forces Douyin to be more "positive" and "encouraging" than Tiktok (i.e. outrage is an easy way drive engagement with obvious negative externalities, and that path is blocked).
Then the GP statement is still correct.
"The forced US hosted tik-tok sale is all about hiding information from the US public that most people in the rest of the world have easy access to."
> Then the GP statement is still correct.
In the most point-missing, technical kind of way.
No? The point is that the US government made this deal with Tiktok so the US can censor stuff the US government doesn't like.
Saying "But China also censors!" is the one missing the point.
> No? The point is that the US government made this deal with Tiktok so the US can censor stuff the US government doesn't like.
That's too black and white. The Tiktok sale isn't just one thing by one actor for one reason, it's more complicated. There's the Biden administration bill, there's Trump's deal implementing it, etc. I don't think the bill that forced the sale was passed "so the US can censor stuff the US government doesn't like." Before Trump got involved, it was heading for a straight blackout (which IMHO would have been better for everyone).
probably not, in fact, the CCP likes to promote content that shows the "US in disarray", while simultaneously censoring and suppressing any content that is critical of the CCP or that exposes its bad actions
At least the Chinese are not pretending to be a free democracy.
The population of the DPRK think they are, and it would be funny if it wasn't so sad.
To be fair, they're not really allowed to show any evidence that they think otherwise...
This information is all over American social media... Even the article references that Megan Stalter posted her videos on Instagram.
A lot of American propaganda hasn't been about strict censorship (as in making it strictly impossible to find out about things). It's about shifting the narrative enough. Most people have been made lazy enough to the point they don't read anything, certainly not fringe opinions. As long as people get their Mcdonalds, Soda and TV they won't do much.
I don't think the original intent of the tiktok sale was about censorship as much as it was about the chinese not allowing american platforms in china. Doesn't change that they're trying to use it to its 'fullest'.
Just because the information is out there doesn’t mean it’s where people are looking. You see this based on the news people watch where things they don’t cover might as well not exist. Which has always been true but it’s especially true today.
By preventing uploads, they are preventing the world from gaining access, not just the US public.
No, the rest of the world operates on different servers now.
Interesting. How is it implemented? I opened Tiktok here in Denmark and went to something I, assume, would be in the US and it seems to load fine for me? Do you an example of something I shouldn't be able to view so I can try?
I imagine the same way you would link multiple data centers together. Only they don’t own the US ones OR the algorithm that’s used to suggest content.
EU is coming.
https://newsroom.tiktok.com/cornerstonefinland?lang=en-150
I’m just saying that here in the US we are going to see some funkiness in suggested content soon. Because we hit different servers than you. Even if they are hosted on Oracle Cloud.
It’s really no different than a large org having two clouds that need data synchronized. AWS and Azure for example. Systems Design…
I’m not a TikTok user so I couldn’t recommend content for you to try.
Of course, because TikTok is the only way people in the US can access information.
No, they also access information through Facebook owned by Trump ally Zuckerberg, X owned by Trump doner and DOGE former official Musk, or via media organisations like CBS who have recently had their editorial standards changed to be more friendly to the regime. It's fine though people can here about the regime through neutral pundits like Jimmy Kimmel, who definitely hasn't come under any pressure to comply with the regime talking points. It's alright we've got NPR, which is definitely not under attack.
If you haven't noticed a sweeping attack on free speech in US media, then I just don't think you're paying attention, and playing it off as if it's "just" Tiktok is at best disingenuous.
100,000 protestors and not a single one can upload a video to a CDN and throw up a static page with an HTML5 player?
Sucks to suck, I guess.
We were so naive in the 2000s. 'Tech will democratize everything' forgetting they will just flood us with bullshit so that nothing means anything.
Well isn't it interesting that at the same time that these social media platforms were getting off the ground, the VC class decided founder control was super important and now essentially all of the biggest companies in the world are in the sole control of men who do questionable activies on islands in the Caribbean.
Now you wonder what these companies are doing to shape events, and the answer is that Tim Cook is attending a private showing of a PR project for the wife of the president premiering on a competing streaming network whilst people hold vigils for the people that the regime has murdered.
You flooded yourselves with bullshit. The people yearn for bullshit. Always have.
Back in the late-90s, I was watching a panel on CNN discussing the new "information age". Everyone talked optimistically about how the internet was gonna benefit humanity because people would be better informed - only the best information would make its way to the top, all the crap would be filtered out. But there was one naysayer, and I'll never forget what he said: More information is not better information. Others on the panel couldn't believe his cynicism; said he didn't understand people. I think about that a lot these days.
>I just don't think you're paying attention
Alternate explanation: they are paying intense attention... to the palms that are pressed desperately against their eye sockets as they attempt to See No Evil.
I've never in my life used TikTok. Can you please point to a specific article, news source, journal, any piece of information that is legal in the United States that I don't have easy access to so I can see what I'm missing?
It's not about legality, its about scrolling and recommendations. Young people see stuff by other young people by default.
Its been a conservative/zionist talking point for years now that "the youth are getting brainwashed by tiktok", and Ellison in particular seems to be in the "I've gone hard right due to the latest Israel conflict" camp. So of course they're not being subtle about it.
Yeah, this is where the friction is because it's ambiguous. "Access to" and "promoted by" are not the same thing, especially on platforms where you don't have a pure-chronological feed and all "home screen" content and its ordering is selected by the platform. Leaky, imperfect filters are still filters.
There's 2 orthogonal lanes:
1) A philosophical debate along the lines you've indicated here, how much is it worth to control the algorithm, and how much does that equate to controlling speech.
2) The allegation that current buyers bought it specifically to bring their ideology to the algorithm, however effective or valid you think that is (I think it just hastens TikTok becoming something for "old people").
So I do have easy access to information, and the OP was incorrect?
> its about scrolling and recommendations
Don't scroll and don't take recommendations from these platforms. It's better now that it's American owned, but you really shouldn't have been using it when the Chinese Communist Party owned it.
And I'm only talking about TikTok because that's the OP. I don't use any social media platforms besides LinkedIn, and LinkedIn is such a big piece of trash I don't think it matters if anyone uses it.
OP said "buying TikTok was about hiding information from people", and the people who bought TikTok are trying to suppress certain information on TikTok.
Whether you or I think that's effective or not is up for debate, I also avoid social media, but OP made a statement about intentions.
(And, aside, the current intentions appear far more pointed and ideological than when it was owned by ByteDance as a lottery winner with a surprise overseas success, optimizing for youth engagement.)
> The forced US hosted tik-tok sale is all about hiding information from the US public that most people in the rest of the world have easy access to.
Restating the OP ^
I don't know exactly what the OP intended, and they are welcome to clarify, but based on the words above I read it as selling TikTok is a means of suppressing information that the rest of the world has access to from Americans. I disagree with the notion because what matters is whether or not information is suppressed holistically, not whether or not information is suppressed in a limited manner on a platform. If you think it's a problem, by the way, you should reach out to the EU, China, India, and every other major government that influences what content is posted on social media platforms including but not limited to TikTok.
If you want to argue the US obtaining control of the content from TikTok in America is tantamount to information suppression, you can only do so by also arguing it's true only for people who use TikTok. In which case it's an improvement anyway since the CCP is no longer influencing content.
The chinese government has never physically assaulted me or my neighbors, never used tear gas around the elementary school my family attends. The united states government has. It's interesting to me that you're so certain about your threat model here but I don't share it.
> The chinese government has never physically assaulted me or my neighbors, never used tear gas around the elementary school my family attends.
Ok, well here where I live the government has never physically assaulted me or my neighbors, nor used tear gas around the elementary school my friends and family members children attend. But the government is clearing my streets of snow, gave me an opportunity to get an education, and generally helps make sure my life isn't so bad.
On the other hand, the CCP (and others) has created lots of fake accounts, engaged in paying off people to help incite riots, and is responsible for algorithmically promoting divisive content which has caused people to go out and riot, shoot at each other, become white nationalist goons or antifa goons, and helped get Donald Trump elected.
Donald Trump himself claims TikTok helped him get elected, he was wildly popular on the platform.
> It's interesting to me that you're so certain about your threat model here but I don't share it.
It's not that interesting, and this isn't warranted. I don't even know what you mean by threat model, and you never asked, so there was never an opportunity for it to be shared. Please don't wantonly levy suspicion here.
> Ok, well here where I live the government has never physically assaulted me or my neighbors,
Lucky for you I hope you can keep saying that. But uh, where you live didn't need to have a civil rights movement?
Plain and simple I think americans, and the american government, and movements formed in america and made of americans, are far more likely to harm me than any foreign power and I act accordingly.
In fact they already have!
> On the other hand, the CCP (and others) has created lots of fake accounts, engaged in paying off people to help incite riots, and is responsible for algorithmically promoting divisive content which has caused people to go out and riot, shoot at each other, become white nationalist goons or antifa goons
This is americans doing this to americans with the help of the american tech industry for the benefit of american elites. How have you come to lay the whole thing at chinese feet. I know... but do you know? You worried about the wrong propaganda my man.
[deleted]
Bro, conservative talking points have existed since before Jan 2024.
You have easy access in that you can find things if you look for it.
What that commenter means by easy access is that the information is in mainstream sources pushed to people such that you are likely to know about it without having looked.
For example I made a comment here on HN recently that immigrants commit crimes at fewer rates than US born people. That sends a segment of Americans into a flying rage even though they have access to that information, they were never going to hear it in their ordinary channels, even if they stick to "mainstream" media.
Mainstream sources that control narratives, and are owned by the same extremely wealthy people that we're complaining about now owning TikTok?
Sorry, this doesn't pass the smell test for me.
Right now the Ellison family owns both CBS and the US version of TikTok, so sometimes the connection is kind of literal.
But this complaint is pretty old, I think of Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent. (Setting aside his Epstein connections for a moment) The way we do censorship is much less the methods of a traditional totalitarian state and more like the private sector policing what is acceptable discourse.
The problem with Chomsky's argument is that you can't do anything about it. Every country, every group in power, democracy, republic, chiefdom, &c, is participating in manufacturing consent and even if you fight to gain power, once you gain power you wind up doing the same thing.
I'm not citing Chomsky with a claim that he's unassailable, just that it's a very old complaint. I also think he was right about a bunch of stuff, and wrong on others.
As for what he suggested, this is reminding me that I never read his work On anarchism. I heard him speak favorably about the anarchists in the Spanish Civil War. I also found that topic very interesting when I was getting a Spanish minor many years ago at college. I am sure many HN commenters will disagree that it's something to emulate.
I think I have that book but haven't read it. I did read Manufacturing Consent but it has been some time. I didn't mean to imply that he was unassailable, just had that critique of that general point.
I think his writing is very interesting, in general, and it always helps expand the mind to new or reframed ideas.
I've never in my life used TikTok. Can you please point to a specific article, news source, journal, any piece of information that is legal in the United States that I don't have easy access to so I can see what I'm missing?
Whataboutism. You presumably know full well what the parent was describing, but if not:
TikTok presents users with feeds of videos. For many users, this is their primary news source.
An American oligarch and party loyalist now has de facto control of the app. Therefore, the regime has the capability to shape the narrative by boosting or hiding videos from the feed (whether or not they are doing so is an open question).
Could users still hypothetically find the same information elsewhere? Sure. But if this app is their primary source of information, would they even know they should bother doing so?
> For many users, this is their primary news source.
That's their problem. You can't make blanket claims saying Americans now don't have easy access to information when there are other sources, ranging from the NYT to the Intercept, to anything you want to read being written and translated right on your computer from the EU or Japan or anywhere else you want to read.
> An American oligarch and party loyalist now has de facto control of the app.
Chinese oligarch, American oligarch. Either way someone without your best intentions in mind owns your platform. Maybe you should stop using it.
Goalpost moving, this one.
The post you were replying to stated:
> hiding information from the US public
They didn't say "Americans now don't have easy access to information" (your words). They said this sort of manipulation would be to hide information from the American public.
Many people in the American public only see news on TikTok. If information is suppressed within TikTok, it is hidden to them.
If TikTok stops showing content, can they find it some other way? Yes, if they know to look. It's not blocked or destroyed, but it's hidden.
Is that a problem? Yes. TikTok's dominance was and is a problem in and of itself. But that isn't an excuse to abuse its dominance for propaganda purposes.
As X has shown, these platforms are crucial to the information ecosystem, and their selective curation can warp the views of an entire population.
Nope, didn't move the goalpost, let's set that aside.
> The post you were replying to stated:
Now you're cherry-picking what the OP wrote.
> But that isn't an excuse to abuse its dominance for propaganda purposes.
I didn't suggest that any of that was an "excuse" for anything - instead I called out that regardless of how TikTok operates you still have access to whatever information you want. If you choose to silo yourself, whether that's TikTok or FoxNews, that doesn't change the fact that you still have access to information.
Reminder of the OP:
> The forced US hosted tik-tok sale is all about hiding information from the US public that most people in the rest of the world have easy access to.
If what you are suggesting is true, than OP's claim is untrue because all governments and all social media platforms regardless of where they exist or who owns them curate content to some degree and are thus "hiding information from the public".
You can't have it both ways here.
Larry and David Ellison have been buying media outlets and those media outlets have started spiking (or delaying, editing, etc) stories that look bad for Trump. It's not that you don't have access at all, it's that these specific platforms are starting to suppress it.
This is the notable example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inside_CECOT
> It's not that you don't have access at all, it's that these specific platforms are starting to suppress it. This is the notable example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inside_CECOT
The 60 Minutes Episode on CECOT aired on Jan 18 and it is also on CBS News' website: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/what-deported-venezuelans-endur...
And it got a Streisand Effect from the attempted scuttling. That doesn't change what they were trying to do, it just means they're not always executing perfectly.
In the long run, they bought out some dying legacy media in CBS and social media has a short half-life. Nobody's saying they're geniuses but it's clear what they're trying to do.
It got delayed, didn't it? In the meantime the news cycle moved onto Trump's intervention in Venezuela and even greater ICE violence.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inside_CECOT#Broadcast_postpon...
Nice of you to delete their first sentence which includes "delay". Which is what happened if you read the wikipedia article instead of holding water for propagandists, e.g., Bari Weiss.
NPR article about the rest of the right wing spin that's happening at CBS news is pretty insightful: https://www.npr.org/2026/01/27/nx-s1-5689849/after-rocky-sta...
The TikTok ban is the hammer, antitrust is the anvil.
Without antitrust regulation, TikTok would have been sold to Meta, and that would be it. We'd have an even worse monopoly (which is not a good thing), but at least we wouldn't have this. With such regulations present, the US government both forced a sale and disallowed a sale to anybody who they didn't like, basically forcing TikTok to choose a government-approved partner. What did that partner do to become government approved? We'll never know.
Antitrust in the US (and GDPR in Europe) give regulators wide latitude over who to prosecute and for what. This makes it much easier to do under-the-table deals to achieve objectives that you can't or don't want to achieve by regulation, like restricting free speech.
Subjecting companies to such regulation was ok when it was about transporting cattle or selling bricks, but giving governments the ability to regulate companies that have a wide impact on speech, even if the regulations don't seem to have anything to do with speech, is just asking for trouble.
