207
this post was submitted on 05 Jan 2025
207 points (98.6% liked)
News
23769 readers
5156 users here now
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Yeah, the reason they want to ban TikTok is because it's not an American owned social media platform like every other one in the country, which means that they can't as easily police its content and only China has that kind of power over it (but I think they don't really have much control over the international version? I don't know enough to say).
This is purely about America's ability to put propaganda on the platform.
There is only one reason I'm concerned about but it's a big one - China could at any time tweak the algorithm to influence a whole generation of people addicted to the network. At that level they could really tip the scales in their favor, and create unrest and instability, probably even violence or worse.
You're absolutely right, but I have the exact same concerns about Meta and Facebook, Google and YouTube, and Musk and Twitter - all of whom have been shown to be influencing the algorithms to censor left-wing news and people and favor right-wing groups and push right-wing extremism.
The other platforms are already doing that. So does the news when they report on events using different language (see the cyber truck blowing up vs. the New Orleans attack). The only difference here is that it might be China doing the propagandizing instead of the corporate overlords.
Absolutely a concern but at least Meta and Twitter do have some interest in stability in the USA. China does not necessarily have the same interests.
All the large platforms can do that. Elon cried about too many bots before he bought Twitter and now it's worse.
Meta has ai profiles. https://www.404media.co/metas-ai-profiles-are-indistinguishable-from-terrible-spam-that-took-over-facebook/
None of these big companies care as long as their profit goes up.
Gotta love the down votes people give for pointing out that it doesn't matter whether it's the US government, a foreign government, or even just the company having an agenda, someone has control over the algorithm and thus what people see.
They seem to want to believe that ignoring the idea that a foreign government can control what we see on social media is somehow inherently better, and that it isn't a legitimate national security threat.
Does that mean it needs to be banned? That's debatable. But it is delusional to insist that it's not a national security issue to have a foreign government in control of the social media nearly 50% of the population interacts with (170m monthly US users in Jan 2024).
They may have already done that
22.94%(19.6% more than second place) of voters voted for a person that claimed pepsi had microchips, said that Donald Trump, a dictactor that was responsible for facilitating The Holocaust in Romania and the founder of a fascist party were heroes, called global warming "a global scam", and spread covid 19 missinformation. As far as i know, his only marketing was tiktok. A lot of romanians were surprised by his place in the election