I would also add full responsibility for social platforms for actions of their visitors that they allowed on their premises. Similar to how, say, we accept responsibility of a private park owner allowing public visitors to.
https://harvardlawreview.org/blog/2024/09/courts-should-hold...
PS: somebody flagged your comment, I clicked "vouch" for it.
If you cannot have a particular type of content on your website and it get very popular without the government demanding you sell it to them, then there's a problem. TikTok was the first website to reach social media scale viewership in the US with such anti-American sentiments broadcast on it
Anything else is preferable.
There is (or was) plenty of politically charged content on TikTok. There’s company began to change its tune once its livelyhood required being in Trump’s good graces
Freedom is slavery
War is peace
And I’m for myself.
Once you move into the broadcast realm, the 1-to-all, you’re no longer dealing with a tank or a pond but with an ocean.
And once you’ve created an ocean, you cant divide it so that predators swim in one corner and parasites in another. Everything coexists, mixes, mutates.
That’s why debates about what platforms like TikTok “should” or “shouldn’t” do are hollow. There is never ending debate but all sorts of strangeness and surprises emerge every single day, that no one can predict or control. That is the nature of the Ocean.
Almost no political junkie I know has changed their view on Trump over the past decade. They'll spend hours a day, sometimes hours a week, focused on him, but it ends up absolutely having no positive impact on their selves or their lives (usually a large negative impact).
Then I ask them about their local politicians, where they stand on certain issues, what their record is, what's been happening with their local government - and they have absolutely no clue. They can't even recall who was running in the previous local primary, or why they voted for who they voted for.
They're wasting countless hours on Trump and national politics because it feels good. Then they won't even spend a fraction learning about things that could actually make an important difference in their voting, because it's too boring for them. Even worse, many people will try to pass off these actions as being virtuous or being informed.
Politics exceeds politicians and specific partisan things. Politics shapes your life and that of your loved ones.
It's not simply about arguing online about stuff.
I'm my opinion one should be informed about local, national and world politics. Also history. What happens in the US unfortunately impacts my country (currently very directly; you are about to bail out Argentina, my country, just because Trump likes our president), so I'm paying attention.
What good does "paying attention" serve? Are you standing ready to send Trump a well timed tweet to get him on your side? Or maybe boycott US products? That's the problem with the 24/7 news cycle. There's "breaking news" happening all the time, and glued to your screen to stay "informed", but what does that actually do?
Moreover the OP isn't even against staying informed. He specifically points out the contrast being glued to some national issue that has no impact on his life, but isn't informed at all for any local issue that actually impacts his life.
I don't understand this position. What good does knowing anything about anything serve? What good does reading about history do?
I like being informed about the world and matters that affect me. Trump extending a lifeline to my disastrous government has implications for my life in our upcoming elections, and possibly beyond (they are saying the bailout comes with draconian "conditions"). I also care about more indirect ramifications and what it means for our sovereignty.
I like being informed about the world.
> He specifically points out the contrast being glued to some national issue that has no impact on his life, but isn't informed at all for any local issue that actually impacts his life.
You can and should be informed about both. There are no issues with absolutely zero impact in your life. Maybe they won't impact now, immediately and in a way that you notice, but in the longer term they will. Even as a trend for your nation.
Everything in life is political (just not about political parties, not sure why people conflate the two things).
If they do what you suggest, all the creativity that makes the platform attractive is going to flock to somewhere else.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_by_TikTok#LGBTQ+_an...
They went out of their way to pick on disabled people, out of all groups. I don't even think there's a party on either side of the spectrum that's like "fuck disabled people". It's pretty obvious that even before the recent acquisition they were trying to cater to a specific type of content.
Maybe censorship is the problem, not the solution. The fact that people are allowed to use a medium to talk about things you aren't interested in doesn't imply that you can't use it to talk about the things you are.
No, because it does a poor job at disseminating information. The best you can do is robocall, and that quickly gets hung up on/ignored.
> How about the newspapers? The printing press?