> but at least we wouldn't have this
I think you might have forgotten recent moves from Meta about removal of moderation, relaxing rules on hate speech, settling lawsuits with Trump and similar moves that imply they wouldn't really fight hard against what this administration wants.
It's pretty clear this is a misuse of antitrust. Actually the details of these deals have very little to do with antitrust, it's likely simplecorruption. Antitrust might be used as a cover for those deals, not the other way around. The prevention of monopolies is one of the few regulations necessary for meritocratic capitalism to thrive.
> that most people in the rest of the world have easy access to
The information is everywhere. Visit any news site, open any general social media feed, turn on any TV. We’re discussing it right now in the front page of HN!
Everyone in the US has easy access to the same information. Acting like only the rest of the world has easy access to this information is ridiculous.
Everyone has easy access right now. Everyone had easier access before the TikTok deal. That's the wrong direction for a free country and it's particularly alarming because the deal was forced by the government.
Censorship doesn’t become okay when it’s easy to work around it.
I’m not condoning censorship. It’s bad.
I’m saying it’s silly hyperbole to make the leap to implying that only people in other countries have easy access to information.
These absurd claims always turn into a game of motte and bailey when they’re called out, with retreats to safer claims. I’m talking about the original claim, that “people in other countries” have easy access to this information which we, in the US, see everywhere all the time right now (except TikTok apparently).
That information may be readily accessible but if it isn't on the screen you're currently engaged with, it may as well not exist.
_you_ have access to it, for an increasingly large number of people TikTok is their only source of news. Same as Fox News or CNN, one news source.
Censorship of TikTok is inevitable given the owners, and it will inevitably lead to a new news bubble.
I think you’re greatly overestimating the number of people who only use one social media platform and never check any other news source at all.
TikTok users are also known for being experts at evading filters and censors. Remember the rising popularity of “unalived” when talk of suicide was filtered out on the platform?
I’m not saying this ICE censorship is good, because it’s not! I’m saying it’s ridiculous to claim that only people in other countries have easy access to information.
> I’m not saying this ICE censorship is good
I hope not because it’s bad and that’s really all that matters in this conversation. And nitpicking whether or not there are other avenues for information is completely besides the point. I don’t even really understand what point you’re trying to make. If you think this is bad, then say it’s bad and we shouldn’t be ok with it. Saying “I’m not saying it’s good” then muddying the waters reads like you’re trying to defend the action.
> And nitpicking whether or not there are other avenues for information is completely besides the point
That was literally the argument I was responding to and talking about.
I am not getting that from your previous comment but I’ll just assume I’m misreading it.
This entire comment thread was me responding to someone claiming that people “in other countries” have easy access to information.
Given the downvotes and angry responses I think a lot of people misinterpreted it as something else. I should learn to avoid comment sections about politics.
I don’t think that’s the lesson here if you’re looking for one. I think it’s just a clarity/phrasing issue. If that’s not what you meant then that’s fine, no harm no foul as far as I’m concerned. I was just going off how I read it.
If you’re looking for feedback, “I’m not saying…” without saying what you are saying generally comes off as obfuscating or at best wishy washy.
> I think you’re greatly overestimating the number of people who only use one social media platform and never check any other news source at all.
When it comes to the _younger generation_, I don't think it's an over-estimation; they don't read news sites at all.
I was responding to a claim about people who use only one social media platform.
>The information is everywhere.
For those who know to look for it, sure.
For those who do not already know it, discovery is increasingly challenged by the deliberately obscurant curators of the information space, who are oddly tightly and uniformly aligned with special interest groups openly declaring their intent to hide that information and punish dissemination thereof.
tiktok always censored, it's just now it censors anti-Trump content instead of anti-CCP content [1]
both are bad, I liked when tiktok was supposed to be just "banned". it's always been a tool for repressive governments
[1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-11-28/tiktok-huawei-surveil...
If it’s true for TikTok it will likely be true for all other forms of popular social media (twitter, instagram, etc) too, so a ban wouldn’t have made a big difference probably.
TikTok was the only popular platform where you could doomscroll and see bad things the US is doing. All others censored it to please the administration. And now TikTok does too.
I think platforms like Bluesky are better suited towards this and that's what people should be using
Does Bluesky still randomly ban people?
> The forced US hosted tik-tok sale is all about hiding information from the US public that most people in the rest of the world have easy access to.
No, at least during the Biden administration when the law was passed, it wasn't.
This shit is a lot more complicated that a hot take based on today's news.
It was even during Biden. The idea was to stop pro Palestine videos. Anti ice videos are in the same realm
Forcing the sale of TikTok predates the current war in Gaza by a good bit. It's obviously a complex thing that encompassed a bunch of different people with different motivations. And considering there is pro-Palestinian videos all over American social media, I don't think it is kind of absurd to think this was the motivation.
It started out with the "China bad" narrative, but it only got bipartisan support and momentum when US people started seeing Palestinian videos on TikTok.
The law for a sale was passed after Gaza. The thing you talk about is data sharing with China on Americans, and some in the Trump govt were opposed to this. That part was resolved with Oracle handling their servers.
You have no evidence that this is true and it sounds like a para kid conspiracy theory from the depths of the worst subreddits. Stop being silly.
Not really. It was about preventing CCP control of information.
The CCP angle is the PR version. From last year: https://www.axios.com/local/salt-lake-city/2024/05/06/senato...
Note that there have been multiple instances over the past two years of high level ex/current officials repeating the same general point.
I wonder where all the TikTok videos are about all the tanks and hotel shoot outs in Beijing over the last week or so are… where various party factions fought it out over control of the central committee and you have the disappearance of various generals in the PLA.
Care to elaborate?
I was able to find this pretty quickly:
Zhang Youxia Arrested After Failed Coup; Gunfight Allegedly Occurred at Jingxi Hotel in Western Beijing (https://www.peoplenewstoday.com/news/en/2026/01/25/1130776.h...)
Oh nice, what would the coup be about? Would it be for something closer to western interests or would it be about because theyre too far from marxism, like when the students at Tiananmen Square were trying to democratically vote in more marxism but the Americans only saw democratically
Reports talk about some combination of being too far from Xi and "corruption", which is the usual all-purpose charge in situations like this.
Most Americans are unaware of how China is collapsing. All news is censored.
You must have heard about it from somewhere? Some reliable third party intermediary that is neither US nor China?
I haven’t heard anything about this but the claim appears to be mostly true - https://spectator.com/article/has-xi-jinping-fought-off-anot...
The spectator is allegedly a reliable media source, I am not personally familiar.
Given the details mentioned (9 guard deaths) the "unconfirmed reports" is probably referring to the x post[1] mentioned in the peoplenewstoday.com article. Personally word not somehow getting out of dozens of people being shot seems hard to believe, though not impossible.
The Spectator is 99% opinion pieces. They're not somewhere I'd go for news. It all seems a bit unconfirmed sources. Zhang being purged is confirmed on the BBC and absolutely everywhere else, along with pointing out that there's been a "clean sweep" of senior PLA staff. The street violence seems a bit less corroborated.
(by contrast, while the Daily Mail is absolutely terrible at opinion and domestic news, they seem to have some capacity left for doing overseas reporting that isn't just wire service, so if they report on overseas events you can be reasonably sure that something like that happened)
It is not. It's a contrarian newspaper, gives some interesting folks a platform, but mostly cranks.
Is https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/the-spectator-usa/ Wrong here?
(I really don’t know, but it does seem that this info at least is coming from multiple places?)
It would be considered way on the right generally. To the right of the Telegraph, the main right wing broadsheet.
It's a funny old magazine though, they really do get all sorts in there and print stuff that others wouldn't. It's entirely editorial though with huge biases.
I'm glad it exists and read it often, but I'd go checking everything I read in it if I was after some facts.
"According to unconfirmed reports...."
The question isn't whether to trust The Spectator, it's whether to trust this unconfirmed, unnamed source.
Can you share the supporting data?
Gordon Chang has been making this prediction for almost a quarter century. Will it happen before or after the Mayan calendar predicts the end of the world??
To be fair, I don’t think it’s as much collapsing as it’s having an internal party power struggle where the more authoritarian faction seems to have violently quelled a rebellion by one or two other factions.
What do you mean "you wonder where they are"? Do you even use tiktok to be able to see them? Because if you search about that on there you can find videos
>is all about hiding information from the US public that most people in the rest of the world have easy access to.
Are we talking about the Trump administration or the Biden administration? The current ban was passed under Biden with supermajorities in both houses.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Efforts_to_ban_TikTok_in_the_U...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protecting_Americans_from_Fore...
How can that be that during any single administration there always are bipartisan votes in favor of digital surveillance and censorship, oh, I mean online protection for kids and puppies? Pure coincidence I think.
Boden's good, Grump's bad, simple as that. Or Grump's good, Boden's bad doesn't matter.
One is clearly worse than the other on some issues — only one of them executed US citizens in the street for protesting, during both terms.
Choose your alignment wisely! You can only serve the Good or the Evil!
I am not sure. I think we're talking about the one where Trump illegally and unilaterally ignored the sale or de-list deadline passed in said bipartisan bill so he could figure out which Trump loyalists would be taking over. I'm glad they finally got it sorted out a little over a year after the January 19, 2025 deadline in the bill.
Both.
I'm not sure why the meme on the right is that the left wants to protect Biden or anyone else. Who cares, they all can come crashing down.
>I'm not sure why the meme on the right is that the left wants to protect Biden or anyone else.
No, the point isn't "protecting Biden", it's pure self interest. Tiktok is a social media platform that's very popular with Democrat's electorate and is already left leaning. Why risk it falling into the other party's control (especially near the end of Biden's term), just so you can maybe push more left leaning talking points?
Because the concept of limiting state power for when the other side takes power is not in the American political vocabulary.
The difference here is that unlike expanding the NSA or DHS, control of tiktok doesn't pass to the next administration, because it's held in private hands.
> Why risk [TikTok] falling into the other party's control
> control of tiktok doesn't pass to the next administration
Huh?
Because Biden signed the bill near the end of his term. If the other party wins control (roughly a coin toss), they get to dictate the terms of the sale.
I think you'll find that pro-privacy, anti-right-wing people often don't have the highest opinion of "their" guy
The current nonsense has been enabled by decades of overreach. A small minority kept saying, this stuff is going to be really bad if a bad guy takes power. Well, guess what happened.
The bad guys would have done it anyway. That's the important part. "Good guys shouldn't make tools because bad guys might (or will) use them" isn't how we should operate. No more should we say "the [internet|source code|pen testing tools|etc] could be used by bad guys so good guys shouldn't have it."
If by "tools" you mean technology or physical infrastructure, I largely agree.
But I'm talking about political tools. Breaking down the norms about how power is supposed to be wielded. Concentrating more and more power in the executive because Congress would rather be powerless and blameless than have responsibility.
For example, giving the President the power to set tariffs was done with the understanding that the President would use this power wisely in an actual national emergency. That created a political tool. Now we have a deeply unwise President who declared a nonsense national emergency and is playing havoc with trade using this tool. If the tool hadn't been created then I don't think we'd have that problem. I doubt Congress would be willing to pass sweeping emergency powers in an environment where there is no emergency and no need for those powers. And there was never a need for those powers. Tariffs don't need to be enacted so rapidly that they can't wait for Congress to convene and pass a law.
In this case, we've created a political tool giving the President broad power to interfere in a specific private business. It's no surprise if that tool gets abused, and it was completely unnecessary to begin with.
So I'd phrase it as: "Good guys shouldn't make political tools that are far more powerful than they need to be assuming that they'll be used wisely, because bad guys will happily use the full power of those tools."
Why is it always a blame game? What dos that accomplish? There’s no “good guy” administrations. There’s just realpolitik. The current iteration of ICE is an outgrowth of the Obama admin, as is the problem with billionaires in politics. Biden put a target on Maduro's head before leaving office (continuing to fill a multi-administration powder keg re: Venezuela). Trump just had the panache to brazenly do the deed instead of waiting for the next guy to do it. Horrible? yes. Unprecedented? Hardly.
Now I’m not saying things are inevitable. Trump has a bull-in-china-shop mentality. But he is only being manipulated to set the same agenda, just faster than any president in living memory.
"The current iteration of ICE…"
Just murdered two protestors. A bit of a change there.
//
Maybe. I just find most “which administration really started XYZ” discussions are a way for people to feel better about their affiliations. Because ‘cause’ and ‘effect’ are continuous and not an inherent property of things, it is always possible to construct a causal chain that happens to start wherever convenient for your rhetorical purposes.
The Democrats always have been nothing but controlled opposition, designed to give you the illusion of choice.
> hiding information from the US public
It is literally on the front page of news papers....
Also, you can see it on Instagram, X, etc.
Even a cursory search on TikTok reveals anti-ICE content...
TikTok is hugely influential, and the younger people they're trying to influence don't read newspapers and don't hang out on X or Instagram (both of which also censor certain political content).
https://www.npr.org/2024/03/26/1240737627/meta-limit-politic...
https://www.reddit.com/r/OptimistsUnite/comments/1i9zf5u/rco...
I am willing to bet that the vast majority of young people are very much aware of what ICE has been doing. Do you believe otherwise?
I didn’t realize that TikTok retroactively wiped every young person’s brains of the content they watched over the past months as well!
Surely you know how things work at scale.
If you introduce friction with something that millions or more use, a few % peeling off or missing things means tens of thousands of people are impacted. And tiktok has a hell of a lot more than a million users.
I still don’t get what you’re trying to say or why you’re downplaying this.
The question isn't whether they've been successful in hiding information. It's whether their goal is to hide information (or I would say, to control the narrative), which it clearly is.
This is why the administration has gone out of its way to try to get Kimmel and Colbert off the air, why it has commandeered CBS and tried to kill 60 minutes pieces critical of the administration, why it violated the law in order to keep TikTok (already fervently pro-Trump) up and running, and why allies of the administration have been put in charge of TikTok after the transition. It's why Bezos is slowly strangling the Washington Post, why Patrick Soon-Shiong is doing the same to the LA Times, and why the administration is putting their thumb on the scale for Paramount, rather than Netflix, to buy Warner Brothers Discovery (which owns CNN). It's why Musk bought Twitter. It's why they blatantly lie in their press conferences and statements to the media about how the ICE killings happened.
If you walked into a Turning-Point USA meeting in a high school, do you think the kids attending that meeting could accurately tell you what ICE has been doing? I don't.
Allow me to offer some words of wisdom. If you help building weapons to be used against $currently_designated_bad_people, you can rest assured that given enough time, those weapons will be used against you. I am watching all this with a mild sense of bemusement.
A NYT columnist Jamelle Bouie suggested (in jest) that the next Democrat administration send armed IRS agents to gated communities in Florida, to "investigate tax fraud".
But this is exactly why all citizens should be concerned about the infringement of rights happening in Minnesota. If it is allowed without prosecution, you are next.
