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...
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.
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?
Boden's good, Grump's bad, simple as that. Or Grump's good, Boden's bad doesn't matter.
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.
Just murdered two protestors. A bit of a change there.
Except for China, where TikTok is nothing like the TikTok for the rest of the world
The point is brainwashing.
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.
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).
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...
https://www.npr.org/2024/03/26/1240737627/meta-limit-politic...
https://www.reddit.com/r/OptimistsUnite/comments/1i9zf5u/rco...
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.
Censorship of TikTok is inevitable given the owners, and it will inevitably lead to a new news bubble.
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 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.
That was literally the argument I was responding to and talking about.
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’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).
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...
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.
Note that there have been multiple instances over the past two years of high level ex/current officials repeating the same general point.
Are you an LLM? Last year was 2025, not 2024.
You're also not contradicting the GP, you know. CCP control of information wouldn't manifest as a bunch of videos promoting Xi Jinping Thought. That would be stupid and the CCP isn't stupid. It would be more like the Russian troll playbook (that we spend so much time obsessing over in 2016): amplify existing internal disagreements to create disunity and cynicism. An elevated amount of "pro-Palestinian" content is totally consistent with that, given Israel/Palestine is a controversial and divisive issue.
And it's obviously working. We now have a sizeable minority of American citizens who believe the government has no right to deport convicted criminals who are in the country illegally.
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...
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.
Duoyin (Chinese version of TikTok) would definitely not be different..
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 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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
Centrist my ass
Proclaiming oneself a centrist might seem like a noble, moderate position. But in 2026, with the Overton window basically being shifted outside the frame?
The point still stands brigading is a massive problem in America.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
At some point, we definitely need a cooling-off period where people from both sides refrain from inciting anger from the masses.
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.
Edit: here’s a link to an example https://bsky.app/profile/seaniebyrne.bsky.social/post/3mby7j...
Welp, guess I didn't want to learn about that anyway
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.
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.
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.
They ALL do incredibly corrupt things
it's just retaliation
and obviously, trump will play into this
Note: They also are having "technical difficulties" transmitting DMs with the string "epstein" in them.
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.
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.
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.
That said, I was thinking more about people all of us building tools that got us into the situation we are in now.
In any case it’s also historically illiterate, the IRS has long been used as a political weapon, infamously against “Tea Party” activists.
And ICE says they only go after illegals.
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.
Similarly, you can think it would be good to catch tax fraud, but think that it should be handled without executing folks.
Seems unlikely.
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.
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..
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 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.
kotaKat•1h ago
JKCalhoun•1h ago
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…
pjmlp•1h ago
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.
criddell•23m ago
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.
nomilk•1h ago
JKCalhoun•1h ago