Citizen, your expression reveals a disturbing lack of joy. Why are you engaging with the Customs and Border Protection agents repressing subversive journalists? Wouldn't you rather drink a nice, refreshing Coca-Cola?
This is, fundamentally, what made TikTok a success.
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.
> That's the opposite of what Facebook notoriously found
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.
>TikTok moderators were told to suppress videos from users who appeared too ugly, poor or disabled, as part of the company’s efforts to curate an aspirational air in the videos it promotes, according to new documents published by the Intercept.
Could you explain how this is related? This is evidence they've always curated for what they deem as "undesirable" things, related to engagement.
> 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?
I would say removing political rage bait is a sign that they are not optimizing for engagement but enjoyment. TikTok is a feed of stuff that's interesting, funny, and wholesome, not the slop and doomscrolling that chasing engagement gets you. Just from looking at the thumbnail in the article you can tell it would never be shown on TikTok, regardless of political content.
A logical way to achieve that would be to minimize cortisol and maximize dopamine, providing a stress free escape from the stress inducing real world. ;)
At the same time letting politics go unchecked turns it into a cesspool like reddit, where politics is shoehorned into most of the default subreddits and "Epstien" is brought up in any thread vaguely political. You might think these issues deserve attention, and they might even drive engagement for some, but not everyone wants their cat video app to be like a 24/7 cable TV news channel.
And Reddit's far more tightly censored than Tik Tok. Most subs won't even allow open discussion of certain hotly debated topics because the Reddit admins have threatened to shut them down (and shut down subs that didn't tightly censor discussion in the past). Twitter used to be pretty tightly censored as well. Right now there's a huge drama on Bluesky because many people want those that don't agree with them politically banned.
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.
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.
Right, but the point is that it hasn't turned into a salient culture war topic like trans people have. There's no political impetus for tiktok to oppress disabled people, yet they did it anyways.
> I don't even think there's a party on either side of the spectrum that's like "fuck disabled people".
Trump said to her niece about her disabled son: "maybe he should just die". The right is ableist, you can see it most everywhere, in their rhetoric, in their policies... They cut billions from healthcare programs in their big bill, that disproportionately benefited the physically diabled. Now a lot of these people will most likely die, as a direct result. This was a desired outcome.
- 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?
>- 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?
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?
Most users will have a very different reaction to being served politics they are uninterested in vs being served shocking gore. (Bored or annoyed vs traumatized)
Many users want to see political content. Almost none want to see beheadings.
You can treat this as one long spectrum but if I was in charge of content moderation I’d treat politics and gore as separate categories. (And most sites do!)
> They've also been accused of having a left bias by the right.
That doesn’t mean they don’t have a political bias. It may just not cleanly fall across modern American political party lines. (And it may have changed over time.)
——
But this is all theoretical. My stance is that if you are going to allow some political content then you should allow all political content that doesn’t break other rules.
And I think “non-joyful” is a bullshit rule for a major social media company to have. It can easily be reinterpreted by moderators to selectively silence political speech
That's a terrible take. Of course politics will play an increasing part in daily life when the country is devolving into a dictatorship. A journalist is getting abducted on the street by the regime's gestapo and your first reaction is "boring, I want to be kept in the dark and resume my mindless consumption of brainrot".
They're important conversations but people don't want to engage in them every second of their living lives. The point of entertainment is to be able to compartementalize and regulate.
If they do what you suggest, all the creativity that makes the platform attractive is going to flock to somewhere else.
Hard disagree. I dont need politics in every corner of life now 3 years ago 10 years ago etc. when the boy cries wolf at everything that moves people tend to ignore the boy.
Exactly. The whole "this might be the last election we have!" messaging has been going on for at least the past decade. Maybe 2024 was actually the last one, but people are tired of it, and have tuned out accordingly. Of course, the politics/news junkies think otherwise, and would rather that their message be shoved down people's throats.
People tend to do this justification behavior where they claim their dopamine hits are good for them/their health/society, when in actuality it's detrimental.
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.
Um, I'm not from the US, so my comment was more general than that.
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.
>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).
PS: I've never used TikTok, I'm arguing out of principle. I do use Facebook and Instagram though. I swore off Twitter even before the Musk era, so I wouldn't know what's it like now (I imagine not good).
