TikTok says it’s not the algorithm, teens are just pro-Palestine — The company denied allegations that it has been promoting pro-Palestine content in an effort to sway American opinion
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TikTok says it’s not the algorithm, teens are just pro-Palestine — The company denied allegations that it has been promoting pro-Palestine content in an effort to sway American opinion::In a blog post, the company denied allegations that it has been promoting pro-Palestine content in an effort to sway American opinion.
It's almost like teens see something like a genocide being committed, think it's wrong and say something about it.
Yeah I don’t think teens are particularly pro-Palestine or anti-Israel.
Teens throughout history have just been anti-war and anti-killing-children.
Imagine being a teenager and being against teenagers getting killed. What is this world coming to?
The sheer audacity
Obviously the teenagers are being mind-controlled
I don’t understand why so many stop doing so.
As you get older you learn that things are never black or white, and everything is grey. Global politics are complicated. The world is a giant chess board and Gaza is a pawn.
I’ve heard arguments that Israel should have essentially done nothing if they were good guys, but not retaliating sends a message to those funding Hamas that they should do it again.
Making matters worse, they are surrounded by people that constantly advocate for their eradication, they’ve already experienced such an event in their history, so to say they are more sensitive to it than other groups may be an understatement.
This was their 9/11. And back then the vast majority of Americans wanted to retaliate against Al Qaeda.
And to clarify further there is no “peace” between Israel and would be Palestine. You’re talking about 1 piece of land that three different religions have ancient ties to, with little desire to coexist on it. Chalk it up to just another failure of western powers dividing up the Middle East after WWII.
Short of some scenario where they can emigrate to Egypt or something, I don’t know what the answer is. They’re all bad options.
I am 29 and i only seem to become more radical of a pacifistic absolutists. Sure the world is grey, twisted dark sometimes even. But global politics are much more off a chaotic mess then they are complicated, and they are indeed complicated. There is no excuse to murder innocent people left and right for neither party or country.
It is naive to believe that we can just get rid of borders and become tolerant enough to let people live where they want without some issues but i much rather see us attempt that then maintain whatever we are doing right now.
I don’t think it’s healthy to be an absolutist about just about anything. The unattended consequences start to outnumber your ideals. If Israel hadn’t done after Hamas, Hamas would be empowered to keep doing it. The net effect would be more Israelis killed. Who knows, they may have been invaded by one of the several neighboring countries that would like nothing more than to destroy the country.
I think Ukraine is a better example though. I can’t fathom telling them they should try to get along with Russia. There’s the idea of being anti-war in general, and then there’s allowing a foreign aggressor to come in and take your country.
I think that you really did a good job summing up an incredibly complex issue in a fairly neutral way. No matter how smart you are as a kid/teen, there's only so much you're ever going to see play out, and it takes some time to get all the "data points" to start seeing the bigger picture.
As for Israel/Palestine, it's literally one of the single most complex issues in geopolitics, and while it's easy for someone reading articles and watching TikToks to just say "if Israel just gave them their land back and everything would be good!", it's ignorant of a much, much, MUCH bigger picture.
This is not saying I support any of what's going on. I don't think it's particularly controversial to say that conflicts of any sort are fucking awful, but the reality is that if Israel just did pull out of the West Bank and ceded all the claims, there would be so many knock-on effects that are effectively impossible to predict, with none of them being particularly good.
Realistically, the only way you could ever hope to come to a "simple" solution that doesn't result in a massive loss of life would be with a time machine.
Exactly. I think you’d have to go back to pre-Hitler to get any sort of major change, but then the butterfly effect comes into play heavily. What does Europe look like if Germany never escapes the grasps of their quite terrible post-WWI restrictions? Maybe all we do is flip the script and Jews are treated like the Palestinians but still in Germany? There’s no way of knowing.
I agree that it’s all awful. I don’t think there is a solution that leaves everyone happy and safe and that’s just the reality of life.
IDK, both can be true. Teens might be right in saying something and tiktok might be amplifying that kind of content because it helps China geopolitically. A highly upvoted post on Lemmy literally yesterday was this - https://www.cnn.com/2023/11/13/us/china-online-disinformation-invs/index.html
Tiktok also didn't censor the major protests in France like Facebook and Twitter did at the time.
