cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/59392382


TikTok wants users to believe that errors blocking uploads of anti-ICE videos or direct messages mentioning Jeffrey Epstein are due to technical errors—not the platform seemingly shifting to censor content critical of Donald Trump after he hand-picked the US owners who took over the app last week.

However, experts say that TikTok users’ censorship fears are justified, whether the bugs are to blame or not.

Ioana Literat, an associate professor of technology, media, and learning at Teachers College, Columbia University, has studied TikTok’s politics since the app first shot to popularity in the US in 2018. She told Ars that “users’ fears are absolutely justified” and explained why the “bugs” explanation is “insufficient.”

  • me_myself_and_I@lemmy.world
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    10 hours ago

    Ironic that an app monitored and controlled by the Chinese communist party allowed more freedom of speech for Americans. How the turn tables.

    • ranzispa@mander.xyz
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      11 hours ago

      We were developing a feature to push for those posts, but a bug made it so that they were blocked.

      I guess this is one of the few cases in which that could be the result of a bug.

      • neukenindekeuken@sh.itjust.works
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        9 hours ago

        Not a chance. Not even remotely possible if they have automated testing (which they do) and qa staff verifying features (which they also do), and smoke/regression tests after deployment (which they do).

        I’ve worked in this industry for 30 years, and the chance that that’s what happened, immediately after a takeover by people who really don’t want those terms searched on, and the feature was released in that state, and stayed in that state without a hotfix or patch going out and it wasn’t caught by their own testers, is practically nil.

  • Formfiller@lemmy.world
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    12 hours ago

    Hopefully the Streisand effect takes place and people wake up to the fact that Israel was blackmailing our politicians with trafficked children and bribing the rest. History will call these people traitors https://www.trackaipac.com/

  • DrDickHandler@lemmy.world
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    13 hours ago

    Once again, they are using this mainly to censor anti-Israel content. No one is mentionning this in the articles and comments.

  • 4grams@awful.systems
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    1 day ago

    Why doesn’t anyone see this for what it is. They put monitoring for certain keywords but fucked up the code and it blocked some users through incompetence. They fixed the filters, but I guarantee they are sending reports to the White House…

  • Samsy@lemmy.ml
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    1 day ago

    Hey, now I am not able to watch videos about my favorite fast train from Germany, the InterCityExpress, ICE. /s

  • AmbitiousProcess (they/them)@piefed.social
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    1 day ago

    Wow, a bug that specifically automatically chose keywords like “ICE”, and “epstein”, then blocked them from appearing, while leaving literally all other content unharmed??? How conveniently specific and well-timed! /s

    • Jännät@sopuli.xyz
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      22 hours ago

      Like someone else said, it might legitimately have been a bug: maybe they didn’t mean for the censorship to be visible to the person using those keywords, and it’d just be everyone else who can’t see them. That way you’d think everything is fine but mysteriously your Epstein / ICE content just doesn’t get any views

    • D_C@sh.itjust.works
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      1 day ago

      Balderdash! That type of stuff only happens in dictatorships.
      Next you’ll be telling me there’s a bunch of masked Gestapo goons running around shooting innocent people and kidnapping non whites…

    • BoJackHorseman@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      Nothing to do with the fact that Larry Ellison is a jew and the largest individual contributor to Israel, right?

      • YappyMonotheist@lemmy.world
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        1 day ago

        Everything to do with it because TikTok is bad for Western imperialist optics and radicalised the youth as the genocide in Gaza was getting livestreamed. Nothing religious or ethnic though, this is just a money move. 🤷

  • reddig33@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    Find. Another. Service.

    TikTok is dead — just like Twitter. I don’t understand people who cling to these services. Might as well post on MySpace while you’re at it.

      • mic_check_one_two@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        12 hours ago

        Saw “no censorship” in the description, and had suspicions because it’s a common dogwhistle for “we’ll allow the most vile people as long as they’re not technically breaking the law”. Got the app, and immediately scrolled past a “Jews secretly run the world” post followed shortly by a “Hitler was right about the Jews” post. Yeah, the problem with “no censorship” is that it inevitably falls prey to the Nazi bar problem.

      • Zoot@reddthat.com
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        18 hours ago

        Or Loops? The federated, no special interests version of TikTok. You’re already on lemmy, why advocate for yet another corporate social media company?

        • Wispy2891@lemmy.world
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          13 hours ago

          I like the idea of a federated version of that, but there are many problems:

          1. When people scroll, they need an algorithm to choose content for them.
          2. 99% of average TikTok content is low quality shit and it’s the algorithm to find and promote what works
          3. All that 99% of shit is occupying exabytes on bytedance servers. Users are uploading terabytes of shit every hour, it’s impossibile for a federated instance to keep all this shit on disk. Look how Lemmy is designed for example. I upload an image and then it’s stored forever in hundreds of instances. For videos is untenable. Only companies that are profiting from this (for example using such videos for training ai models, or using this videos to hook people and serve them highly personalized ads) can host a TikTok clone
  • FukOui@lemmy.zip
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    1 day ago

    Might not be a lie. They might be silently rolling a feature to selectively censor/ show ICE fascists and accidentally censored all by mistake lol