How much time do you think people should invest in staying informed about politics?
The upthread discussion was about being glued to the 24/7 news cycle, which at least in the US focuses mostly on national political drama. If you're suggesting that people should spend most of their limited attention budget following that news cycle, then they won't have attention left for much else.
I don't think anyone in this thread would say that spending, say, 15 minutes a day getting caught up on political happenings is a bad thing. It only becomes harmful when it sucks up all of your attention (as it does for political junkies).
Did letting politics go unchecked turn the telephone system into a "cesspool"? How about the newspapers? The bookstores? Videotape rental stores? The public library?
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.
>Did letting politics go unchecked turn the telephone system into a "cesspool"?
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.
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".
I omitted the "vast wasteland" of television on purpose: it's the major medium that suffered pervasive government censorship in the US.
>>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
>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.
Trump claims that China has practically approved the deal, but as of Oct 10th we again have a 100% tariff threat on China and no confirmed Chinese approval:
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.
"TikTok took down my 8-second video featuring an image
of Debbie Brockman — the news producer just detained by
CBP agents — saying it violates the “joy of TikTok” "
The violation notice from tiktok:
"Violation reason
Shocking and Graphic content
Part of the joy of TikTok is coming across new and
unexpected content. But the platform is not a place to
intentionally shock, upset, or disgust others. We recognize
this type of content may be triggering, cause psychological
harm, or lead to extreme discomfort.
We do not allow gory, gruesome, disturbing, or extremely
violent content."
There are nearly-century-old journalistic guidelines and ethical codes about what you do and do not put into widespread news media.
Posting explicit details about methods used in a celebrity suicide encourages copycats.
Posting explicit details about a shooter's extremist philosophical beliefs brings those beliefs closer to the mainstream AND encourages copycats.
There was a certain recent college debate that I was very surprised to see proliferate across social media, because of the fact that We Do Not Publish Snuff Films.
I actually assumed it was a deepfake, doubted AP News Wire and Reuters, and finally bought it when I saw a tiktok from the TMZ cutting room floor. The fellow in charge didn't believe it either... until he did, and then it was an all-hands-on-deck moment steadied by someone clearly experiencing a huge surge of adrenaline but keeping their cool while operating in their element.
I suspect this is data driven. It would be reasonable to think that long term engagement drops if people don't enjoy what they watch, in aggregate, even if short term engagement is high for "non joyful" content. From what I can tell, TikTok is powered by dopamine, not cortisol. With dopamine being the "joy" hormone...
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?
aside from users "stuck in the dopamine loop", i also think tiktok will see users plateau and eventually shrink without relevant content, even if it's a tough watch. If "joy of tiktok" becomes code for "news that does not upset dear leader" folks will go somewhere else for that content, and imho that's a meaningful chunk of users.
> 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.
Almost everything with this administration is just lawless uncertainty so it's hard to tell, but has that actually happened yet? The last info I could find is that some sort of rough deal was solidifying, but that even things like the investor makeup or components was still up in the air. That was just two weeks 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.
Tiktok has long been extremely heavy handed with censorship. A slightly negative comment will get deleted and warnings meted out. Content that angers anyone gets flagged and often removed. And while there were some ephemeral movements where a bunch of young people trend-lambasted Trump, generally I find the platform seems to actually magnify pro-Trump content, even long before he was elected.
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.
Meta has C Suite execs whose job is to make sure specific political content is censored. Usually stuff the US administration doesn't want. Previously this was COVID skepticism. Now it is anti-Israel content mostly
There’s a difference between 1-to-1, 1-to-many, and 1-to-all media.
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.
It would be great if that were true, but TikTok is filled with accounts dedicated to virtue signal and “news”. I’ve tried multiple times to clean my feed but there are too many
It's hard to know for sure, but many people are reporting that rules are being enforced unequally to silence news critical of the current administration.
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.
> if a foreign power can buy the platforms and adjust information flows to "shift" public opinion their way.
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
I agree with you on this. People who don’t believe this fundamentally do not believe in democracy.
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.
Sure, but there's a difference in intent and degree between "foreign influence is manipulating our voters" via political content on TikTok vs a targeted state sponsored campaign run by intelligence agencies.
There are some common sense guardrails around elections in a democracy, and foreign influence targeting the actual election process is generally viewed as over the line of acceptability.