Right, if a future democratic president starts sending masked government thugs out to assault and kidnap American citizens we all know that 100% of the people who are defending the current ICE atrocities will suddenly be outraged about government tyranny.
a surprising amount of people seem to genuinely believe law enforcement (generally, not just police) is at its core based on discretionary actions guided by their moral values and not a morally neutral action upholding agreed upon contracts
that is to say, the law only applies to you if you do "bad" things. and ill be honest, there is a level of truth to this to me. from a practical standpoint, it is infeasible to formally understand every nuance of every law ever created just to be a citizen. The underlying core social contract does appear to be one of "if you do 'good' things, generally the law will agree with you and if it doesnt then we wont hold it against you the first time"
*the important caveat here is that this leaves a rather disgustingly large and exploitable gap in what is considered good vs bad behavior, with some people having biases that can spin any observable facts into good or bad based on their political agenda. Additionally, personal biases like racism for example, influence this judgement to value judge your actions in superficial ways
> from a practical standpoint, it is infeasible to formally understand every nuance of every law ever created just to be a citizen
I feel like this is basically the case in everything.
* A lot of people don't read the article before commenting.
* Nobody reads TOS for things.
* Most people don't read academic papers.
* MIT or BSD license is easy, but how many people here have actually read the whole GPL, Apache, or Mozilla licenses.
* Voter turnout in Municipal elections here in Ontario is incredibly low.
There is too much information out there for one person. Everything is done with value judgements.
Which is why its backwards and makes no sense that we allow / cater to "well nothing said I couldnt do that" as a reasonable defense. The value judgement system should go both ways. then a lot less would need to be written down to begin with, because it wouldnt be an arbitrary set of rules on every front but the codification of a specific value judgement system with clarifications on how to align yourself to it.
We really shouldnt be allowing things like, "this is a location dedicated to peace and non-violence" and then section 32 subsection C part 2 (a) says "we can kick the shit out of you if you photograph the premises". Just a random made up example for communication purposes, but it applies to all sorts of things. Personally, I think it should apply to social media. there was a implied sense of privacy to it, that people could not see my information if i did not approve it - and then the fine print says except for the company running the page who can sell the information to whoever they want. Like WTF was that about? I wont say its an ignored thing, there plenty of outrage over it - but i think its incredibly fundamental to whats going wrong and feeding this information overload in a dangerous / stressful way.
Companies shouldnt need 10 pages of TOS to say all the obvious things, and appealing to this idea that only whats written down is what matters shouldnt allow for just any arbitrary set of things to be written down and called reasonable
> Everything is done with value judgements.
Less about value judgements. More about outsourcing to people/brands we trust.
When it comes to software licenses, we aren’t lawyers, so the informed people will use a primer created by a trusted 3rd party. Maybe GitHub’s “which license is right for me?” Page.
Who to vote for in local elections is usually decided via one of the following: (1) I know/met the person, (2) I trust the party they affiliate with, (3) I trust the newspaper/news source which recommended them.
Academic papers are usually thick, long, and inaccuracies are difficult for anyone not in that field of expertise (or something relevant like statistics) to identify. Most people require an overview of the article by an expert. Hopefully (but unlikely) they can choose one which is impartial / minimally biased and who can give an opinion on how definitive or significant the findings are.
The last 2 decades have been spent with companies learning to exploit this. For example, every large tech business would prefer all your code was MIT/BSD and they have spread advice to this effect.
I have never considered this perspective, but this fits very well with people's actions. Thank you for sharing.
To me, the system of codified law and courts makes intuitive sense, and most people misunderstand or abuse the system. But other people's intuitive understanding of the law as you mentioned is a much easier way to understand and actually IS a rough approximation of what the system does.
The other caveat is if you're a historically persecuted minority group, then those assumptions toward law enforcement don't usually apply. And now the political opposition to the current US administration is also feeling that way.
I would be remiss if I didn’t suggest everyone go watch the Watchmen series on HBO
Honestly, and I say it without a shade of irony, it might be for the best, if the collective 'we' stop attempting re-enact fictional events and lives in alternate worlds. It would do everyone, and I do mean everyone, a good solid needful, should they just stopped and thought about what they are doing and the likely course of the events given their actions.
It would be orders of magnitude more productive if we did that.
I’m saying people should watch a powerful series about state violence and masking with real world lessons that can be taken away. I’m unsure what you mean by how we shouldn’t re-enact fictional events. Are you talking about my suggestion? Or are you saying we should end acting? Or is it something g else?
They are acting with the expectation that Democrats are too spineless to do anything because thats all they have seen their entire lives and they are probably right.
Yeah I also expect they are correct on that assumption. If history is any guide Dems will take very few if any concrete actions to correct these wrongs if/when they ever get back into power again. I'm sure they'll give some rousing speeches and press conferences though.
What should happen is that everyone who is flagrantly violating the law and looting the federal govt right now should be quickly and aggressively prosecuted. Real concrete legislative reforms should be enacted to limit future corruption and dangerous adventurism by demented leaders.
I expect none of that to actually happen.
Zero disagreement. Rules of engagement should be clear to everyone. How can you possibly play the game if the rules keep changing based on political expediency. And we all know.. that that kind of a game is rigged from the start.
That said, I was thinking more about people all of us building tools that got us into the situation we are in now.
People rarely recognize that force can be turned on them until it happens. If one side uses force and the other refuses to, you cannot expect the first to grasp that force is always a two way street, because for them it is not real until they feel it.
Force can be turned on even if there was no force before. Biden didn't have anything like the current ICE, but Trump just made one out of thin air and then turned it on people.
First they came for the Communists And I did not speak out Because I was not a Communist
Then they came for the Socialists And I did not speak out Because I was not a Socialist
Then they came for the trade unionists And I did not speak out Because I was not a trade unionist
Then they came for the Jews And I did not speak out Because I was not a Jew
Then they came for me And there was no one left To speak out for me
His brilliant columns is the only reason I would ever consider a NYT subscription.
Would probably be very popular, outside the kind of people whose donations fund political campaigns.
If Dem could win big soon the lawfare against Trump business could be huge. DOGE purge alone was making a lot of bad blood.
A democratic administration would be extremely unlikely to do that, I think. Democrats are usually middle–of–the–road, don't–upset–anyone types. Radical centrists, if you will. That's why the elections of people like Mamdani are so shocking.
People who care about their community?
There's going to be a lot of pressure on Democrats from their base to hold people accountable for what happens during Trump's 2nd term. And there is going to be some new blood that runs on that. You have state governors like Newsom, Pritizker and Waltz documenting abuses with future accountability in mind.
What baffles me is how conservatives supporting the current government overreach aren't worried about the coming backlash. Do they think they'll just win all the future elections? Even when there is no more Trump?
They’re ruling like they don’t think they’ll ever be out of power again, which is why people are scared about future elections being fair and free
> Do they think they'll just win all the future elections?
Let's say the administration require physical in-person voting due to supposedly mail-in vote fraud and similar in past elections, like when Trump lost.
Then they place a bunch of ICE agents outside of each voting location, checking any immigrants and others they've declared unwanted that are about to vote. Suddenly a lot of democratic voters no longer feel safe voting.
Will the democrats still win?
> Do they think they'll just win all the future elections?
There's a degree of that. But really it's learned behavior; MAGA literally sacked the Capitol in a violent insurrection and Democrats managed to botch the response to that. The only reason we're talking about future malfeasance is because Democrats didn't punish past malfeasance, thereby shifting the Overton window. And of course this goes back further than Jan 6 -- Trump might actually get a pardon from the next Democratic president if history repeats.
Not massively different to Obama weaponising the IRS against the Tea Party.
Why would anyone be opposed to the IRS catching tax cheats? This seems like such a bone-headed take.
In any case it’s also historically illiterate, the IRS has long been used as a political weapon, infamously against “Tea Party” activists.
"Why would anyone be opposed to deporting criminals" is verbatim what I've read from conservative commenters.
That isn't the issue being discussed. This is illustrating that armed, masked goons as a political weapon is a pandora's box that will get turned against everyone, regardless of status. Some people just don't care about the violence in Minnesota because it isn't happening to them.
Almost every major US criminal constitutional rights case started with an actual criminal, or at least someone unsavory. Miranda was a rapist. Gideon of Gideon v. Wainwright was a burglar. Brady of Brady v. Maryland was a robber and possibly a murderer. These cases helped form the foundation of what due process actually means in the United States. But contemporary discussion surely included a lot of commentary like "Why would anyone be opposed to prosecuting murders, rapists, and violent criminals?" And that commentary was just as irrelevant then as it is now.
It's not about whether the US deports criminals. It's about how we go about doing it.
Obama managed to deport more illegal immigrants than Trump. The difference is the local cities and states were working with ICE, rather than weaponising it to try and get a Democrat president.
Obama even gave Tom Homan a medal for his work.
You forget that Obama wasn’t an idiot and did everything above board. Sanctuary cities existed back then, federal agents still enforced immigration rules just without Gestapo-like sh*t stirring. Trump wanted to provoke Minneapolis with aggressive highly visible tactics, and he got what he wanted.
The difference is that the Obama version was done with due process, i.e. constitutionally.
> Why would anyone be opposed to the IRS catching tax cheats? This seems like such a bone-headed take.
And ICE says they only go after illegals.
Speaking of historically illiterate...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRS_targeting_controversy
> Conservatives claimed that they were specifically targeted by the IRS, but an exhaustive report released by the Treasury Department's Inspector General in 2017 found that from 2004 to 2013, the IRS used both conservative and liberal keywords to choose targets for further scrutiny.
There's nothing wrong with catching tax cheats as long as due process is followed and the person's rights are not infringed. However, selective enforcement can be used as a weapon - never investigate people "on your side" and always investigate "enemies" even if there's no evidence of fraud. Another way to weaponise enforcement is to have a law that is almost never prosecuted and rarely followed (e.g. only using bare hands to eat chicken in Gainesville, Georgia), so then a law enforcement officer can threaten to prosecute for it unless the victim complies.
Another great way to do this would be to preemptively arrest your political enemies with a pretext of assumed fraud and use that as a fishing expedition. Then you could spread your retribution by trying to violently suppress anyone who got in your way and use that as a pretext to send in the army to raid some billionaires' compounds.
I feel like you can both want illegal aliens to get deported, but not approve of how ICE is executing protesters in the street, entering homes without warrants, and kidnapping people in unmarked vans.
Similarly, you can think it would be good to catch tax fraud, but think that it should be handled without executing folks.
> infamously against “Tea Party” activists
that claim was disproved by the way
but, it is famously how the feds managed to get Al Capone
No, they went after tax cheats and it wound up that there were a lot more people cheating taxes hiding behind conservative-sounding fronts than there were hiding behind liberal-sounding fronts.
This was spun as "targeting conservatives".
The problem I was listening to a historian discuss the other day is that we're stuck in a cycle of:
1. Republican breaks norms/laws
2. Democrat cleans up after, but by *not* breaking norms, doesn't go far enough to actually undo all the damage
3. We end up with a more broken governmental configuration, and head back to (1)
Theres a reason 99% of actions taken by democrats are just "strongly worded letters" and how they consistently come up with the exact small number of Democrats needed to push legislation and bills that the party proposes to be against.
Most Democratic politicians are in on the game too. Its all just political theater and their in-group rotates out who gets to be the bad guys.
Yes Democrats clean-up by not breaking norms, but as mentioned they never go far enough because they legitimately do not want to go too far due to corporate interests and the elite.
I am left leaning but do not align with the majority of the Democratic party because they are in on this too. They have the tools to be much more antagonistic to the GOP but they purposely don't use them
I think this take is on the cynical side. A more charitable interpretation would be what they say (but maybe I'm being naive): that they don't want to break the rules to fix what someone else broke by breaking the rules.
I'm not sure what you mean by "they consistently come up with the exact small number of Democrats needed to push legislation and bills that the party proposes to be against" -- if you mean the Republicans manage to get some Democrats to "switch sides" -- it's important to remember that this is how everything used to get done. Check the old votes: party-line was less common back in the day. And even now, Democrats tolerate members with differing opinions far more than the GOP does, and it shows in their voting patterns.
How tedious. I don't disagree, fundamentally, with your message, but this internet smart guy thing people do where they use things like $variables to signal that they are above everything and anyone who things X is bad or good just isn't smart enough to see things in the abstract really sucks. And I am very glad you are mildly bemused by people getting shot in the streets, the deterioration of democratic norms that might spiral into more violence and actual, real life, people getting fucked up. Very cool of you.
On occasion, it is worthwhile to take a step back and recognize that what is happening is not new or novel. Likewise, it is useful to recognize a pattern when it presents itself. It is extra useful ( and helpful ) that this is brought to the attention of other people who may still be going through the steps of processing of what seems to be happening.
If it helps, I appreciate going meta after me, but there is not much to dissect here. I stand by my bemused. You may think it is some soft of grand struggle and kudos for you for finding something to believe in, but don't project onto others.
I don't think its any sort of "grand struggle" in any sense other than the human condition is a grand struggle for peace in a world which perhaps fundamentally encourages conflict, but it doesn't have to be a grand struggle to appreciate the fact that people are dying and being treated inhumanely.
I really do think you're fundamental warning is spot on: people really should consider how power is going to be used against them when calculating how much of it to give up in the pursuit of a goal. I also happen to think its sort of ridiculous (and impossible) for us all to wail and gnash our teeth each time a person dies unjustly. But I also think its probably wrong to be amused by it, even if it is commonplace in human affairs.
<< But I also think its probably wrong to be amused by it, even if it is commonplace in human affairs.
This may be the source of disconnect. While it might seem like I am amused by suffering, this is explicitly not the case. I shudder at the thought that people would take my argument as meaning that.
All I am saying is: things exist after their original purpose has been served ( or not served ). But those things continue to exist, because we, as a species, can't seem to help ourselves.
That weird drive within us is what I would call bemusing ( and not amusing ).
This is called "boomerang theory" in sociology
> The imperial boomerang is the theory that governments that develop repressive techniques to control colonial territories will eventually deploy those same techniques domestically against their own citizens.
This is different from what parent post describes. Parent means developing tools by one side of a barricade, that the other may eventually use against them, e.g. when the power shifts to them. Whereas you speak about developing the tools to be used abroad, but those tools eventually also get used domestically, but the administrator remains the same.
I have been arguing this point for several years now -- but wrt to the Democratic party's relationship with guns. The same justification used to limit the second amendment is the same justification that can be used to limit the 1st, 4th, etc.
Both parties seem to be on an authoritarian bent over the last 10-15 years, which sucks.
Tik Tok wasn't built to be used as a weapon though.
Are you sure about that?
Yeah.
I don't subscribe to the hypocritical vies that people are expected to have "free will" and "freedom", while also being "influenced by the algorithm".
Its either one or the other. Personally I think its the former, and Tik Tok is just confirming to people what they want to hear.
<< Its either one or the other.
Why would that be a given? If we remove tiktok and replace it with anything else, that replaced influence does not automatically negate my will? Case in point, when I call my mother to talk a new car purchase, does her disliking my choice automatically mean I either influenced and therefore have no will?
I am not certain you considered edge cases here.