Theres only a handful of social media outlets. Tik tok is just not suppressing the Pro Palestine content like Western owned media outlets have been.
We speak lots of " free speech " in the West, but look how quick, German, British, American, Canadian government and media spheres are united in calling Palestine protestors terrorists and supporting hamas.
Its just our lack of free speech being exposed when it goes against the powers that be.
That proves nothing, it might equally be in China's geopolitical interest to support discontent and protests in the West. A more interesting question is if TikTok would promote content about the Uyghur genocide the same way.
Well we know for a fact that China has it's own Douyin (Tiktok) app and that it prioritises stopping any inkling of random social movements/organisation through social media.
So this isn't really a mystery at all. Within China they are subject to their laws. Elsewhere they follow global norms.
I actually think all the furore about China and Tiktok was really not about Chinese control over Tiktok in the West, but about the West's own control over Tiktok. Much like how Huawei was booted for not allowing US intelligence agencies to put in backdoors, rather than actually enabling spying itself (this came out last year iirc).
Ironic seeing as Huawei was founded with IP they stole from Nortel. They can fuck off as far as I'm concerned.
From Nortel, Ericsson, Alcatel.....
Its how innovation happens. I'm pretty sure the Americans did the same to the British.
Came out where?
There's a ton of support for the Palestinian people out there. It would strongly appear to be suppressed on commercial social media sites. I can't say that Tiktok isn't amplifying it, but as you poke around on open social platforms that tend to censor less, you see a lot more Pro-Palestine news and content. If you go through twitter or facebook and find specific regional bloggers, the content is out there but if doesn't seem to pass the algorithm
Maybe the U.S. upvoted that to discredit China /j
Stupid thing people don't they like killing?
When the October 7 attack happened my teenagers noticed the one sided media and hamfisted pro Israel propaganda asked what's really going on. Today's kids are getting constant propaganda and advertising. They're not immune but they recognize it and bristle.
When I was a teenager and Yitzhak Rabin was murdered i bought the anti palastine rhetoric that followed for an embarrassingly long time. And we knew that it was Netanyahu. Well, I don't think we knew until later that he was aware that night of what he was doing. But we knew it was his follower who pulled the trigger.
Israel has already killed 10-20x as many people as died in the Hamas attack, and they’re just getting started.
Almost like when you take religion out of the picture it's one country committing genocide against another which is never okay for any reason. Israel can scream "but muh anti-semitism" all they want but it's a scapegoat. Ignore Jewish/Muslim backgrounds and look at what's really going on. It's nothing but a disgusting land grab and genocide that's been going on since WW2.
The world would 100% be a better place without Israel, and that's nothing to do with their religion. The country itself is evil and corrupt. They are bigoted and hypocritical. Israel deserves no sympathy or support. Out of all the bullshit I've seen happen in the middle east the past few decades, Israel is definitely the most abhorrent and repulsive source of conflict.
A broken tiktok is right twice a day...
As far as I can tell, neither government here has the moral high ground...and I chose the word "government" there for a reason.
It is my understanding from very far away only able to see through Lie-O-Vision that two governments that hate each other because religion are basically taking it out on civilians who just want to live their lives. It's a tragedy that has basically nothing to do with me yet it does cast my eyes toward my own capitol city with a bit of a suspicious squint.
I'm convinced this whole tiktok is manipulating the algorithm thing is actually US propaganda.
Here's how you actually "manipulate the algorithm."
1: take up residency in the comments, and at the same time start a few basic accts that don't say anything too controversial (day in the life kinda stuff, thirst traps, etc). Establish a basic presence
2: once you amass a following, you start with pretty basic stuff lots of young people agree with - housing/healthcare reform, work reform, etc
3: an important part a lot of people miss - have your own team troll your comments. Stir up shit. The goal is to get people riled up, not move the needle in any specific direction
4: throw out something big (it's been confirmed that Russia is behind distribution on TikTok of OBL's "Letter to America" recently). Fight on both sides, tagging in as much of the greater sphere of commenters as you can.