"Just build your own tiktok". "Freedom of speech is not absolute". "Freedom of expression doesn't guarantee giving you a platform". "1st amendment protect you from government, not from companies".
Let me guess: they censored some leftist content, am I right?
> Let me guess: they censored some leftist content, am I right?
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:
Is there an uncut video? As controversial as the desire for full understanding is these days, there an incredible amount of context missing from that video:
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?
My point is that so called "progressives" kept justifying and even celebrating censorship for more than a decade, but screeching and screaming now, when it hit themselves.
No one was justifying or celebrating censorship then, and no one is screeching and screaming now.
It seems you're trying to imply that "progressives" are being hypocritical (although I don't know what specifically is "progressive" in this context), but there is no hypocrisy in recognizing that private platforms have the right to enforce policies while also protesting those policies. That's how free speech actually works.
As opposed to what conservatives were doing not long ago, which is demanding the government forcibly take over social media platforms and make banning them illegal. Talk about screeching and screaming.
One of the few social media outlets that didn't blatantly censor Israel's war crimes. So of course it had to go. Places like Hacker News are safe because they toe the line and ensure "inconvenient topics" aren't popular or promoted. It's fully baked into their rules and it's generally accepted as a Good Thing somehow. Anti-censorship lip-service out of one side of their mouth and rampant clampdown on "unacceptable conversations" within their VC safe space.
The administration's theft of TikTok is absolutely unacceptable and we should all be horrified. Entrepreneurs built a great business with an algorithm that is still -- years after it launched -- head and shoulders more entertaining and engagement-generating than anything domestic firms could come up with, even with years to figure it out.
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.
Or people are just trying to not be reminded every second of their living lives that there's one conflict or another going on. TikTok is made in China and used worldwide. Not many things are relatable and relevant to a world wide audience.
Have you ever used TikTok? It responds rapidly to your engagement (likes, skips, etc.) and very quickly starts showing you mostly the kind of content you enjoy.
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.
No, seems he hasn't even used the app before. He is just spamming this thread with thinly veiled pro-censorship advocacy. Seems to be a trend on this site as long as the content being censored is negative about trump.
Yeah it's pretty amazing. Not sure if a lot of HN readers are MAGA or if someone wrote a bot of some kind, or if dang and the crew are suppressing it to avoid retribution of some kind from Trump toward YC.
> 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.
Almost as if everyone using the same few centralized platforms that they ultimately have no control over is a situation ripe for abuse.
So what though? If I have a website and I want a particular type of content on it, why should I NOT be allowed to moderate it? These are not public services.
Agree, time to host our own websites. People falsely believe sites like Facebook and Twitter are public utilities (some government services even depend on them now). While in reality their owners benevolently allowed you to store and share your content on their premises.
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.
Came to say the same. You posted something on somebody’s service. It wasn’t in line with what they allow on their service. Accept that truth or else use a different service.
I imagine this is being posted as a response to the fact that TikTok was forced to sell itself after it didn’t play nicely with US propaganda.
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
The problem is the US government very publicly and explicitly forced TikTok to sell their website so they could change the content on 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
Citizen, your expression reveals a disturbing lack of joy. Why are you engaging with the Customs and Border Protection agents repressing subversive journalists? Wouldn't you rather drink a nice, refreshing Coca-Cola?
This is, fundamentally, what made TikTok a success.
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.
[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15854783/
That's the opposite of what Facebook notoriously found—but, either way, is maximizing long-term engagement in the best interest of the users?
Facebook is kinda dead now proves the point
> That's the opposite of what Facebook notoriously found
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.
Exactly, let’s not forget that Facebook is currently losing users. A shrinking business.
> This is, fundamentally, what made TikTok a success.
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 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".
>TikTok moderators were told to suppress videos from users who appeared too ugly, poor or disabled, as part of the company’s efforts to curate an aspirational air in the videos it promotes, according to new documents published by the Intercept.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/mar/17/tiktok-tr...
Could you explain how this is related? This is evidence they've always curated for what they deem as "undesirable" things, related to engagement.
> 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?