Weapons can come in all forms and sizes. When wielded with the blend of censorship and propaganda, (social) media is absolutely a weapon. Is there a reason why it won’t be?
> those weapons will be used against you
On the matter of social media "moderation," this is the phase you're actually in, right now.
This seems to be an argument that defense spending is never legitimate?
Corollary: building a benign system that doesn't make the levers of control as small and close to the user as possible, is inviting someone with ulterior motives to use those controls.
>If you help building weapons to be used against $currently_designated_bad_people
Democrats would really love some extra help from WikiLeaks right now, if only not Bidens administration who helped to extradite Julian.
Afaik only one side of the aisle asks for Russia's help with offensive cybersecurity.
And you think they won't be used against me if I don't help build them?
Seems unlikely.
If the implication is that the tools won't exist if I don't build them, that's beyond a pipe dream. We'll never get a globe of 8 billion people to agree unanimously on anything. Let alone agreeing not to build something that gives them power over their adversaries.
I will offer a benign example. A new team member was given a task to generate a dashboard that, as per spec, in great detail lists every action of a given employee within a system that generates some data for consumption by those employees.
As simple as the project was, the employee had the presence of mind to ask his seniors some thoughtful questions of what makes sense, what is too intrusive, what is acceptable. He felt uncomfortable and that was with something that corps build on a daily basis.
Now.. not everyone wakes up thinking they are building database intended to enslave humanity as a whole, but I would like to think that one person simply questioning it can make a difference.
The $currently_designated_bad_people however are criminal illegal aliens. Sometimes we have to create mechanisms to go after pedophiles and rapists, and we just have to trust the system well enough to assume these tools won't be used to go after good people. I mean the bar for ICE is so outrageously high it's hard to see a world where it's lowered far enough to go after someone like me.
Sure, but I was under impression those mechanism already exists. The question, as it were, comes to enforcement.
The mechanism to do it properly is the feds working with local and state officials where there's a full breadth of accountability and judicial coverage. Some states and cities have explicitly rejected doing this, some opting to purposefully make it harder. Trump instead of being diplomatic and trying to work with them has aggressively sent goons in to do flashy operations and pushed federal enforcement to the limits of the law.
ICE and border patrol wasn't really designed either legally or in training for these sorts of large operations, so it's created lots of dangerous situations like how to do crowd control broadly under laws like "interfering with a federal investigation", while commanders are pushing them hard for results.
I am not disagreeing with you. Paraphrasing your own words, the mechanisms exist, but they have been intentionally blunted. We can argue whether it was a good idea to blunt it, but it does not help that the administration used that blunt tool regardless.
How fitting that you bring up pedophiles and rapists, and trusting the system, while Trump is sitting in the white house. Do I need to point out the irony?
It's insane right now browsing tiktok and seeing every 3rd or 4th video on my feed have consistent glitches (in the same places of a video, as if my internet was slow which it isn't), on only the videos mentioning resistance topics from the US. Very black mirror. Feels like it's meant more to send a message that your content is flagged, and to watch what you say and do. Otherwise they would just block it or hide it from your feed.
Anecdotal: uploading a video of original songs with political/protest lyrics will have random background noises added to the audio track, making the songs audio seem amateurish.
Edit: here’s a link to an example https://bsky.app/profile/seaniebyrne.bsky.social/post/3mby7j...
>This author has chosen to make their posts visible only to people who are signed in.
Welp, guess I didn't want to learn about that anyway
Sorry. Thats fixed now.
The audio is really strange, have people tested it with similar sounding videos without ungoodthink?
Have a mirror of the TikTok version for comparison? It’s just showing me “Video currently unavailable”.
Dang. I didn’t download it. But when was live it had the deep sound of chopper type motorcycles in the background.
can you relax the restrictions on your link or share a direct link to the video, i dont have a bluesky account
Yes. Sorry I’d no idea/forgotten it worked that way. Thank you for pointing it out. I’ve updated my settings.
That's super curious. No offense, the noise didn't make it sound more amateurish to me personally, so I wouldn't go as far as to immediately conclude that this was intentional by TikTok, let alone that it is because it didn't like the lyrics, but I'm very curious what is it anyway.
Reminds me of how someone lately was going crazy about weird video-artifacts on Youtube. It was fixed (for his videos) after contacting somebody on the technical side of Youtube, but there was never an explanation AFAIK of what actually went wrong, so I was left pondering if that could be a result of some more ambitious ML-experiments in attempt to improve compression rates or something, but never found out conclusively.
Anecdotal to myself. I shamefully sometimes use TikTok, I particularly like recipe clips and even I noticed something in the last week, most noticeably around this weekend where the algorithm for recommendations changed. It’s like they completely wiped my preferences. I try not to watch anything political so I cannot say much about censorship of content but something was noticeable in the last week.
I noticed exactly the same thing. I don't recall which day it started (probably this past Sunday), but it was as if a switch flipped. My For You Page no longer has anything to do with my preferences. I'm familiar with Tiktok nudging me in different directions in the past, but I was always able to steer it back to videos I was interested in within 10-15 minutes. Three days later, and it's as if Tiktok not only has forgotten everything about my watch history, it also hasn't learned. That said, it doesn't seem to be entirely about politics. I had a mix of political/protest related content, native plant content, and woodworking videos on my For You Page. None of those are showing up for me.
Very similar for me as well. And yes no connection to the politics angle. It was very pronounced for me because I would like a video and then every other video it showed me was someone else’s version of it. It was very bizarre.
Same experience here, and also I noticed several channels I used to be following I was no longer following after the hand offs. The feed is completely different now.
Something definitely broke.
It does this all the time. I think it is called "exploration injection". It increases engagement by trying to prevent boredom.
It’s amazes how confident people will describe your lived experiences and say you are wrong. No this was entirely different and coincided in time with the complaints of censorship.
I said you were right. You might need to go touch grass man.
[Edit]: I shouldn't have made the "touch grass" comment. Sorry.
From my read you said something different from what OP said. They voiced that there was a wiping of preference that was noticeable, where you said "it does this all the time." Sure both can describe the same thing, but they don't have to be. Why double down instead of accepting that this time it might be different?
Because this exact conspiracy has been going on since the elections for 2020. And it's well known and documented. Are you essentially asking me why I wouldn't encouFrage a conspiracy theory based on the anecdote of someone who says they hardly use the platform they are suggesting is forcing propaganda/censorship on them?
There are polarizing events getting more coverage right now, by far, than anything else in the USA, and HN user infecto is subscribing to the idea that the algorithm isn't going to try to check if these important ongoing events interest them.
It's very unlikely that "this time might be different"; the far more likely answer is that this is run-of-the-mill algorithm exploration injection.
Infecto replied me I said "you are wrong". I didn't. My original comment was assuring, in good faith, made to let them know that TikTok changing theit FYP feed is normal. They hadn't yet mentioned they already knew about algo resets and that they were leaning in to the conspiracies. Their reply to me was not in good faith, and did not respond to the strongest possible interpretation of what I originally commented.
> There are polarizing events getting more coverage right now, by far, than anything else in the USA, and HN user infecto is subscribing to the idea that the algorithm isn't going to try to check if these important ongoing events interest them.
No conspiracy theory here. Long time user of TikTok. The sometimes part is that I am not hooked on it but I do use its regularly. I started using it after being a user on Douyin.
Like I already said I have no input on the censorship but just anecdotally to me something’s dis change that was out of the norm for my usage that I never experienced before. If you want to say that’s normal ok but I am suggesting it was out of the norm as a long long time user.
Not sure why you are lumping me with a conspiracy theory just sharing a datapoint that something did change weather on purpose or not.
Sorry to offend you but please don’t misread and lump me into a conspiracy! I explicitly said I had no opinion or datapoint on the censorship but there was a massive change in the feed. Wild how many hoops you are jumping through here. You continue to call out my own experience as wrong and now pump me into a conspiracy theorist. Nutty.
> sometimes use tiktok > use it regularly
That's not how these words work. A reasonable person wouldn't think these phrases are interchangeable when taking about something addictive -- in this case TicTok. Someone who "smokes sometimes" and someone who "smokes regularly" are very different groups. This isn't an attack; I understand you now, I'm just trying to get you to see where I was coming from.
> Like I already said I ... that I never experienced before.
You had not said that yet, you just said I said you were wrong.
> this was entirely different and coincided in time with the complaints of censorship.
If you think this statement isn't reasonably interpreted as you implying and leaning in to, or in the very least encouraging, this conspiracy theory, then I think you are being disingenuous.
I was trying to provide helpful information by giving someone who only "sometimes" uses tiktok some assurance that these changes are typical.
Please stop backpedaling and attacking me. You don’t know me and you have not acknowledged the lies you have already used for absolutely no reason. I apologize my words upset you that was not my intent but I am concerned you continue going down this route.
You’re reading into my words far deeper than you should. I have used the App for a long time off and on but enough to know something changed whether intentional or not over the last week.
I already stated in the very beginning that I have no comment or opinion on the censorship. That’s not my corner of the world but was sharing an anecdote that something most definitely changed in my feed around the same time. Could be related or not but it coincides with the timeline. Even with the timeline similarity it may simply be a bug in the recommendation engine. I was only sharing an anecdote and no it was not exploration injection. The anecdote was just that my experience and saying it follows the same timeline is not suggesting a conspiracy is happening but that yes something happened/broke in the feed and it aligns with my timeline.
Please stop attacking me. I have apologized for my words already they carried no ill intent but still amazed how you continue to invalidate my experience while also attacking me. Maybe you should take some of your advice.
"I said you were right" is not doubling down, and looks like an accurate description of the conversation to me. OP got hostile for no good reason. If it's different, they can talk about how it's different instead of going on the attack against someone that listened and tried to provide information.
Thanks. Though I do admit that my swipe back at them about "touching grass" was out of line.
No hostility just amazing how I can share a datapoint as a long time user that something did interrupt the feed engine in a negative way and I get told it’s normal when in my experience it’s not.
I don't understand. Why is that amazing?
Sloppy analogy time: Imagine you came in and said your vacuum cleaner broke and someone said "Yeah, that brand loses suction after six months, it's obnoxious." They're telling you it's normal for that type of vacuum, but they're not calling you wrong, they're trying to agree with you. If your problem is different, go ahead and correct them, but they're not denying your lived experience!
(And don't say they should have inferred you knew about that behavior and known you meant this was different. That's too close to expecting someone to read your mind. Especially when your original post didn't mention you were a long time user with enough dedication to notice that.)
I usually try to steer clear from replying to your full time posting but cmon. I am saying this experience has nothing to do with exploration injection. Could I have replied differently, sure but they also are whipping up some wild conspiracy theories and I have no time to be associated with that.
> I am saying this experience has nothing to do with exploration injection.
Yes.
But the guy you're talking to had no way to know that, and you shouldn't have taken insult at what he said.
> wild conspiracy theories
What?
Edit: Also for your first sentence, have we been in an argument or something? But apparently I've made 5 comments a day all-time and 7.6 comments a day in the last year. If that's full time then I need to become a brand promotion contractor ASAP.
Have you been using it for long?
I no longer use TikTok, but I was pretty hooked for a while, and I felt those “waves” every now and then.
It was pretty noticeable because each time I started getting extreme right political content from my country, and I neither consume anything local nor right wing content.
Yes I have and this reset was very different than anything I have experienced. I would like a specific recipe and then they the feed would show me someone else’s attempt of that recipe. I haves used the app for years off and on.
TikTok said in a statement that glitches on the app were due to a power outage at a US data center. As a result, a spokesperson for TikTok US Joint Venture told CNN, it’s taking longer for videos to be uploaded and recommended to other users. The tech issues were “unrelated to last week’s news,” TikTok said.
There was a major storm over the weekend. I think the issues have been resolved. Is it still the case anti ICE videos can't be uploaded? Seems easy to test.
It seems to me that the hard part to test would be whether or not videos are allowed to circulate in the same way they would be if they were of a different subject. Upload status seems like red herring
Much like how even relatively innocuous comments on many subreddits will just be shadow-deleted.
If someone demonstrates they are liars, there is a reasonable default reaction. Most people can ignore what they say, because liars made the conscious decision not to be credible.
It is an incredible time-saving productivity hack to disregard what habitual liars say.
It looks like some are moving over to upscroll, anyone know anything about upscroll? what other apps are you using?
I remember when everyone migrated from MySpace to Facebook and I assumed everyone was going to just keep moving over to the next big thing every few years but that actually didn't happen. Facebook became an institution.
Nit, but it's upscrolled
thank you!Seems I can't edit.
That is available only for two hours after posting.
I checked out the website, and it looks more like Instagram than TikTok. We've had a few TikTok-like apps, and it didn't work out. Even the people behind Vine couldn't make their own Byte app take off:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huddles_(app)
TikTok showed that the platform lives and dies by the algorithm and ease of use. I'm not even a huge fan of TikTok's recommendations these days with too much slop slipping through the cracks. And their comment moderation is some of the worst.
If another platform ever gets popular enough, I'm sure the same people will find another way to neutralize it.
Yeah, I read about this thing called network effects on blue sky.
Thanks for the heads up ... we're really entering some shitty internet times
Yeah, but there might be some kind of opportunity arising too, I try to focus on that.
Nothing. These apps are mental poison. They're designed to be addictive. Healthy adults don't use TikTok or any equivalent.
I would agree with you, but its pretty disturbing that the general public doesn't have a good outlet, especially to discuss unconstitutional ICE actions. It’s unfortunately very convenient that at a time when the pros outweigh the cons (open discussion vs. addiction) that some might stay offline. I would encourage you to overlook the mental poison and continue to support open communication. That's more important right now.
> Healthy adults don't use TikTok or any equivalent.
This is a pretty obnoxious comment. You're welcome to your opinion that the apps are harmful, and I'm inclined to agree with you even though I use TikTok myself, but a blanket statement that only unhealthy people are on the apps is just inflammatory.
What do you suggest then to stay informed for those without televisions?
I have been using feedly to slowly build up a good news "diet" using sources from all over the world. Anytime, I come across an article on hn from a good news source I look into that website and add it to my feed. I look for criteria like independent journalism, representation of perspectives I don't already have in my news portfolio and general quality. I do think of my news as an investment portfolio, you want a good balance of stocks, diversification, hedging, risk management.
A subscription to multiple news sources is a good way to consume news.
Traditional news sites ideally. I don't think that people are more informed from using short-form social video. A TikTok user is not any more informed than someone who does not use TikTok.
A news subscription
Regular news sites?
Try reading?
Really? I have bookmarked:
- 758 posts on home construction and interior design - 487 posts on cooking - 58 posts on relationship health - 605 posts on leadership - 58 posts on fitness - 19 posts on woodworking
, and countless others on travel and dining.
Would you like to restate your claim with more nuance? I have collected a vast amounts of knowledge through TikTok. Their algorithm is insanely good at capturing whatever it is you’re after. It’s a challenge to put the app down and I think any person that can’t impose their own healthy limits or can’t modulate their topical interests is going to have an even harder time. Let’s remember that amidst the real negative aspects, there is a really great system for learning buried in there.