That's it. That's all anyone's doing. Just do this over and over and you eventually drive people crazy.
They did the exact same thing in 2016, they did it in 2020 with BLM, they did it with Ukraine. It's nothing new
Sounds pretty convincing, but you lost me in the end. Who did "exact same thing" in 2016, 2020, and 2022? Are you implying that Russia and/or China were trying to increase the harm done to the US that way? I'm quite at a loss here
Yes. This is the new age of psychological warfare, and has been recorded occurring at these instances, among others.
100%
Russian trolling is pretty well documented at this point. They overthrew several Baltic nations and bought a lot of breathing room during the 2016 election.
It's been all over the news and stuff.
US propaganda is so, so bad. Russia and China are awful, but US is no better in this regard.
A little from column A, a little from column B?
Have you seen Chinese TikTok vs America TikTok? It’s wild. The Chinese TikTok has videos of scientists and musicians and engineers all tackling major problems. It’s inspirational. The American TikTok is absolutely fucked. There’s clearly heavy algorithm manipulation. At the very least, we know China could make American TikTok not terrible and they choose not to.
My TikTok FYP is various scientists/science commenters, stand up comedians, chubby goth girls dancing, Magic The Gathering card reviews, and swinger shit.
If you engage only with things you like, you'll only see things you like.
Yeah, Western Tiktok is just more liberal lol. If you don't like it, go and live in... China?
Stupid lizard brains are too easily tricked with tribalism and anger though. It takes a real conscious effort to curate your feed like that.
Any nuanced opinion on Gaza gets trashed because both "teams" view you as the enemy. You're always pushed towards absolutism.
I agree with the latter, but I don't think it takes a lot of effort to curate a TikTok FYP.
Yeah you literally just like videos and hit not interested on shit you don't like
A lot of the best sci-fi is coming out of China these days. People who like to theorize about these things point to a population, much like America in the post war Baby Boom, seeing for themselves the benefits science can bring to their lives as China pretty rapidly develops, and being fascinated by what could be next.
So you might need to accept that the most popular trending American social media is venal and insipid because the average American wants to see venal and insipid, while the Chinese population might just be interested in things that interest them.
I'm pro-human beings and opposed to killing and maiming people who are trying to enjoy their life.
They're just trying to survive. We've already made it impossible for them to enjoy life
TikTok is banned in India so there's way less anti-muslim sentiment on the platform.
Everyone's pro-palestine. They're just fucking people caught in the middle of some retarded bullshit. Every time someone gets killed, that entire family is probably radicalized, and they're right to be.
Israel has unrelentingly taken the worst possible approach to the problem, having learned nothing from their own experience. They've made the worst possible mess of it, which is no surprise considering it was made by a bunch of people trying to make the Bible come true like dipshits.
IMO there are big risks consuming news & opinion from any single source.
Whether it's the CCP manipulating the TikTok algorithm, Russia buying ad space on Facebook, or American conglomerates pushing narratives on western mainstream media, there will be implicit biases everywhere.
The only real answer is to get news from multiple sources with diverging perspectives, try to find where facts overlap, challenge your own implicit biases, and form a perspective in line w/ your values.
Seeing America blame TikTok for pushing propaganda is the pot calling the kettle black -- and honestly more of a distraction than anything else.
The real important issue is that people are dying, and the existing power structures are doing jack shit to stop it.
I wouldn’t trust TikTok
no one with a functioning brain does. at the corporate or content level.
Which is why so many americans are obsessed with it, since the overwhelming bulk of americans are fucking idiots.
Thanks A_Random_Idiot
I may be a random idiot, but I dont have tiktok on my phone, or social media accounts.
Which makes me a cut above the rest.
Maybe it's not so much they're "pro-Palestine" but anti-genocide.
I never would have thought that "anti-killing-people" would be a controversial position to take, but here we are.
My ancestors since the 1700s were part of a pacifist tradition so I'm well aware of how controversial it is lol
Does that pacifist tradition have a name, or better yet a Wikipedia page?
They were Mennonites who initially migrated largely due to increasing mandatory conscription in the Russian Empire (now Ukraine), a lot of them went to Weimar Republic then to Canada, so really good timing. In WW2 they were contentious objectors and were conscripted to civilian service, which apparently my grandpa loved.