The second half of the 20th century was more or less a golden age of objective journalism, but it wasn't always that way. Newspapers used to explicitly partisan and had poor journalistic standards: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism
Moreover in the 2000s 24/7 cable TV channels were widely criticized for sensationalism to drive viewership. That's the closest analog to /r/all, where there's always some sort of political crisis happening every day.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/24-hour_news_cycle#Critical_as...
I omitted the "vast wasteland" of television on purpose: it's the major medium that suffered pervasive government censorship in the US.
>Yet those very partisan newspapers created a public that was, by all accounts, far better informed than the public of the 20th century you think was a "golden age".
Are you claiming that the public was better informed in the 19th century than in the 20th? That's a wild claim to make, not least because the former had far worse literacy rates.
That's one of the things that's tiring about these debates. Too many people only view "free speech" as a rhetorical cudgel, using it to hit "the other side" when it's convenient, then immediately discarding it and going back to "freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences!" when it's not.
- Isn’t the point of apps like TikTok that they show you content that is interesting to you? Why can’t they show politics to people who are interested but not to people who aren’t?
- Does TikTok ban all political content? Or just some? Do they ban all “non-joyful” content? Or just some?
- Might this be related to the sale of TikTok to American investors linked to Trump?
How far can we extend this? Assuming AI is good enough to detect shock gore/shock images, why have content guidelines at all? If I want to watch ISIS/cartel beheading videos, why should I have to go to another platform? The standard in the US for clamping down on free speech is "imminent lawless action", so it's unlikely to run afoul of any laws. You can even make the argument that it's bad to ban them, because they're conveying some important information and to do otherwise would be "I want to be kept in the dark and resume my mindless consumption of brainrot". If that's too far fetched for you, replace "beheading videos" with "gaza or ukranian war footage".
>- Does TikTok ban all political content? Or just some? Do they ban all “non-joyful” content? Or just some?
See wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_by_TikTok#Politics
They've also been accused of having a left bias by the right.
This is why TikTok is not a lens you should perceive the world through, or get "controversial" news from. It's a highly curated feed to maximize long term engagement and profits. Cortisol, the stress hormone, is the "situational avoidance" hormone [1].
> High glucocorticoid stress-responses are associated with prolonged freezing reactions and decreased active approach and avoidance behavior in animals.
Increasing a chemical that is tied to avoiding an activity is in complete odds with the goals of TikTok.
Consider that Facebook's conclusions are why they don't have anything remotely as successful as TikTok, for engagement.
> in the best interest of the users?
I don't understand this. Is this some moral motive? TikTok is an independent for profit company that has a product with better engagement than any other in the world. Within that context, yes, it's in the best interest for the user, measured by engagement.
The algorithm optimizes for engagement.
This is outside of that optimization because it is outright just removing this content, not even considering it for display.
This is based on what? Another assumption could be that the algorithm identified this as "net negative".
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/mar/17/tiktok-tr...
> who appeared too ugly, poor or disabled
From the engagement perspective, you'll find that movie stars, social media stars, CEOs, and even politicians (with some famous presidential results [1]) are, nearly without exception, attractive and fit. Why?
TikTok is also significantly better for content creators and has more useful tooling. TikTok lets videos be downloaded by default which is why most Instagram Reels (tm) and YouTube Shorts (tm) are actually TikToks someone uploaded.
TikTok was a problem for the US Government both because it outshone US firms -- ironically by making the algorithm show more interesting and appealing content to users, rather than the "viral" rubbish that overtakes the incumbents feeds... and also because it started becoming a source of highly informative citizen journalism, spreading awareness about many social issues, from police brutality to the treatment of the people of Gaza by Israel and the US.
It's the politically sensitive citizen journalism that Bebe considers a "weapon" that needed to be stolen from its creators.
Now, per Larry Ellison's recent comments, everyone's TikTok history is being mined by Oracle to help suppress dissent against Trump's policies and keep people in line.
I've already started noticing a few obviously fake disinformation campaigns that support pro-Trump goals starting to gain ground on TikTok and other social media in the past week or so.