Have you learned 758 things about home construction and interior design? Bookmarking certainly isn't learning. I should know; my collection of bookmarks contains countless papers, documentation, and tutorials, yet I've hardly glanced at most of them and the majority will remain in that state for eternity.
It’s been highly valuable. It taught me about undertones, color temperature, 60/30/10 rules, strengths and weaknesses of various countertop materials, load bearing, space planning, power delivery, millwork, lumber quality and cost, HVAC options, building code requirements, ceiling projections and light planning, fixture restoration, exposure to new vendors … should I go on?
You bookmarked those once, surely you meant to go back to them ;)
Please revisit those bookmarked items and you will be learning. I find it hard too sometimes to get back to all the shiny new things I find but I guarantee you have a few gems worth revisiting, then you can share them on here and we can all learn something.
It's great that you're using these tools for expanding your knowledge. Share some of the highlights! Sometimes I think people who claim everything on these platforms is bad are telling on themselves, or not very savvy at getting the best out of a tool and blaming the tool.
It feels like federated networks with open-sourced feed algorithms are the best path forward.
If AI removes any technical limitations, and automates content management, what's stopping a content creator from owning what they create and distributing it themselves?
How can centralization continue to survive?
The magic lies in the two-sided coin of promotion vs. spam filtering.
The web started off as a pretty peer to peer system, but almost immediately people built directories and link farms as means to find things. You can make a system as distributed as you want, but that only works for content which people know to find. Which is great for piracy, as e.g. movies and TV shows are advertised everywhere else and can be found by title.
For social media, the recommendation engine is a critical part of the appeal to users.
Beyond federated systems, P2P systems seem to have a strong advantage here in identifying bad actors.
Ranking posts/comments by the exponential of inverse IPAddress-post-frequency would solve bad actors posting behind VPNs/proxies like evil bot farms / state actors and marketers.
Real users have their own IP address, and IP addresses are expensive like $20-50 a month which would make mocking traffic an extremely expensive proposition.
Mocking 1% of reddit's 120M daily active user would cost 58M and you wouldn't want to share/sell these addresses with other actors since it would ruin your credibility
I think it would do the opposite. The regular user posts 5 times per day, but the spammer has bought access to 65536 IP addresses and posts once from each, boosting his posts 5x. And the town in South America with one CGNAT IP address to go around gets censored.
The 65K IP addresses cost 1.638M dollars, thats alot more than they would spend doing the exact same thing today.
The idea is to accept bad actors but make it more expensive and also you can directly identify cliques by IP ect.
Yeah, but he's got a botnet of residential ips that he didn't pay for.
You don't need to own them. You just need to rent the rights to send a spam message on a particular service using a proxy.
> Ranking posts/comments by the exponential of inverse IPAddress-post-frequency
Doesn't this just incentivize posting a bunch of comments from your residential proxy IP addresses to launder them? This smells like a poor strategy that's likely to lead to more spam than not. Also, everyone has to start somewhere so your legit IP addresses are also going to seem spammy at first.
I think residential proxy IP's still have the same associated cost, and arent those often for bundled traffic?
I'm not much of a blackhat so excuse my lack of knowledge on tricks of the trade
Why do so many tech people push this "federation is a panacea" idea despite all evidence to the contrary? I don't get it.
First, the obvious: if federation was clearly superior, it would've won. No medium since email has been federated and even that's dominated by a handful of players. Running your own email server is... nontrivial.
Second, users don't care abou tthis. Like at all.
Third, supposedly tech-savvy people don't seem willing or able to merely scratch the surface of what that looks like and how it would work.
Fourth, there's a lot of infrastructure you need such as moderation and safety that would need to be replicated for each federated provider.
Lastly, zero consideration is given to the problems this actually creates. Look at POTS. We have spam and providers that are bad actors and effectively launder spam calls and texts. You need some way to manage that.
The utility of federated networks increases a lot when bad actors cause harm to people. What had a minimal value and failed to get attention yesterday when they need was low may be drastically different today when that need is high.
Running your own email server is not trivial.
Federated networks are theoretically and systematically superior to centralized, that's why people push it.
Humanity and social media isn't about technological superiority. Current platforms have inertia. Why would people fragment when all they care about is basic actions, and their network is already built?
Federated networks have been burdened by an onboarding tax, but this, along with moderation, can all be abstracted away by AI.
Let's see the current reality: social media platforms are currently American-dominated. A serious geopolitical problem, especially considering the amount of time younger generations spend on it.
There is more and more reason for governments to get involved and force the fragmentation of these platforms.
For almost all of human history information has been centralized among a small actors, for some time period we had a large independent press but those days are gone.
Everyone has a stake in getting accurate information, and therefore they have an interest in owning part of that system.
Well for one we've seen how great and powerful federation can be, email is completely federated and the design of email has enabled hundreds of multibillion dollar companies.
Why wouldn't this also apply to social media? Why is it better for 5 players to exist rather than 1000s?
Isn't the web federated?
Sure is! the issue is that people's attention isn't -- most people on the web stick to a few web pages; their social media of choice (facebook, tiktok, etc...) and their news provider of choice (CNN, Fox, NBC).
Putting up a website is easy, pulling traffic away from bigger sites is much more difficult
If the better, truly good thing was always also the winning, "superior" thing, we would live in a very different world.
>if federation was clearly superior, it would've won.
no because we don't live in the best of all worlds. it starts to win pretty rapidly when centralized abuses of power become apparent. Bitchat (p2p mesh network messaging app) has been becoming quite popular in Uganda and Iran.
Decentralization is the basic guarantor for most of the freedoms we take for granted in democratic systems. Just because the average user doesn't exercise them, just like people who only start going on the treadmill when their chest starts to hurt at age 50, doesn't mean it isn't the answer.
Do you actually believe anything you just wrote?
If TikTok falls TikTokers will just use another centralized app.
Content creators don't have peertube instances for a reason.
Is it a technical glitch that prevents the uploads? Or is it a technical glitch that let's people know that that content is being censored
They have to block upload bluntly as they are still figuring out the algorithm how to shadow ban them.
They consider free people sharing information with each other against the consent and interests of MEGAPEDOELLISON Cabal in power a "technical glitch" that they're trying hard to "patch" by slaughtering the First Amendment.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_They_Came stays relevant
Someone I know told me they think about this when they see the people who voted for gun bans talk now about how they need guns to defend against unlawful ICE folks
But not a single person has actually done so. Until it can be shown that armed citizens are making a genuine difference against government agents it's still just bluster.
Not the same thing or even country, but the guy killing Abe with the handmade gun changed the handling of Moonie infiltration of Japanese government and society. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/02/02/how-shinzo-abe...
Disagree. The most valuable feature of a fraction of people having guns is that the risk of someone having a gun discourages the most extreme harassment, even if no gun is ever fired.
You've just seen the people at the very top of the administration saying that just having a gun in any sort of proximity to federal agents = terrorist. If you show up tomorrow with a rifle on the other side of a Minnesota street from a bunch of ICE agents, do you think they're going to prioritize de-escalation and professionalism or just light you up? Serious question.
Yes, just like government operators were recently discouraged from escalating with that one protestor who had a legal gun that he wasn't using.
If only there was an extremely high profile example of how this isn’t at all true in the past several days!
Two protesters were murdered by government agents (one of them armed!). How much more extreme do you want to get?
The Black Panther Party proved this works decades ago: https://www.wbur.org/npr/442801731/director-chronicles-the-b...
So this was uploaded only 6 hours ago and has over 1,000 points and is at the very bottom of the front page (#28 right now).
Comments like this appear on every single post like this. Hacker New's algorithm lowers posts that have too much engagement too fast as a way to prevent flame wars. Is it perfect? No. But I highly doubt this is HN demoting this on purpose.
From the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
> The basic algorithm divides points by a power of the time since a story was submitted. Comments in threads are ranked the same way.
> Other factors affecting rank include user flags, anti-abuse software, software which demotes overheated discussions, account or site weighting, and moderator action.
This could very well be marked as an overheated discussion.
This comes up on HN constantly. The reason I feel confident that this is actually the case and not selective moderating is that these same exact comments pop up across posts from the entire political spectrum.
I believe the reasons for this system where initially good - don't want too many political discussions, keep it on tech only.
The issue is, that the tech is not a niche thing anymore - the biggest companies on earth are all tech now, and they played a very major role in installing the current US government. This topic is a great example too. Any current or future authoritarian state will be a very heavy user of technology, so it may very well be worth it debating these things here on HN.
> keep it on tech only.
I don't think that was ever completely true - it was always "things hackers found interesting". But what was "interesting" then was a product of the much calmer times back then – talking about Blub and build-your-own Lisps, hikes across Japan, etc.
Unfortunately, "interesting" is polarizing – and that is by design by the politicians iin power instigating this.
Thanks for explaining this.
It's really nice that I can still post here anonymously.
I really only come here for tech news, but I doubt ICE cares.
Do not expect your rights to be honored on large platforms. They are fenced gardens regularly weeded, using algorithms with very specific preferences.
The only information outlet where we can have a reasonable expectation of freedom is the web itself, a good old websites on your own domain. Could be a txt file if you want to keep it simple ;)
I’m guessing this is related to and corroborates this early flagged article? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46777652
This is building an interesting case for those that say that the rest of the world can not build successful competitors to US entities: they can, but then they get taken away. I wouldn't use TikTok, but I find the whole situation a bit strange, ostensibly the rest of the world has a capability problem, but then when they are successful that can't left to stand.
Remember all the grievances about the previous executive administration's "Twitter Files" censorship? Rules for thee, but not for me.
To be clear, I think both censorship regimes are not good, but I can't say I'm surprised.
The pendulum is in full swing. Soon it will be ban worthy offense to suggest there are more than two genders.
Though I am morbidly enjoying the irony of seeing those on the left suddenly discover an interest in free speech, and those on the right discover their love for campaigning to get people deplatformed.
I'm beginning to put together that party-lines are strictly about gaining and holding power at all costs. Irony disappears through that lens and the way people act makes much more sense.
Ladies and gentlemen, the frog has been boiled.
Turns out, all you needed to do was say "jumping out of boiling water is woke" and frogs will turn up the heat themselves.
My bet is that too many frogs are gonna leap, that this is far too shitty a situation right now. They are gonna work extra overtime to cool it down some for now, collect & put some frogs back in the pot. And then slowly turn up the heat again.
I also do believe this is an incredibly hard technical moment. Elli-Tok has nearly no chance of suceeding in building their own algorithm, from square 1, since they don't have access to the ByteDance algorithms. I don't know what access they have to international content and internstional viewing habits, don't know if US content flows to TikTok actual and if they get any algorithmic help from that. This feels like a suicidal business, buying a brand name but lacking any and all of the means to maintain product quality.
There probably are real technical problems here. And feed preferences are probably just gone, while Elli-Tok rebuilds its own perhaps isolated perhaps loosely connected fork, while as said above probably lacking the content and viewer data to work from.
But just as Ellison's bought CBS then let it be overrun & destroyed by the hollow Free Press propogandists (pretending to be neutral, I say as my eyes roll out of my head), I also tend to think they thought they could get away with doing what they want. Maybe they will get away with this project. Maybe it is all isolated US only content, maybe it is swamped with right wing agitprop from here on out. Maybe half those viewers here keep scrolling forever and that's good enough to make the incredibly fantastically rich happy with their US government facilitated acquisition, that sundering an interesting diverse well tuned network is maybe or maybe not a delight but a necessary thing to claw under for this desired class propoganda. But I tend to think they're alas probably smart enough to learn quickly this is not how you boil a frog, and tend to think Elli-Tok is going to (suck for a long while either way, but work to) dial down the right wingism & divisionism a lot, then slowly work it back up.
(But man, watching these buffons mishandle CBS, watching ridiculous bald faced "salute to Mark Rubio" sure makes it hard to believe they have any competence at all.)
Different topic but the extremely critical TikTok v. Garland and the First Amendment Anticanon by Evelyn Douek skewering the unanimous Supreme Court decision that ok'ed this absurd international media property theft is amazing to read. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6118706
The new TOS also says it tracks: immigration status, political affiliation, whether you identify as non-binary or transgender, religion, activist content you consume, etc.
It’s crazy to think that Instagram Reels, owned by Meta, is preferable to TikTok now. At least Reels now is at least competitive in terms of content - unlike two years ago when people were worried about TikTok being banned and Reels was not a good alternative.
Reels is just AI and engagement slop
Isn't Reels content more right-wing, while TikTok has lots of both left-leaning and right-leaning content.
TikTok historically has, but if this is truly the new owners trying to block content then that can change rapidly.
Reels skews older in the user-base, which skews the average to the right.
This was quick, it was never about the money, who needs Truth Social and Twitter when you have tiktok. Best of luck America
This is the first political story that HN hasn't killed in a while. Well done! Time to wake up to what is happening.
A few weeks ago, I reported a compilation video of ICE officers beating people. The description included the phrase "The deportations will continue :)".
I reported it for promoting violence, but TikTok found no violation of its guidelines.
It probably didn't help that the video was posted by the official White House TikTok account..
I wonder when Americans will wake up and see their system for what it is. It is almost too late to fix it. What comes next is going to change the rest of our lives (everyone, the whole world).
A large number of people don’t want the existing system.
They want Jesus on the throne, enforcing morality and making sure the poor people to work instead of being lazy grifters that take good people’s hard-earned money.
This isn’t a hot take. I’m a Christian who grew up that community. :(
It’s everywhere. And I hate what they are doing to my LGBTQ friends.
They're lying, of course. They're also blocking messages that contain the word 'Epstein'. This is all by design.
even setting aside the particulars of a US-controlled tik-tok, that our entire view of the world is through these narrow balistraria controlled by a few platforms is extremely detrimental to a free society, especially one so dependent on the flow of information.
You could leave tik-tok but that's where folks are at and the average tik-tok viewer is unlikely to leave their dank maymays just because of some "alleged" (and I use that term lightly) censorship
Definitely not censorship
/sarcasm
https://www.forbes.com/sites/conormurray/2026/01/26/tiktok-c...
Upscrolled looks like a promising alternative.
for what it's worth many solopreneurs on the X/twitter solopreneur committee were reporting their uploads to TikTok were failing, and I saw at least one conservative complaining that their (conservative political) videos were not uploading to TikTok either
At least within Canada I'm continuing to get anti-ICE content from various creators.
TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC is only within the US (controlled by Larry Ellison). You still get ByteDance.
I'm happy anti-censorship is becoming more popular generally. Tiktok blanket banning terms and aggressive moderation of political topics didn't start here, but if it gets people talking...
it's obvious that tiktok is doing this intentionally, pretending it's a technical issue, so that people can blame the US government for forcing the sale of tiktok
it's just retaliation
and obviously, trump will play into this
Or the right wing ideologues who now allegedly control (components of) TikTok are as dumb and ideological as they appear.
Note: They also are having "technical difficulties" transmitting DMs with the string "epstein" in them.
If you care to fight them directly, upload them using "Ellistein" or "Epsteen". But really you should delete the app, and find an alternative. Vote with your attention/wallet.