Other side were Merchant Navy marines and got royally fucked after the war, those vets weren't even recognized for their service until the 90s.
I think you'd be surprised how many people are pro-Palestinian liberation struggle. And for a good reason. Sometimes the liberation fight may result in war crimes which we are all against, but that doesn't discredit the liberation struggle itself. If anything, maybe the colonisers should stop oppressing and mass murdering the people if they don't want them to react so violently.
surprise
pikachualgorithmI don't think an algorithm is responsible for the fact that most sane people are generally against genocide. People being pro-Palestine in this specific situation is a humanitarian response and should not be causing any amount of concern because it is the morally correct position here.
HOWEVER, the fact that we just witnessed the fucking letter to america go viral on tiktok, wherein a soul crushing amount of people publicly stated they agree with a fucking jihadist manifesto, is cause for a massive amount of concern. Tiktok definitely needs to face consequences for letting that happen. We also can't excuse the audience for that type of behaviour. Whether it came from a deliberate propaganda campaign, or a sketchy algorithm, or just mass stupidity, audience members need to be better. If you read the letter to america and you think bin laden was right, you're a moron, and you're contributing to the problem.
I wholeheartedly agree with you. However, I can tell you from my experience as an antitheist that TikTok is heavily PRO-religion. It is ABUNDANTLY CLEAR that much of the problems in the world stem from religiosity, and this long-standing war between Israel and Palestine is the best example of this.
However, TikTok works tirelessly to suppress ANY criticism of theism of any kind. Thus, those jihadists you mention are allowed to promote their extremist ideology, yet if someone like me analyzes and critiques their baseless claims while using logic, reason, fact-based evidence, and the scientific method, I get cited for bullying and hate speech. This is one of the biggest problems facing humanity today........
I think you should pay less attention to mainstream media which propped that issue up disproportionately. It wasn't as big of a deal as many made it out to be.
But regardless of that, I don't think one should be concerned about opinions of people and I certainly don't think it is an issue at all if young people hate the US. It has done some of the most fucked up things in the world since the start of the last century to say the least. This may be expressed in stupid ways like sympathising for Bin Laden, but the broader sentiment of hate towards the US isn't wrong.
The entire point of an app like TikTok is to stir stories and headlines so they get more clicks. Everything is for the algorithm.
tiktok discourse is designed to create the narrative that no one could possibly be pro-palestine, and that humanity can be split into "people who see the truth and support Israel absolutely" and "people who have been fooled by propaganda". do I think there's pro-palestinian propaganda? absolutely. there's also literal commercials for israel in between the youtube videos that I watch.
an asshole loves nothing more than another asshole, so that while he's being an asshole he can point his finger and go "look at what an asshole that guy is!"
TikToc is a site that people use to share information, and at the end of the day, this is their main complaint. Their golden idea is for one or two major corporations to control the message and decide who to support.
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It might be a surprise to Americans that many people think that Israelis are evil bastards.
It might be a surprise to non-Americans how many of us think so, too, despite the narratives that Zionist organizations like AIPAC and ADL spend a lot of money to push.
Remember! Truth tellers don't mind being questioned or scrutinized.
Liars are the ones that always rush to silence the opposition and censor everyone they disagree with.
The US doesn't have any strategic benefit in propping up Israel other than doing so being weirdly important to white voters.
Incorrect. For one, Israel is our key point of contact in the middle east. Also, to your point about the white voters, it stems from historical religious ideology that some fictional magic being named "yahweh" promised the land to these people called "israelites."
Because we have a large portion of our population that are huge fans of this horribly-written abrahamic sci-fi fantasy fairytale, they exude blind support for Israel in the hopes that it will "fulfill the end-times prophecy." The fact that many of these loons have positions of power and decision-making highlights the absurd kakistocracy America has become.........
Let's not gloss over your first point too much. Like yeah the average American voter probably likes Israel for religious/Zionist reasons, but the American politicians and generals that want to be friends with Israel are definitely in it for the strategic value of having an ally in the Middle East. Like, you think Biden gives a shit about Zionism? Nah. He just likes the military industrial complex
Excellent point. The government uses the religious part to garner support for Israel, which empowers the military industrial complex. That may be why social medias are generally hostile to leftism and antitheism, because both undermine the foreign policy agenda that fuels our hyper-militarism.