There is absolutely no reason that any country that values freedom of speech and press freedom should confiscate someone else's company to weaponize it against the American people. This is an utterly shameful episode motivated by the worst and darkest human motivations -- controlling others and suppressing the speech of the downtrodden.
Not sure what you mean about it not being relatable to a worldwide audience. I see mostly US content in English and a bit in Spanish, but the algorithm will quickly adapt to show the user content from whatever regions they are interested in.
Almost as if everyone using the same few centralized platforms that they ultimately have no control over is a situation ripe for abuse.
TikTok is still under Chinese ownership. Nothing has changed (yet).
Votes are the output, not the input. Not that officials seems to listen anyway.
NO.
I will never accept this premise and nor should any American. The people ARE the government and they can be influenced any which way they want to be. There shouldn't ever be any such thing as the government "protecting" people from influence. If the people want to all tune into some foreign broadcaster all day and love everything he's saying. That's how the country will be.
The second you accept "oh foreign influence is manipulating our voters to X or Y so it has to be stopped" you are signing the death warrant for free speech. This is EXACTLY the justification used in all sorts of authoritarian garbage places to suppress information and restrict speech
You may worry about citizens being sufficiently educated, you may worry about them having access to enough information to make good decisions. But to restrict information for fear that they may make the “wrong” decision—the one you don’t like—there is nothing democratic about that.
Foreign voices and perspectives are critical to understanding the world as a whole and making informed decisions. If the population isn’t ready to take in that information and sort the wheat from the chaff, then they aren’t ready for democracy.
https://www.nbcnews.com/business/economy/trump-threatens-chi...
With Trump flooding the zone, this news was difficult to find. Much of the press just reported that the deal is practically sealed, which he (probably falsely) bragged about on Truth Social.
So the ICE censorship appears to be still done by Chinese algorithms, perhaps to soften up trade relations or because their algorithms are tuned to censor videos of persons in military gear beating down a citizen anyway.
Let me guess: they censored some leftist content, am I right?
I don't see what the point of your comment is. It seems like you're dunking on "the left" for... being factually correct?
It is this video of ICE arresting a prominent news reporter and slamming them into the ground - it isn't clear she is leftist or simply reporting the news:
https://chicago.suntimes.com/immigration/2025/10/10/feds-arr...
The video starts with her car being faced diagonal, facing the wrong way in traffic, blocking traffic, with an ICE vehicle clipping her trying to go around. What's the context for that? The article has a single sentence, "Jennifer Welday said she first heard honking and yelling just after 8:30 a.m.". Is that related? Was that her honking and yelling? Was that before or after they hit?
There's a cut in the video, then her on the ground. What happened during that cut?
I don't think it's probable that that's what's going on here. But it is possible. And the overlapping concerns of state control & platform censorship seem abundantly clear.
WarOnPrivacy•2h ago
nomel•2h ago
edit: is there some inside knowledge to the data or algorithm that I'm not aware of that's driving these votes? is this some unreasonable perspective? do humans seek stress, long term?
ansley•2h ago
nomel•2h ago
TikToks long history of content moderation appears to be wholly unrelated to the current administration [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_by_TikTok
(not sure why you're comment is negative)
citizenkeen•2h ago
llm_nerd•1h ago
I don't think it has moved to the new structure yet, or the "all the servers in the US with Oracle control of the algo". Maybe they're just getting ready in advance.
Alternately, a motivated subgroup can often coerce platforms. A lot of platforms will engage such moderation simply because enough people brigaded to flag/report something.
nomel•56m ago
> U.S. officials said in September that China had struck a “framework for a TikTok deal.” However, in the following weeks, China has not confirmed that such a deal was agreed to.
> Many experts believe China’s strategy is to keep talking while making few concrete agreements.
llm_nerd•1h ago
It's actually a shocking experience seeing Instagram Reels in comparison. The latter seems to remove extraordinarily little. If you enjoy darker if not offensive humour, it is a much more rewarding experience, though sometimes I just marvel that Meta not only allows this, they seem to encourage it.
aprilthird2021•1h ago