BREAKING - Tiktok has now SHUT DOWN SERVICES in the United States, noting “A law banning Tiktok has been enacted in the U.S. Unfortunately, that means you can’t use TikTok for now. We are fortunate that President Trump has indicated that he will work with us on a solution to reinstate Tiktok once he takes office. Please stay tuned!”
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There is a recent study on Tiktok and how it compares to Instagram and Youtube – (pdf)
An article about the study says:
The three-level study, which has now been peer-reviewed, looked at TikTok, Instagram and YouTube.
Typing in four politically-loaded key words – “Tiananmen,” “Tibet,” “Uyghur,” and “Xinjiang” – the team first looked at what content the respective algorithms delivered.
The researchers found that while TikTok might not deliver more pro-CCP content, it did deliver less anti-CCP content than the rival platforms. It also, interestingly, delivered more content that researchers say was irrelevant to the keywords.
The team next looked at engagement to see if this explained why anti-CCP content was performing less well. But it found that TikTok users “liked or commented on anti-CCP content nearly four times as much as they liked or commented on pro-CCP content, yet the search algorithm produced nearly three times as much pro-CCP content”. This didn’t happen on Instagram or YouTube.
The last element of the study looked at the impact the content was potentially having on users. The researchers surveyed 1,214 Americans to find information on their social media usage, and their opinion on China’s human rights record. What they found was that the more time users spent on TikTok, the more positive their attitude towards the CCP was.
The researchers came to the damning conclusion that “taken together, the findings from these three studies raise the distinct possibility that TikTok is a vehicle for CCP propaganda.”
Another widely ignored issue regarding Tiktok and other Chinese apps is that European digital rights organization Noyb has filed GDPR complaints against TikTok, AliExpress, SHEIN, Temu, WeChat and Xiaomi for unlawful data transfers to China.
Can‘t find the pdf of the study under the address. Then again, is it really worth reading it: They found that there isn‘t more pro-ccp stuff on TikTok than on the American platforms but less anti-ccp content on it. I mean they tried real hard finding something, looking for the decisive keywords, yet this is the outcome? There is more anti-ccp content on American platforms that on a Chinese one! Does that tell us something about Chinese or about American propaganda?
@bungalowtill
I suggest you read the study before commenting (the link works fine here, but you’ll find it also in the article).
The study finds, among others, that TikTok users exhibited significantly more positive attitudes towards China’s human rights record as reports on forced labour and other human rights violations by the Chinese government are suppressed.
The Chinese government is actively silencing the views of Americans who try to criticize the Chinese government and the Chinese Communist Party, according to the study.
Free speech doesn’t mean that foreign autocratic governments can silence Americans (nor other countries’ citizens) from expressing their opinion in public forums. This is what happens on Tiktok, and, even more so, on Red Note.
Have you read the study?
Because: I still only get the names of the authors when I click the link to the study. In the article on the other hand there is a link to the “study that will be published” and it goes to the same rather blank archive url that you provided.
If the study has already been published, maybe you got another source?
Edit:
I managed to get it:
https://networkcontagion.us/wp-content/uploads/Peer-Reviewed-Paper-in-Press_Dec.-2024.pdf
But yeah, I won’t read it now, cause it’s massive. That’s also why I replied to your quotes in the first place.
Also, I think we know each other from some time ago, right?
Clowns will find some other teet
This just seems like weird censorship/control to me. Unless they can come forward with hard evidence that TikTok is working for the Chinese government.
I just think of all of the actual hateful and concerning websites out there that stay up and nobody blinks an eye.
I’ve never used TikTok and I don’t really like what I’ve seen from it, but a ban seems unnecessary
They’re banning it for the wrong reasons. But in light of the ban I spent a day scrolling to see what kinda stuff the algo would push on me.
And yeah, burn it with fire. At least on Twitter you get community notes and even without that the top comments usually refute things pretty quickly.
TikTok is just feeding people pure nonsense which is impossible to verify in-app. Everything is intentionally vague af for engagement and the search sucks.
Surprisingly I’ve seen nothing on Gaza. But a lot of bogus alternative medicine scams and MLMs.
Great for seeing what’s going on locally though. As well as things like life hacks, cleaning/organising tips. A federated version with some safeguards for fact checking could be awesome.
People are so happy for other’s first amendment right to get stepped on.
there seems to be a pretty strong sentiment that TikTok users are all idiots (especially compared to us incredibly smart, sophisticated, and attractive Fediverse users) and therefore they deserve whatever happens to them.
it reminds me of the predictable response every time Florida gets hit by a hurricane, or Texas by a snowstorm, or whatever, and a bunch of liberals come out of the woodwork with the same tired old “they live in a red state, fuck em, I don’t care what happens to them”.
I just don’t see how this move and the timing was not orchestrated to manipulate uninformed TikTok users into supporting Trump. The explicit callout to Trump in the message… I have been fearing the next presidency and this was a blow.
Glazing Donald’s ego is a last ditch effort to save their platform. This is entirely on the Democrats—they didn’t have to agree to the ban, they could have insisted on higher standards for transparency and data security for social media instead. But banning the platform that featured pro-palestinian sentiment was more important to them. Now all that’s left is billionaire owned pro-Trump social media which Tik Tok may or may not join in the future. Good job guys!
On one hand, yeah, on the other hand Biden literally signed the law banning it. If Democrats didn’t want Tik Tok being banned to be associated with them and to give Republicans an easy, obvious win by unbanning a wildly popular app, then they could have just… not done that. This was just completely an unforced error on the part of the Democrats.
As is traditional, the Republicans drafted a law, got bipartisan support to push it through congress, and then after it passed publicly flip flopped their support for the law they just wrote when they realized they could score political points by complaining about it while the Democrats would hold to their agreed support.
This way the Republicans get the law they want, get to claim any benefits of said law by pointing to their voting record, and get to blame anything people don’t like about it on Democrats, all at the same time.
Meanwhile there are no consequences to their bad faith actions because the Democrats will just bend over and take it in the name of bipartisanship and working across the aisle because half of them are Republicans, they just don’t want to call themselves Republicans and leadership is willing to fight tooth and nail to protect said members.
I’ll get a bit conspiratorial here, but if what Bernie has said is to be trusted in his video about oligarchy, up on his youtube channel, then Democrats are largely owned/influenced by billionaires who would benefit from the increased Trump support. It would make sense to do this, but yeah it could also just be a blunder, given how Trump was the first one to propose the ban and Democrats could take it as “hey if we do this, we’ll win the moderate right support again!!”, though who knows.
It’s important to remember that politicians are still people, too. Some of them might just not have realized what would happen, some of them might just be corrupt, some of them might have known this was a bad idea but played along anyway to try and get support for things they thought were more important. There isn’t actually a single motivator for all of the Democratic Party. That’s just not how people work.
Or instead of targeting tiktok specifically, they could have chosen to pass a data privacy law and actually did something worthwhile instead of pointless, unpopular grandstanding. Haha just kidding, they would never do anything to reduce even slightly shareholder value.
Apparently the law is written so that it would also be applicable to other apps like RedNote, if a president were interested in applying it.
Accurate perspective but another one is this was a very successful social engineering of US politics by its global adversaries.
Dems have been been trying to pull back the moment they released they got played but its to late. Above messaging is additional salt in the wound.
How did they “[get] played”? Like the poster you replied too said, it was a completely unforced error on their part. It feels like they tried to jump on the right-wing “China bad” bandwagon and it bit them in the arse.