Race has nothing to do with it. Christian Zealots want all that land to belong to Israel because they think it will start the rapture and then the Christian Armageddon.
And Jewish zealots want all that land to belong to Israel because they think they're the only ones who have any right to it. They literally think an invisible wizard in the sky gave it to them and that anyone who says or even suggests anything to the contrary is an antisemite.
I know we have outposts in Israel keeping an eye on - as an example - Iran and shit, but why do we have to be enemies with Iran in the first place? Our situation with Israel just seems like a pointless one-way relationship that only serves to further alienate the rest of the middle east from us.
The US points fingers at Iran for everything Saudi Arabia is guilty of. And since Biden uttered a single syllable of criticism of them, they stopped selling oil in american dollars. So since we're off the gold standard, we've given power over our currency to Saudi Arabia.
But to your question. Saudi Arabia decided to work with us and fuck their people. Iran wanted to give their people some dignity in exchange for what we wanted from them. The only reason we haven't turned Iran to ash, like we did with every other country in the middle east and are continuing to do...excluding Saudi Arabia and Israel. Is because going to war with Iran means going to war with Russia and going to war with Russia means nuclear Armageddon for the entire world from WW3 happening
But now we're sprinting toward nuclear Armageddon with what's happening in Gaza AND Ukraine. We have Hillary making up Russiagate to thank for the bullshit happening in Ukraine...that and the US has been fucking with Russia through Ukraine for decades now.
How does the US not have any strategic interest in propping up Israel? This is insane. Israel is the biggest strategic ally of the US in the middle east, do you not know anything about the issue? They protect and fund Israel more than anyone in the world.
Yeah, the US is the only thing keeping Israel in business. They're useful to keep an eye on Iran, because we don't like Iran, because...?
Saudis need our weapons, and Qatar likes the money we spend to keep our increasing number of bases there. But these are purely transactional relationships that we can have with anyone.
I think Kuwait are still fans of the US.
Other than that, everyone hates us because we protect Israel, and they hate Israel. Why don't we just join the club, and pick up an entire region of strategic allies instead of "Israel at all costs"?
https://www.newsweek.com/democrats-joe-biden-palestine-millennials-1835455
there's an increasing divide between real people and the owner class when it comes to Israel. Our government treats Israel like it has an unlimited budget and can do no wrong because the realpolitik is such that they need a client state in the middle east. Regular, everyday people OTOH are being shown a war of genocide in real time from dozens of different angles and it turns out that watching it happen live invokes vastly different feelings than watching a press conference where Israel and the US congratulate themselves on establishing a daily 4 hour window where they won't bomb civilians unless they really, really want to. It's turning out that there actually is a number of innocent lives we're not willing to trade for one guilty life, and that for a lot of us that number is 1. It's turning out that we're smart enough to realize that evacuation warnings on twitter in english are probably aren't meant for an Arabic-speaking population that lives somewhere where the internet has been cut off and are, therefore, just Israel trying to manage its reputation in the west. We're also human enough to realize that we wouldn't accept someone firebombing our entire neighborhood to rubble even if one of our neighbors was evil and they sent an evacuation warning first, and that the basics of decency demand that we don't ask Palestinians to do so either.
The thing that sunk the Vietnam war in America was embedded journalists. People who have seen war have a hard time defending it. So the war machine adapted: now you only get access to report on the war if your reporting supports the war effort itself ("winning the war") and the effort to maintain moral authority while waging the war ("winning the hearts and minds"). Thing is, now anyone can broadcast themselves to the entire world at a moment's notice. It was already hard to limit the reporting capabilities of 5 or 6 news orgs, now everyone you're trying to have a war with is their own news org. Why do you think they tried to shut down the internet in Gaza almost immediately? Why now are they targeting a platform where anyone can go live and the data is out of the hands of western governments until after it's already in the eyes and ears of western civilians? They're trying to stem the flow of information because if we know what's going one we're not gonna support it.