Yeah, agreed. I'm not a TikTok user but good advice in general
How is TikTok able to screen this en masse? Are they going after tags? Political issues aside, I am really interested in the technical background in this.
The only thing I could come up with, assuming this isn’t a technical glitch, is that TikTok already had the infra to silence anything they want on the platform and as soon as the keys were handed over they turned that filter up to 100%
How would you distinguish this from the case where they turned the 'magnify dissent' filter down from 200%?
Sure, but are they running audio recognition and image recognition models on each upload just to classify it?
Social media platforms have been doing that for years to keep advertisers happy, so yes.
Surely they do that to filter out Tiannamen Square content already…. Now they’re good to go for any authoritarian gov who wants to restrict what their citizens can see their own government doing.
Every large social network has fairly advanced mass screening setups for advertiser-sensitive topics. They just need to change the configs. On YouTube for example they will transcribe audio and run OCR on text to flag sensitive topics using MLP in order to flag certain topics (ex: Palestine/Israel), and prevent most ads from being shown (and demonetize and down rank).
Basically every large advertiser requires this so it's pretty trivial to turn on.
TikTok easily bends over backwards authoritarian government. In Nepal, during the GenZ protest, TikTok disabled the search for "NepoBabies" which is the term people used for the affluent lifestyle of leaders' children and which was why the GenZ protest happened. Every other social media was banned but not TikTok because they happily censor whatever the government tells them to
They are in transition, so for the moment I believe them to have technical problems, because it also matches my experience. Yesterday I encountered problems with several videos, which are working today. And not all of them were political.
Going by the comments, people on TikTok seem very fast in seeing conspiracies, when many problems can be simply explained with normal problems or human failings. And it's good to be critical and aware of dangers, but I fear if they are so easy to call out problems, it will wear of fast, and people will start to ignore real problems again, like they used to be.
I am also skeptical (despite having 0 faith in the new owners). However, I am a bit confused: why would new ownership alone cause technical issues? It seems like they set new requirements that required new software. Even if the reqs are content-agnostic, I am curious what they are and how they differ from the previous tiktok.
Data migrations, new staff permissions and policies, merging AWS or other cloud accounts and their complex IAM policies, enrolling devices into new corporate networks, Okta setup, corporate firewalls. There are hundreds of reasons that moving to a new corporate ownership can cause technical problems.
which of these do you think is most likely? I thought they were already using usa-based cloud infrastructure
All of these will be happening as well as hundreds of other moving pieces (domain name transfers, DNS changes, adjusting compute resources to maximise existing contracts with providers, migrating metrics systems impacting alerts and infra scaling etc etc etc). It's impossible to say from the outside which of these are causing issues.
> I thought they were already using usa-based cloud infrastructure
Unless they were already using the same provider on the same account with the same IAM policies as their new owner (they were not, obviously) this is irrelevant.
The presumption of good faith has been justifiably obliterated when it comes to Topics Such As These with our right-wing extremist political and media leadership.
Especially with extremists, you should have a solid foundation of argumentation, because they will not ignore even little fails and weaponize everything against you if necessary.
Especially with extremists, a solid foundation of argumentation will do you no good because the facts are beside the point.
It's not about the extremists, it's about everyone else. Extremists usually have to convince people to give them power, to follow their BS. And by experience, even extremists sometimes can change their mind.
It's unnecessary: extremists usually aren't seeking to change their mind, and they'd sooner fabricate evidence of a fail than acknowledge The Perfect Argument That Totally Changed My Mind
Just technical problems in their “banned topic” identification models. No need to be concerned.
The point is that people are more aware of problems happening with that topic, but ignore whether it also happens with other topics. So at the moment it's a very skewed view.
it seems like our software engineers included `censorship=true` in the latest build when someone filed a JIRA ticket that said "censor stuff"
we're going to class this one as low priority / won't fix.
So it went from being a social manipulation tool of one county to another and ownership changed hands.
Is Instagram better at this? Since their racist content is so unfiltered nowadays, surely they would allow this at least?
Heh, no [1][2][3][4].
Meta and Google (including Youtube) kowtow to the administration in what speech they promote and suppress in the exact way the administration (both parties) says China might theoretically do in the future.
[1]: https://theintercept.com/2024/10/21/instagram-israel-palesti...
[2]: https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/metas-israel-policy-chief...
[3]: https://www.972mag.com/social-media-ukraine-palestinians-met...
[4]: https://www.hrw.org/report/2023/12/21/metas-broken-promises/...
They weren't concerned about privacy of US citizens so much as they were about their ability to directly influence the platform.
I will save this for the future, when people complain about Chinese open models and tell me: But this Chinese LLM doesn't respond to question about Tianmen square.
Currently, Tiktok US is owned by US Companies
that's exactly why I said, I am going to save this.
Then I will ask: what about TikTok US owned by US companies censoring anti-ICE and anti-Israel narrative, do they have freedom of speech?
[Let's simulate the discussion for old times sake.]
That's the GP's point.
At this stage it's the kettle calling the pot black.
Nuts that the whole company is in on it. Missing such a huge story is something that rank and file engineers would notice. But nobody is saying anything.
Perhaps on the tiktok Blind?
The Blind community is one of the most toxic communities out there. It made me sick even before the tech industry had its mask off moment 1+ year ago. Since then they’ve only amped up the racism and hate. I wouldn’t expect to find any serious discussion there.
Blind is fine. It's close to the forums of the ancient Internet.
If there was some "mask off" moment I don't know what it was, and I've been in this industry for a while. Perhaps you're just projecting out from Elon? It's a popular thing to do nowadays.
Blind is the 4chan of tech, so in some way you're right. I guess some kind of people might find that "fine". Not me.
Perhaps you're one of those pro-Gestapo people? It's a popular thing nowadays.
I used to think that most engineers had strong ethics, but It seems thats not the case.
I wonder if it is widespread knowledge internally or if just the select few know.
Why would you think that engineers have stronger ethics than the population at large? Following this logically, some profession would have to have lower than average ethics or perhaps only the unemployed do?
I don't think that one's personal moral compass and one's profession have much correlation at all. Otherwise, moral philosophy professors would be near saints. Moreover the moral philosophers at Harvard would be more ethical than those at Ohio State.
> I used to think that most engineers had strong ethics
Civil engineers maybe. Software "engineers" were never known for their strong sense of ethics.
You need remarkably few engineers in the loop to actually pull a thing like this off (if it is/was true).
Implement the filter? Yeah that's like one guy. But then all the internal dashboards and experiments have this big obvious miss that everyone sees
So, US has their own Tiananmen Square. How the turntables.
We didn’t go after TikTok because of PRC propaganda. We wanted a platform for US propaganda.
At this rate the US will soon have its own Tank Man image censored from mainstream social media.
Can't mention "Epstein", either.[1]
It was better when TikTok reported to the Third Department of the People's Liberation Army. They don't censor outside China.
[1] https://www.npr.org/2026/01/27/nx-s1-5689104/tiktok-epstein-...
A riff on "The Revolution Won't Be Televised"...
the revolution won't be televised because the bastards who own the networks won't let you see it and you probably wouldn't watch it anyway— you're too busy with your beer and your phone and your comfortable numbness.
the revolution won't be televised because it's not entertainment, not something you can half-watch while you're scratching your ass and wondering what to eat for dinner.
you can't consume revolution like you consume everything else— passive, bored, already thinking about the next thing.
the revolution won't be televised because it happens in the place you're most afraid to look: inside your own goddamn skull.
it starts when you stop lying to yourself, stop swallowing their garbage, stop pretending this is fine. it's not on TV. it's not coming to save you. it's just you and the choice to keep sleeping or finally wake the hell up. nobody's going to film that.
Oh man. The fix is in. This is becoming more and more like 1984 every day.
Glitch or not, anything that helps get people off TikTok and hopefully off their phones is a good thing.
CEOs and boards of directors treat the regular public as either slaves or stupid. I don't know if they believe that or pretend to believe.
Under the current administration, the US is in the process of throttling long term economic growth, cutting itself off from its traditional allies, and pulling back as a global power. China's Communist Party has the most to gain from the end of American greatness.
The free speech crowd who demanded to stop censorship of vile racism and bigotry (while pretending to not believe in it themselves) are awefully silent when actual state censorship happens.
Meanwhile, UpScrolled was #1 in social media App Store charts in the US, and #2 overall.
Well, besides that TikTok is censoring “Epstein” now. Is that a tech issue as well?
If you can upload any video but ICE brutality then I want to conduct system design session with their architect, tech lead, and CTO!
Freedom of speech, right ? ... My god, the US are so fucked up.
What's disappointing is that this precise thing was happening during people trying to report on Gaza issues, and were encountering ghost "technical issues" and shadow bannings/outright bannings, but any such discussion about it here seemed to be getting flagged.
Honestly I'm surprised people don't jump ship more often with social media platforms. With TikTok this is kind of new news, but there have been related problems with it that have been pretty obvious for some time.
The same with X and, before that, Facebook.
TikTok has never worked for me though so maybe there's no real equivalent alternative. Maybe time to make one if not?
To me it says something about the public, but I'm not sure what. I'm tempted to attribute it to indifference or complacency but I'm aware of network effects and the reality of alternatives.
Sometimes I feel like education and theory about security practices needs to extend beyond micro-level phenomena like passwords, to things like administrative conflicts of interest and strength in decentralization and competition. Private monopolies and quasi-monopolies aren't just economically bad, they're bad for privacy and security, and make the public vulnerable through lack of choice. In important ways it doesn't matter if it's the government or a private company; whenever power concentrates it is easier to align and abuse.
Are you really surprised? I find the interest entirely unrelatable, but I'm not surprised. They tune these platforms for addiction. I mean, I don't even use them but I still immediately recognize their branding video-end sounds just from random exposure here or there. (I hate it)
I'm surprised in the sense that it seems a few times we've been exposed to various problems arising from social media manipulation or censorship — of the right and left variety actually — so I'd think people might be more sensitive to it at this point.
Part of it too I guess is my personal experience with people I know who will complain about a platform repeatedly (in terms of algorithmic political manipulation) and then turn around and continue to use it voluminously, sending links to stuff on the platform over and over again, etc. (not speaking just about TikTok in particular, with a few sites). It has this feeling similar to if they complained about how awful a food item tastes, and expressed concerns about it being poison, but then continued to binge eat it daily.
Maybe they figure it's just inevitable or something, or maybe you're right about reinforcement contingencies. Maybe it's as simple as that.
> Honestly I'm surprised people don't jump ship more often with social media platforms.
Most people don’t pick one social media platform and use it for 100% of everything.
They’ll switch between TikTok, Reddit, Instagram, and others during the day.
It’s not hard to see when one of those platforms is missing discussion of current events.
Classic big. You just have to set the MANIPULATE env var to false in the container. It's true by default.
I'm not seeing this. I uploaded a video earlier today comparing sending in Tom Homan to replace Greg Bongino to sending in Ghostface to replace Jason Voorhees -- both still murderers. Unless they're lying to me about the view count and fabricating comments, something like 400 people have seen it and a dozen have commented -- most calling me an idiot, but whatever.
Where is that HN thread where everyone was saying how bad it would be for Biden to ban Tiktok? Let's see how it can be used to manipulate the upcoming elections in the US this year. Except now they can't be banned, they're American!
freedom of speech my a*
Freedom of speech has literally never prevented a private company from controlling the content on its platform.
Platform allows criticism of a government.
That government forces the platform to be sold to a billionaire ally.
Platform’s new owner immediately bans criticism of said government.
“Not a first amendment issue, it’s a private company”
"private company"
Ah you mean an app that the US forced to be sold to a private company that certainly agreed behind the scenes to certain terms of the government?
Yeah.. completely independent private company...
It did before the internet. See Marsh v. Alabama where publicly accessible ( private sidewalk) on private property was ruled the people there still could exercise 1A rights and could not be trespassed for doing so even if the owners forbid it.
How does freedom of speech allow you to walk somewhere you have been forbidden from walking? Does that mean you can just go into any building you want and use your 1A rights to not be arrested?
You can read the case. Basically it was a privately owned public space that they could have been otherwise trespassed from, but not for the reason of their speech. Since the reason for the trespass was their speech, it was prohibited. They were not otherwise "forbidden" from walking there were it not they expressed something that was disapproved of.
A weak analogy (I know analogy are never allowed here because "they're not the same") is that you can fire someone at will. Unless it turns out you fired them because they are black (yes I know being black is much different than expressing an opinion). It didn't mean you can't fire them at will, just that you couldn't for that specific protected reason.
Although at this point we're well well past the goalpost of "Freedom of speech has literally never prevented a private company from controlling the content on its platform" and down into the weeds of how it happened. The case clearly prevented the company from fully controlling the content of its sidewalk platform.
Well… how do you reconcile that probably-truth with the Twitter Files? What do you call it when they private company censors at the demand of the government?
You mean https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_Files
These twitter files:
"After the first set of files was published, various technology and media journalists said that the reported evidence demonstrated little more than Twitter's policy team struggling with difficult decisions, but resolving such matters swiftly. Some conservatives said that the documents demonstrated what they called Twitter's liberal bias...
In June 2023, lawyers working for Twitter contested many of the claims made in the Twitter Files in court. According to CNN, 'the filing by Musk's own corporate lawyers represents a step-by-step refutation of some of the most explosive claims to come out of the Twitter Files and that in some cases have been promoted by Musk himself.'
"
The nothingburger Twitter Files?
Just say no to any/all forms of corporate owned social media. They are toxic and antithetical to freedom of speech and true community building. Inevitably, all of them will eventually be used to disseminate propaganda.
Just throwing these out there for people looking for options: Check out Piefed for a Reddit-like, and lobste.rs for an HN-like.
The fediverse might not be booming with activity to the same degree as the big names, but there’s plenty out there and it has a pleasant small-forum vibe that went extinct on the bigger sites a long time ago.
What happens if the creators load the video first with a different title and different contextual information, then if the video gets loaded, they change the title and the content afterwards?
Dupe of another post that was mysteriously flagged: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46777652
Anecdotally my feed dramatically shifted. My politics are very leftwing, and prior to the transfer virtually every video was discourse on ICE. Following the transfer, I get content that is all over the place. At one point, I got 8-9 tiktoks in a row of obviously bot-created rightwing text.
At least on the surface level, I could believe this is just a full algorithm reset and they are having problems with it. But even after other algorithm resets that I believe I've experienced, Tiktok figured it out extremely quickly. If this continues, I will believe in the heavyhanded censorship theory.
As a former employee in TikTok US Data Services, the division that was stated working to separate the US TikTok service and infrastructure, I wouldn’t be so quick to dismiss the algorithm reset theory, because the reset this time is qualitatively unlike the others.
Since 2020, when the first Trump administration attempted to ban TikTok, work has been ongoing to separate out the TikTok US business in all aspects from the parent company Bytedance. Setting up dedicated infrastructure for US users was already accomplished by 2023 for the most part, and this included the restriction that US user data couldn’t be used to train or otherwise influence non-US user operations.