[1] https://www.history.com/articles/kennedy-nixon-debates
I would say removing political rage bait is a sign that they are not optimizing for engagement but enjoyment. TikTok is a feed of stuff that's interesting, funny, and wholesome, not the slop and doomscrolling that chasing engagement gets you. Just from looking at the thumbnail in the article you can tell it would never be shown on TikTok, regardless of political content.
huh? Doesn't tiktok engagement increase as a person becomes more avoidant of whatever it is they'd have to do if they weren't scrolling on tiktok?
A logical way to achieve that would be to minimize cortisol and maximize dopamine, providing a stress free escape from the stress inducing real world. ;)
At the same time letting politics go unchecked turns it into a cesspool like reddit, where politics is shoehorned into most of the default subreddits and "Epstien" is brought up in any thread vaguely political. You might think these issues deserve attention, and they might even drive engagement for some, but not everyone wants their cat video app to be like a 24/7 cable TV news channel.
And Reddit's far more tightly censored than Tik Tok. Most subs won't even allow open discussion of certain hotly debated topics because the Reddit admins have threatened to shut them down (and shut down subs that didn't tightly censor discussion in the past). Twitter used to be pretty tightly censored as well. Right now there's a huge drama on Bluesky because many people want those that don't agree with them politically banned.
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.
Was never a problem on TT to date. Only when it gets taken over is it suddenly that truths freedom is a problem. I wonder why.
>Was never a problem on TT to date.
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.
There is certainly at least one prominent politician who thinks its amusing to physically mock disabled people to get cheap laughs.
Right, but the point is that it hasn't turned into a salient culture war topic like trans people have. There's no political impetus for tiktok to oppress disabled people, yet they did it anyways.
> I don't even think there's a party on either side of the spectrum that's like "fuck disabled people".
Trump said to her niece about her disabled son: "maybe he should just die". The right is ableist, you can see it most everywhere, in their rhetoric, in their policies... They cut billions from healthcare programs in their big bill, that disproportionately benefited the physically diabled. Now a lot of these people will most likely die, as a direct result. This was a desired outcome.
Three thoughts:
- 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?
>- 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?
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.
>How far can we extend this?
This feels like the slippery slope fallacy.
Most users will have a very different reaction to being served politics they are uninterested in vs being served shocking gore. (Bored or annoyed vs traumatized)
Many users want to see political content. Almost none want to see beheadings.
You can treat this as one long spectrum but if I was in charge of content moderation I’d treat politics and gore as separate categories. (And most sites do!)
> They've also been accused of having a left bias by the right.
That doesn’t mean they don’t have a political bias. It may just not cleanly fall across modern American political party lines. (And it may have changed over time.)
——
But this is all theoretical. My stance is that if you are going to allow some political content then you should allow all political content that doesn’t break other rules.
And I think “non-joyful” is a bullshit rule for a major social media company to have. It can easily be reinterpreted by moderators to selectively silence political speech
That's a terrible take. Of course politics will play an increasing part in daily life when the country is devolving into a dictatorship. A journalist is getting abducted on the street by the regime's gestapo and your first reaction is "boring, I want to be kept in the dark and resume my mindless consumption of brainrot".
They're important conversations but people don't want to engage in them every second of their living lives. The point of entertainment is to be able to compartementalize and regulate.
If they do what you suggest, all the creativity that makes the platform attractive is going to flock to somewhere else.
Hard disagree. I dont need politics in every corner of life now 3 years ago 10 years ago etc. when the boy cries wolf at everything that moves people tend to ignore the boy.
Exactly. The whole "this might be the last election we have!" messaging has been going on for at least the past decade. Maybe 2024 was actually the last one, but people are tired of it, and have tuned out accordingly. Of course, the politics/news junkies think otherwise, and would rather that their message be shoved down people's throats.
But politics in one way or another shapes almost every corner of your life. This is a reality whether one chooses to see it or not.
People tend to do this justification behavior where they claim their dopamine hits are good for them/their health/society, when in actuality it's detrimental.
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.
Um, I'm not from the US, so my comment was more general than that.
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.
>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.
> What good does "paying attention" serve?
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).
PS: I've never used TikTok, I'm arguing out of principle. I do use Facebook and Instagram though. I swore off Twitter even before the Musk era, so I wouldn't know what's it like now (I imagine not good).
How much time do you think people should invest in staying informed about politics?
The upthread discussion was about being glued to the 24/7 news cycle, which at least in the US focuses mostly on national political drama. If you're suggesting that people should spend most of their limited attention budget following that news cycle, then they won't have attention left for much else.
I don't think anyone in this thread would say that spending, say, 15 minutes a day getting caught up on political happenings is a bad thing. It only becomes harmful when it sucks up all of your attention (as it does for political junkies).
Did letting politics go unchecked turn the telephone system into a "cesspool"? How about the newspapers? The bookstores? Videotape rental stores? The public library?
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.
>Did letting politics go unchecked turn the telephone system into a "cesspool"?
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...
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".
I omitted the "vast wasteland" of television on purpose: it's the major medium that suffered pervasive government censorship in the US.
>>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
>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.
Bit ironic that we are finally getting the dreaded draconian Chinese censorship once the company was forced to sell to Americans
Finally? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_by_TikTok#Politics
Trump claims that China has practically approved the deal, but as of Oct 10th we again have a 100% tariff threat on China and no confirmed Chinese approval:
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.
This is legitimately reassuring.
There are nearly-century-old journalistic guidelines and ethical codes about what you do and do not put into widespread news media.
Posting explicit details about methods used in a celebrity suicide encourages copycats.
Posting explicit details about a shooter's extremist philosophical beliefs brings those beliefs closer to the mainstream AND encourages copycats.
There was a certain recent college debate that I was very surprised to see proliferate across social media, because of the fact that We Do Not Publish Snuff Films.
I actually assumed it was a deepfake, doubted AP News Wire and Reuters, and finally bought it when I saw a tiktok from the TMZ cutting room floor. The fellow in charge didn't believe it either... until he did, and then it was an all-hands-on-deck moment steadied by someone clearly experiencing a huge surge of adrenaline but keeping their cool while operating in their element.
I suspect this is data driven. It would be reasonable to think that long term engagement drops if people don't enjoy what they watch, in aggregate, even if short term engagement is high for "non joyful" content. From what I can tell, TikTok is powered by dopamine, not cortisol. With dopamine being the "joy" hormone...
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?
aside from users "stuck in the dopamine loop", i also think tiktok will see users plateau and eventually shrink without relevant content, even if it's a tough watch. If "joy of tiktok" becomes code for "news that does not upset dear leader" folks will go somewhere else for that content, and imho that's a meaningful chunk of users.
> "news that does not upset dear leader"
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)
Yes, but TikTok’s ownership has changed.
It has not: https://www.nbcnews.com/business/economy/trump-threatens-chi...
> 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.
Almost everything with this administration is just lawless uncertainty so it's hard to tell, but has that actually happened yet? The last info I could find is that some sort of rough deal was solidifying, but that even things like the investor makeup or components was still up in the air. That was just two weeks 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.
Tiktok has long been extremely heavy handed with censorship. A slightly negative comment will get deleted and warnings meted out. Content that angers anyone gets flagged and often removed. And while there were some ephemeral movements where a bunch of young people trend-lambasted Trump, generally I find the platform seems to actually magnify pro-Trump content, even long before he was elected.
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.
Meta has C Suite execs whose job is to make sure specific political content is censored. Usually stuff the US administration doesn't want. Previously this was COVID skepticism. Now it is anti-Israel content mostly
That's fine. Not every platform has to work the same way and attract the same communities.
Well there's always going to be one lobster that likes the water a little warmer.
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There’s a difference between 1-to-1, 1-to-many, and 1-to-all media.
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.
It would be great if that were true, but TikTok is filled with accounts dedicated to virtue signal and “news”. I’ve tried multiple times to clean my feed but there are too many
Political censorship does not have a good track record as a way to foster self-expression, which intrinsically involves drama in many cases.
What platform and medium is more suited for that? All the major social media platforms based in the US also censor such topics and don't promote them
Xitter and Blue sky are just US folks screaming about politics these days, can't you just join those and let us watch cat videos on TikTok in peace?
That's true.
You can post creative works on both Ao3 and spacebattles, but you certainly can not post some Ao3 works on spacebattles (or, indeed, anywhere).
It's hard to know for sure, but many people are reporting that rules are being enforced unequally to silence news critical of the current administration.
Ignorance is bliss
Freedom is slavery
War is peace
All for one and one for all.
And I’m for myself.
Who knows, but worth noting at least that China has demanded purges of negativity across the internet. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/08/world/asia/china-censorsh...