However, there were a few major caveats. First, all the actual videos, at least if they’re public, were considered to be Bytedance data, even those created by US users (although the actual user intent signals - likes, watch behavior, and the like, were considered to be US user data). This allowed them to be used to train the main Bytedance-owned algorithm. Second, the Bytedance-trained algorithm continued to form the basis of the algorithm to serve US users. At least when I was there, US user data was used to tune the algorithm for US users, but the algorithm was not necessarily trained from scratch only on US user data in practice.
One of Bytedance’s main conditions for the TikTok US sale has always been that they own the algorithm (both the code and the models) and would not transfer it to the US, so this was definitely a foreseeable issue. With the chaos of the TikTok Us divestment between the Biden and Trump administrations, though, I suspect that it was hard to hire and retain ML engineers that could build a proper replacement for the algorithm in time for the divestment, let alone build one that matches the behavior of the previous algorithm.
If the algorithm is separated between US and non-US as strictly as the TikTok US Data Services mission always aimed for, then TikTok for US users is in many respects a new service entirely that shares the same UI and features. I also don’t know how US users get trained on non-US content, or if they’re even exposed, nor if any other countries use the US algorithm. So this change in content may last at least into the medium term, if not permanently. The question will be if you start seeing more left-wing anti-ICE content in the coming weeks or months.
Will US folks still get other nation's video's? Will other nations get US videos?
From the divestiture announcement, the answer appears to be yes to both: https://newsroom.tiktok.com/announcement-from-the-new-tiktok...
Glowing endorsement for the Oracle investment
Surprisingly convenient accident that happened miraculously just a few days after ownership transfer to the US owners.
You also can't talk about Epstein apparently.
Some guys from the other French thread will tell me that government should legislate social networks.. yeah, sure bud.
what a bunch of enormous pussies ICE are, to have tiktok do this... lol, they're children, man. children with guns.
You elected yourself oligarchy. Good luck getting rid of it now.
I hope for the good of mankind, all sides of politics unite against deplatforming and oppressing opposing viewpoints.
It's sad that certain topics (anti-ICE, Epstein) neutered on a social media platform, but this went on for years when the politics were reversed.
Let everyone have their say, I say.
But the thing is people aren’t having “their say”. Social media companies are amplifying voices and viewpoints. They are not acting as “common carriers” letting quality sift to the top. It is curated and crafted.
Now they're thumbing down the scale for censorship.
“Letting quality sift to the top” implies that there is a way for this to happen without curation.
Pure user vote driven things like Reddit are a failure (echo chambers, emotional appeals, bot rings, etc). So I’m curious what you think would let that happen?
Even HN is heavily moderated to maintain topics.
Moderation is not amplification.
I am not sure why this was flagged but I don’t think it’s wrong. I am not sure if it’s a uniquely American thing but the internet has caused an unfortunate case of brigading for almost anything. I like to think I sit fairly middle in a lot of American topics I lean left on some items, taxes, healthcare, free school lunches and right on others but I remember how easy it was a number of years ago to be labeled a racist. You really cannot have an opinion about much these days without someone labeling you something unfavorably. It’s unfortunate.
Ironically, "labelling" someone else is an act of free speech as much as anything else.
I don’t think it’s ironic and my point was not the act of labeling itself but more of how America has become a brigading culture. Free speech should be protected, even for things that we know are wrong but we have this decay of the internet and culture where you are either with someone or against them.
But that's my point: what you call "brigading" is other people using their free speech in a way you don't like.
I think we are talking past each other a bit.
I am not objecting to people expressing disagreement or labeling as an abstract exercise of free speech. I am pointing to a pattern that has become common online where disagreement quickly turns into coordinated pile-ons, identity assignment, and social signaling rather than substantive engagement with the argument itself.
Free speech protects the right to do that, but it does not mean the behavior is healthy or productive. When discourse collapses into binary alignment where nuance is treated as hostility, it discourages honest participation and pushes people toward silence or extremes.
So yes, others are exercising free speech. My concern is about the cultural outcome of how that speech is increasingly used, not whether it is permitted.
Increasingly society in America is either you are with us or not and at least for me my view of the world is more nuanced and day to day.
> I am pointing to a pattern that has become common online where disagreement quickly turns into coordinated pile-ons, identity assignment, and social signaling rather than substantive engagement with the argument itself.
It's easy to fall prey to the fallacy that disagreement with you means the disagreers are failing to engage substantively to the topic, and are simply "social signaling".
It's easy to dismiss many people disagreeing with you as a "coordinated pile on".
In my experience, these accusations are usually a result of the "piled on"'s failure to understand and consider the others' perspective, and their unwillingness to change their mind.
Not to say that they must understand and consider others' perspectives, or that they must be willing to change their mind either! But engaging with a society means facing social pressure to conform with social norms. There's always not engaging with society in any meaningful way, as an option.
I agree those are real failure modes, and I am not denying they happen. People absolutely misread disagreement as bad faith, or assume coordination where there is none, especially when emotions are involved.
Where I differ is that I do not think this is only an individual perception problem. There are structural incentives online that reward signaling, amplification, and rapid norm enforcement over slower, substantive engagement. That does not require explicit coordination to function like a pile on, and it does not require bad intent from participants.
Social pressure and norm enforcement are inevitable in any society, as you note. My concern is about degree and speed. When the dominant response to a nonconforming view is immediate identity assignment or moral framing rather than argument, the space for persuasion narrows quickly. At that point, engagement becomes less about exchanging ideas and more about sorting people.
Opting out is always an option, but that feels like conceding that meaningful public discourse online is no longer worth defending. I am not convinced that is a good outcome either.
> There are structural incentives online that reward signaling, amplification
Those same structural incentives reward people organizing around a topic about which they're genuinely both passionate and informed. So how are you determining the difference?
> and rapid norm enforcement over slower, substantive engagement
Different people have different opinions over whether violation of norms should be tolerated, and how quickly. Note that this is different from tolerating disagreement, but some disagreement is so heinous as to violate norms in and of itself (e.g. a nazi salute).
> That does not require explicit coordination to function like a pile on, and it does not require bad intent from participants.
Sure, but a "pile on", which I'll refer to by the more impartial term "many people disagreeing with a person or their take" or "many people validly expressing that a person has violated norms" is totally okay and valid in a society. The speed and degree of that enforcement is itself a social norm, and if it seems people prefer a high speed and high degree, then that is the norm.
I could speculate why that has become the norm, but I'll just generalize that there is a lot of hurt going around, and a lot of callousness to it, and a lot of failures of the traditional ways of addressing it, like shame.
I do not think there is a clean, mechanical way to distinguish passion and expertise from signaling in the moment, and I am not claiming omniscience there. My point is about aggregate behavior and incentives, not adjudicating individual intent. Systems that reward visibility, speed, and alignment will naturally select for responses that optimize for those traits, regardless of whether participants are sincere, informed, or acting in good faith.
On norms, I agree there are cases where the content itself is the violation, not merely a disagreement. Extreme examples make that clear. Where it becomes tricky is that the boundary of what counts as norm violating has expanded and become more fluid, while the enforcement mechanisms have become faster and more punitive. That combination raises the risk of false positives and discourages exploratory or imperfect reasoning, even when the underlying intent is not malicious.
I also agree that many people disagreeing is not inherently a problem. What I am pushing back on is the framing that this is always just neutral preference aggregation. When enforcement becomes immediate, public, and identity focused, it changes the cost structure of participation. The fact that a norm exists does not automatically mean it is optimal for discourse, only that it is currently dominant.
Your last point about hurt and callousness is important. I suspect that is part of the explanation. But if widespread hurt leads us to default to faster and harsher sorting rather than engagement, it seems reasonable to ask whether that tradeoff is actually helping us understand each other better, or just making the lines more rigid.
"Labelling" is different than censorship though, no?
I think it’s all part of the same culture of brigading. My comment was more an extension of thought to the parents that America has gone down a hole where dialogue no longer exists.
> but I remember how easy it was a number of years ago to be labeled a racist
Centrist my ass
I am going to vouch for this comment because this is a great example of what I was describing. People jump to whatever conclusion they want and you are either with them or without. It’s sad what has come to be in society.
People jump to the conclusion because a lot of the time they've had this exact argument already, and they know how it tends to end.
Proclaiming oneself a centrist might seem like a noble, moderate position. But in 2026, with the Overton window basically being shifted outside the frame?
What argument are we having? I see someone struggling to hold their own words steady, and you claiming that I am proclaiming something when I only mentioned it because of this exact problem. I do not really think of myself as left or right within the current American political system. I do not follow either political party, and my opinions often zig zag across existing party lines. If anything, maybe “centrist” is the wrong or overly loaded word. I do not follow any particular political movement in America.
The point still stands brigading is a massive problem in America.
I'm not having an argument. I was just trying to explain that "I'm not left or right" sounds like "I am perfectly fine with how things are right now" to the people who think the current state of things is an absolute disaster.
> they've had this exact argument
Maybe it’s not obvious but you compared the thread to an argument. I see no argument. Just a boneheaded reply from someone which was a great example of exactly what I was describing.
Your follow up is pretty on point too, somehow we go from the topic of brigading to maybe me being ok with the current state of things. This is a really great example of the problem I was describing. Thank you.
He is accusing you of not beign "leftist enough", which he regards the same as beign a traitor to the "good" side
Do I need to be present for this thread, or are you capable of projecting the rest all on your own?
You can't have all side of politics unite when one side is doing that thing you want to unite against.
I don't know.
I think that over the years, bad faith actors in the world of geopolitics have taken advantage of this in a very nefarious way in order to sow chaos, bad-faith/purposefully-inaccurate "talking points" and capture the hearts and minds of the ignorant, the stupid, and the willfully delusional masses who are desperate to cling to a conspiracy if it fits their worldview which is in turn reinforced by said bad actors.
Is it a potentially unconstitutional slippery slope? yes, absolutely. Is it something we need to tackle as adults and citizens? yes, absolutely. Should the desires of SV tech bro billionaires have any input in those discussions? no, absolutely not.
To me, the media is/are nothing more than drug sellers at this point. They have their weapon "of truth" sold to the very people you listed above. I do my absolute best to not consume any media because I know it is twisted and often wrong (eg. AI generated content). The best I can do is simply not participate in their war. Reddit, TikTok, X, etc are definitely supplying heavy drugs to anyone who wants to be hooked.
At some point, we definitely need a cooling-off period where people from both sides refrain from inciting anger from the masses.
Yeah except when it comes to what this was really about, in which case "all sides" happily go along with it. As it turns out censorship to protect our precious zionist ethnostate is something everybody agrees with.
the right wing furor about deplatforming and media bias was always just a bad faith rhetorical tactic. When Musk bought Twitter, it became clear that there was no conspiratorial algorithmic suppression -- in fact, the code showed that the only thumb on the scales was to promote Musk's own account. The right wing owned essentially all the media before, and within the last few years they also own Twitter, Facebook, The Washington Post, TikTok, Paramount, CBS, and are trying to grab CNN.
There isn't an all-sides argument here; there's one side in almost total control of the entire discourse, whining about being victims, and promotingly increasingly insane viewpoints.
"it became clear that there was no conspiratorial algorithmic suppression". Yes, the Twitter files showed that the suppression was done mostly by humans.
the twitter files, what a laugh. Can you point to a particular part of the twitter files that was not obviously overblown, wrong, or subsequently thoroughly discredited that supports your claim of conspiratorial right wing suppression? Here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_Files
Not to mention, the largest media distributors / syndicates were parroting increasingly right-wing talking points instead of staying neutral or simply presenting the facts and letting the viewer come to their own conclusions.
there is no left-wing media machine that even comes within a billion light years of the strength of the right-wing machine. Effectively, the entire spectrum is owned by hard-right billionaires.
Media has fallen victim to the need for continuous profits (because they have been targeted over and over by bad faith right wing actors) and the journalistic integrity of the 4th estate has effectively been weaponized by the people who need to be named and shamed.
Why on earth are grownups using TikTok anyway?
Because it has content that's enjoyable for them and they like to interact with the community. Same reason you're on hackernews.
I dunno, why do grownups watch TV?
Hopefully people will start seeing social media as what it is: a cheap, shitty, and extremely addictive drug. I am confident that in time, the opposite opinion will be viewed as insane.
As much as I dislike TikTok, I dislike this dangerous mischaracterization even more. If you start propagating the meme that screens are like chemically addictive drugs the governments of the world will feel emboldened to use violence force to 'regulate' them. Screens are not drugs. They do not directly manipulate the biochemistry of incentive salience regardless of valence of perceived stimuli. They just provide enjoyable stimuli. It is VASTLY different. Conflating them is playing in to the hands of the authoritarians.
Gambling doesn't directly manipulate biochemistry either. Neither does porn. Both are recognized as addictive. If you think reading Dostoevsky is in the same realm as doom scrolling algorithmically tailored Instagram reels because they're both "enjoyable stimuli," there's not much of a conversation to be had.
This is a thread about government-aligned owners censoring content on a platform the government forced a sale of. The authoritarians already have the thing.
I'm sorry, but "playing in to the hands of the authoritarians" is using shite like TikTok, generating revenue for the authoritarian billionaires who are currently destroying the world.
We are not disagreeing. Definitely do not use TikTok for those and many other reasons. But calling an audio visual stimuli an addictive drug is just as wrong and dangerous. That will lead to those same authoritarians controlling screens with use of force justified by the false metaphor.
State-owned social media?
How many people are willing to even talk about the Twitter Files here?
The what?
You mean https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_Files
These twitter files:
"After the first set of files was published, various technology and media journalists said that the reported evidence demonstrated little more than Twitter's policy team struggling with difficult decisions, but resolving such matters swiftly. Some conservatives said that the documents demonstrated what they called Twitter's liberal bias...
In June 2023, lawyers working for Twitter contested many of the claims made in the Twitter Files in court. According to CNN, 'the filing by Musk's own corporate lawyers represents a step-by-step refutation of some of the most explosive claims to come out of the Twitter Files and that in some cases have been promoted by Musk himself.'
"
The nothingburger Twitter Files?
There have been a number of fake AI-generated videos of police confronting ICE officers lately:
https://gothamist.com/news/ai-videos-of-fake-nypdice-clashes...
I suspect these are some of those that have been banned from TikTok, and there's probably heightened moderation around this content at the moment since people are sharing AI-generated propaganda and riling others into violent confrontation with ICE.
TikTok: Notoriously tough on bullshit ragebait
It's kind of amazing that all the companies act in lockstep. Apple, Google, TikTok remove anti-ICE stuff, rightly or wrongly (I'll go with 'wrongly' because of freedom of speech/freedom of app choice, among other things)
They ALL do incredibly corrupt things
See also re: censorship of messages containing the word Epstein: https://xcancel.com/krassenstein/status/2015911471507530219
Per https://www.npr.org/2026/01/27/nx-s1-5689104/tiktok-epstein-... :
> "We don't have rules against sharing the name 'Epstein' in direct messages and are investigating why some users are experiencing issues," a spokesman for TikTok's U.S. operation told NPR in a statement.
But the evidence in that Twitter thread should be weighed against the spokesperson's statement.
Lmao, I know that 2020 Trump was the first to brought up banning TikTok but it was Biden and Democrat who were vigorous in "controlling" TikTok.
Worthy for fell for it again award.
If there's a flash of light and a town in North Korea suddenly vanishes and becomes a giant crater, and the North Korean government claims it was a natural disaster, I'm going to guess they accidentally nuked themselves.
If TikTok suddenly blocks videos on a topic, and they say it was "technical issues", I'm going to guess the new US overlords accidentally pressed the wrong button.
Wonder how long before that button comes for HN. If Dang starts talking like ChatGPT we'll all know.
Not just anti ICE videos - you can’t even mention Epstein
https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/tiktok-epstein-trump-cens...
It's also blocking the word "test": https://www.theverge.com/news/868362/tiktok-epstein-ban-hoax... Looks like it's just a bug.
Thankfully, I learned from our leaders that was just a hoax!
And HN users can’t upload anti-ICE articles or discuss politics without getting flagged and downvoted.
So I guess HN was just ahead of the curve.
>Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.[0]
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
This has not changed in over ten years https://web.archive.org/web/20140702092610/https://news.ycom...
It may have not changed over ten years but its enforcement I believe has been lacking over the past 1-2 years.
Like I said. Ahead of the curve.
Sure, if you want to compare unexplained censorship to established guidelines. Whatever helps you feel superior
On Twitter, there's a bunch of reports that TikTok suddenly prevents people from sending the word "Epstein" in DMs [1].
I had expected an Orbanisation (aka, what happened to the media sphere in Hungary after Orban took over and his cronies bought up almost all media) of Tiktok, but not that fast, it's like less than a week after the deal [2].
Scary shit if you ask me, and it's made scarier by the fact that Tiktok has already been changing the way our youth speaks due to evading censorship (e.g. "graped" instead of "raped", "unalived" instead of kill/murder/execute/suicide).
[1] https://x.com/krassenstein/status/2015911471507530219
[2] https://techcrunch.com/2026/01/23/heres-whats-you-should-kno...
> but not that fast
Why not? All the tech was already put in place by China. All that the U.S. had to do was change the filtered words.
What words were China filtering? I've never seen reports of censorship like this on TikTok before Ellison bought it.
Enough of them to give rise to the term "algospeak" which means using words like "unalive" in place of "kill" to avoid automated censorship.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algospeak
Meanwhile you can report a bot who's posted 20+ comments under a video to advertise illegal drugs and all of the reports and subsequent appeals will consistently come back as "No violation found".
This has been happening for 10+ years on e.g. YouTube, you can't say certain words in the video or mention them in the title or you get demonetized. Nothing to do with China.
> you can't say certain words in the video or mention them in the title or you get demonetized
That's not censorship problems.
That's advertisement problems. That's conflicts of interest problems. That's incentives problems. That's people-who-post-videos-just-to-make-money problems.
Well, okay, it can easily be turned into censorship problems: instead of just demonetizing the video, don't show it to anyone. It's quite a fine line, but the line is indeed there.
>> All the tech was already put in place by China. All that the U.S. had to do was change the filtered words.
> I've never seen reports of censorship like this on TikTok before Ellison bought it.
Does "kill" have some type of salient political valence that I'm not aware of?
This seems like a fairly blunt attempt at quality-of-life improvement for the general platform vibes, no? Put some friction on the (legitimate) nutjobs who just want to say "Kill X, kill Y" all the time and are so insane they can't figure out euphemisms?
On WeChat lots of things are censored, almost keyword based. E.g. a building collapses, you want to talk about it to your friends, your message can't be sent because it'll be deemed to be trying to cause social unrest..
Duoyin (Chinese version of TikTok) would definitely not be different..
On WeChat and Douyin (chinese tiktok), good luck mentioning things like:
the cultural revolution famine the great leap forward Taiwanese independence Hong Kong self governance democracy human rights Falun Gong Uyghur people free speech KMT party Chiang Kai-shek
and that's just off the top of my head. there are likely hundreds of others.
But did this apply to the US version of TikTok? We now have imposed censorship in the US app, that as far as I'm aware did not exist at all when it was owned by China.
> did this this apply to the US version of TikTok?
Yup. China doesn't want you to know about Chinese problems or history, like Tianenmen Square.
> as far as I'm aware did not exist at all when it was owned by China.
Then either you weren't paying attention or the filters were working against you as intended.
You say yes, but do you have any evidence to back that up? I’ve never seen any credible reporting suggesting China was censoring any topic on TikTok.
But this blatant move shows "We're no different to the Chinese ruling party now"... If it's a slow descent, people might accept the madness (imagine if a bombshell report showed Biden had links to Epstein, sexually assaulted 20+ women, and was moaning about the Nobel Peace Prize to the prime minister of Norway)...
Somehow I'm optimistic that this means the Trump Regime is on its last legs. But well, what's the quote about underestimating the stupidity of the American public?
> But this blatant move shows "We're no different to the Chinese ruling party now"
Yup!
I had expected a longer "cooldown" time so that people don't immediately jump to the conclusion that the forced TikTok sale was to suppress discussion of the Epstein files.
No, the forced bipartisan support TikTok sale was to suppress discussion of Palestine.
It’s so blatant, it’s more like trolling at this point.
The Epstein situation is .. weird. On the one hand, it's a massive nexus of corruption and abuse. On the other hand, it's just .. evidence. Nobody cares about evidence, they've already decided they want to protect the Trump administration no matter what. Rather like ICE shooting legal gun owner US civilians.
I believe everyone here realizes there are several highly used media platforms (some bigger than TikTok, like Instagram), that are posting the videos without any issues. You also realize that there are US TV stations playing those videos almost non-stop, right?
People laugh at MAGA conspiration theories backed by Fox News, but their conpiration theories - backed by CNN - sound just as insane for anyone that didn't buy into any of the 2 extremes...
well… i submitted it as https://lite.cnn.com/2026/01/26/tech/tiktok-ice-censorship-g... but i guess HN drops the lite off of it? le sigh, here’s hoping someone can frontpage one of these tiktok censorship stories today…?
Looks like this one made it to the front page.
Interesting times…
My mother was born just after WWII—died a few years ago. As sad as I have been (still am) when I watch the world fall apart around me I am thankful that she at least lived through perhaps the best stretch American history—does not have to see the shit I am seeing daily (she was the type that would have been unconsolably anxious about it).
I feel badly, so far, for my daughters born roughly in the period around September 11, 2001. Still, I'm hopeful they might yet see even a brighter future than I had growing up in the 70's…
Based on this comment, I think we are around the same age. I'm 55 and have two kids born in the early 2000's.
I was born in Canada in 1970 to loving and extraordinarily supportive parents and moved to the US in the mid 90's. I can't imagine a better time or place to have been born. I have kids around the same age as yours and their lives are so much more difficult even though they are smarter and harder working than I ever was.
I am the first generation after the fall of Salazar's dictorship, so naturally I belong to those that had the opportunity to grow in freedom while hearing the stories from everyone that suffered from it, the dead and crippled from colonial wars, many sent as punishment for their political views and so on.
Never I though that I would still see the return to such politics in my lifetime, even in Europe it is getting harder to push back on them.
> I am thankful that she at least lived through perhaps the best stretch American history—does not have to see the shit I am seeing daily
I think the Vietnam War was much worse than what you are seeing daily...
Meta note: it would be awesome to collate a list of 'better ways to view populate sites'. For example, I only learned recently that replacing www with old in a reddit url takes you to a less cluttered version of the site. And I only recently bookmarked a couple of 'archiving' sites (important for reading content that's paywalled). TIL your cnn 'lite' technique.
Yeah, rock the 'old'. New reddit is TikTok Jr.
Sure, 'technical issues'. Just like the filtering around epstein, mussad, etc. Right-wing billionaires like to ensure the speech matches their preferences.
I really want to know which directions data is flowing. How much of an island is Elli-Tok? Do videos from the US appear internationally? International to US? ByteDance famously isn't giving up the algorithm, but what user data does Elli-Tok get and what do they send, or does Elli-Tok have to totally rebuild the algorithm from scratch using only US viewers?
This whole thing is such a shit show. The US government right now looks like a total ass of all asses on the world stage, but this TikTok business of the US demanding our country get to take over a social network preceeds this era of major fuckery by a good tick. And is just so stupid, so not what governments should do. Even if we hadn't had Trump just hand it over to his preferred "buyers" the Ellison's, it's just a grade a fuckup, absolute bedlam to do this, completely delegitmizes the US.
TikTok v. Garland and the First Amendment Anticanon paper by Evelyn Douek just came out, talking to what a first class First Amendment fuck up the unanimous Supreme Court decision was. Excellent read. Just could not have done a worst job, unbelievable nonsense that let this madness just persist & amplify. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6118706
I predict a future showdown over Section 230 because "algorithms" are used to cheat on the safe harbor protections. Let me explain.
The general principle of Section 230 is that a platform provider isn't generally liable for user generated content. This was a key piece of legislation that enabled forums, Reddit and ultimately social media. The platform provider does have responsibilities like moderating illegal content and responding to legal takedowns, etc.
Alternatively if you produce and publish your own content you are legally liable. You can be sued for defamation, etc in a way that you can't if you simply host user generated content (unless you fail to adequately moderate).
REcommendation algorithms (including news feeds) effectively allow a platform provider to select what content gets distributed and what doesn't. All algorithms express biases and goals of humans who create those algorithms. It's not a black box. It is a reflection of the company's goals.
So if you wanted to produce content that's, for example, only flattering to the administration even if you outright lie, you can be sued. But what if your users produce any content you want but you only distribute content that is favorable to the administration? At the same time, you suppress anti-administration content and content creators. It's the same end result but the latter has Section 230 protections. And it really shouldn't.
This isn't hypothetical. The Biden administration revived the dead Trump 1 Tiktok ban to suppress anti-Israel content [1][2][3].
What I find most funny about all this is that the American administration--both parties--are doing the exact thing they accuse China is possibly doing in the future.
[1]: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/11/10/tiktok-faces-renew...
[2]: https://www.internetgovernance.org/2024/03/18/yes-its-a-ban-...
The purchase of TikTok is interesting. Ellison is first and foremost pro Trump, and pro-Israel. TikTok was one of the few companies that allowed videos against the status quo (the propaganda our media pushes), which has only grown more biased now that Bari Weiss (again, a Pro Trump, pro Israel shill) is heading a large media organization. Censorship and controlling the media is one of the first tenets of bad actors. By controlling the flow of information, the truth can be obfuscated (that is why for instance, Israel has a total ban on covering Ghaza for western media. So that war crimes can go unnoticed, and thereby, it is as if they never occured). If we do not share anti-Ice videos, then they simply do not occur. For is the truth really factual, if it is left in darkness. A war on facts is concerning. I see videos of Mr Preti in drag on my feeds, clearly generated by AI, and shared by boomers. Disparaging the dead and the war on facts is highly concerning. That is why Noem does not release body cam footage of the ICE execution of Good and Preti. The only comfort I can find is that Noem and Ellison, and the Trump admin and Israel, are just plain bad at their job. Many years ago, Ellison was well known in SV circles to badly desire to be called like Jobs, in an almost comical way, like a kid asking his parents whether he is like that wrestler he saw on TV when he imitated one of his moves (he used to dress like him, and ask anyone around at his parties about the similarities between the two). They still miserably fail at controlling public sentiment, which is only growing against them day by day, as it rightfully should. Whether or not that leads to a tangible action against these bad actors is to be waited for. Rarely does anything happen though. The war criminals that lied and killed civilians in Vietnam and Iraq enjoyed their ranches. Netanyahu and trump will someday retire and enjoy their old days, after wrecking havoc on the innocent.
When you force the sale of a company in order to control the political messages that its users post, the wailing and gnashing of teeth that comes when that power is exercised is entirely performative.
Weren't anti-ICE people just calling it "freeze peach" a minute ago? This is what that looks like. This is the group that repeated "nothingburger" over and over again when you said that government directly and publicly threatening private businesses if they didn't censor individuals was bad.
This is political. The Democrats began their open hatred of the left in the 90s when the Democrats cracked down on free speech during the anti-globalization protests (the introduction of fenced-in "free speech zones"), the party went all in on Iraq against the wishes of all people who were paying attention, Hillary Clinton mocked the left for objecting to a wall between Mexico and the United States, and Rahm Emanuel described people who wanted single-payer as "fucking retards."
Now the bizarre group of media-addicted partisans that now calls themselves the "left" fight for free trade and imported slave labor. They remind you that there are jobs that are too awful for Americans that are totally appropriate for Mexicans. That manufacturing is actually worthless, and we should import everything because as a reserve currency there's no need to produce anything. Trade deficits can be infinite, and America is meant to be a black hole, sucking in the worlds production and handing it to the rich. But the rich are bad, although we're giving them every single thing they want. Their politics judged on policy are to the right of Nixon. The only illegal immigrants they know are their employees. They've left behind Floyd, Illegal is the new Black.
Now, on HN, this isn't politics. This is something else. Only black people and women are politics. The creation of a masked, militarized federal police force filled with morons to enforce federal immigration law because Democratic cities and states are refusing to enforce it themselves? Not politics. The performance of Trump's street roundups to rally his base (and the working people in this country that are undercut by illegal labor, and the racists who think every Mexican is a rapist) while ignoring and writing exceptions for the corporations that employ illegal labor? Not politics.
Sorry, I meant something something something Russia, China, Iran, Nazis. And some specious, offensive comparison of people who just got here in order to make money to Black Americans enslaved and segregated over centuries.
I became entralled and hypnotised by 90s liberalism. Convinced that their ‘change’ would actually happen, I backed their candidates and media for 30 years waiting for a solution to even the lowest hanging fruit. Instead of getting any solution at all, I watched them rope in more rubes for ‘bigger and better issues’. The self-righteous, like the younger me, are so easily redirected.
Meta comment: it seems like you can only voice a particular direction on the politic topic of immigration enforcement on this thread without getting downvoted. The opinion is obvious because everyone automatically jumps to malice as opposed to incompetence as the prevailing theory for the article's claim.
I had a condescending response from a HN mod the other day telling me that HN isn't all that left wing, just a 'slight skew'. Well OK buddy, exhibit A, read through the diversity of opinions that aren't flagged in this thread. I'd go as far to say that HN is basically like Reddit, except more of you happen to have computer science degrees.
And that's fine, it is what it is, but let's not pretend this website doesn't have a heavy bias in a particular direction.
From what I know, politologists are analyzing the situation in US from a perspective of "mid intensity civil war".
So what you're writing is aligned with tactics you'd expect...?
immigration enforcement has existed for as long as HN has existed, yet there was never this much attention paid to it. Even under the same president during the previous term.
So simply supporting or opposing "immigration enforcement" must not be it. Something must be different about this situation. I encourage you to dig deeper, or actually ask those who disagree with you, what that difference might be. And beware of falling victim to the easy dismissal of 'more people are less rational and/or less informed than before', a variant of 'this person who doesn't agree with me must be less rational and/or less informed than me'.