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.
"Democracy" is obviously a scam if a foreign power can buy the platforms and adjust information flows to "shift" public opinion their way.
Votes are the output, not the input. Not that officials seems to listen anyway.
> if a foreign power can buy the platforms and adjust information flows to "shift" public opinion their way.
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
I agree with you on this. People who don’t believe this fundamentally do not believe in democracy.
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.
Sure, but there's a difference in intent and degree between "foreign influence is manipulating our voters" via political content on TikTok vs a targeted state sponsored campaign run by intelligence agencies.
There are some common sense guardrails around elections in a democracy, and foreign influence targeting the actual election process is generally viewed as over the line of acceptability.
"Just build your own tiktok". "Freedom of speech is not absolute". "Freedom of expression doesn't guarantee giving you a platform". "1st amendment protect you from government, not from companies".
Let me guess: they censored some leftist content, am I right?
> Let me guess: they censored some leftist content, am I right?
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...
Is there an uncut video? As controversial as the desire for full understanding is these days, there an incredible amount of context missing from that video:
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?
Freedom of speech isn't absolute, and it doesn't guarantee you a platform, and the 1st Amendment does only protect you from government, not companies.
I don't see what the point of your comment is. It seems like you're dunking on "the left" for... being factually correct?
My point is that so called "progressives" kept justifying and even celebrating censorship for more than a decade, but screeching and screaming now, when it hit themselves.
No one was justifying or celebrating censorship then, and no one is screeching and screaming now.
It seems you're trying to imply that "progressives" are being hypocritical (although I don't know what specifically is "progressive" in this context), but there is no hypocrisy in recognizing that private platforms have the right to enforce policies while also protesting those policies. That's how free speech actually works.
As opposed to what conservatives were doing not long ago, which is demanding the government forcibly take over social media platforms and make banning them illegal. Talk about screeching and screaming.
One of the few social media outlets that didn't blatantly censor Israel's war crimes. So of course it had to go. Places like Hacker News are safe because they toe the line and ensure "inconvenient topics" aren't popular or promoted. It's fully baked into their rules and it's generally accepted as a Good Thing somehow. Anti-censorship lip-service out of one side of their mouth and rampant clampdown on "unacceptable conversations" within their VC safe space.
The administration's theft of TikTok is absolutely unacceptable and we should all be horrified. Entrepreneurs built a great business with an algorithm that is still -- years after it launched -- head and shoulders more entertaining and engagement-generating than anything domestic firms could come up with, even with years to figure it out.
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.
Or people are just trying to not be reminded every second of their living lives that there's one conflict or another going on. TikTok is made in China and used worldwide. Not many things are relatable and relevant to a world wide audience.
Have you ever used TikTok? It responds rapidly to your engagement (likes, skips, etc.) and very quickly starts showing you mostly the kind of content you enjoy.
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.
No, seems he hasn't even used the app before. He is just spamming this thread with thinly veiled pro-censorship advocacy. Seems to be a trend on this site as long as the content being censored is negative about trump.
Yeah it's pretty amazing. Not sure if a lot of HN readers are MAGA or if someone wrote a bot of some kind, or if dang and the crew are suppressing it to avoid retribution of some kind from Trump toward YC.
> The administration's theft of TikTok is absolutely unacceptable and we should all be horrified.
TikTok is still under Chinese ownership. Nothing has changed (yet).
> 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.
Almost as if everyone using the same few centralized platforms that they ultimately have no control over is a situation ripe for abuse.
So what though? If I have a website and I want a particular type of content on it, why should I NOT be allowed to moderate it? These are not public services.
Agree, time to host our own websites. People falsely believe sites like Facebook and Twitter are public utilities (some government services even depend on them now). While in reality their owners benevolently allowed you to store and share your content on their premises.
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.
Thanks. The fact that this got flagged and removed is rather apt.
Came to say the same. You posted something on somebody’s service. It wasn’t in line with what they allow on their service. Accept that truth or else use a different service.
I imagine this is being posted as a response to the fact that TikTok was forced to sell itself after it didn’t play nicely with US propaganda.
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
The problem is the US government very publicly and explicitly forced TikTok to sell their website so they could change the content on 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
Because the alternative was to keep letting the Chinese Communist Party to do it.
Anything else is preferable.
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