Tiktok is the absolute worst at irrational censorship. It’s a shame because the site is immensely popular and that means it is full of very interesting content. Yet, this is far from the first unreasonable thing they’ve been removing. It’s well known how Tiktok users came up with alternative words to circumvent words that were likely to get their content removed (e.g., “unalived” instead of “killed”).
“Unalived” sounds like something out of 1984.
Nah, unalived was being used by gaming YouTubers years before TikTok. YouTube does the same kind of censorship shit.
Tiktok is the absolute worst at irrational censorship
Tell me about it. They literally block access from Hong Kong.
Chinese government spyware disappears content it doesn’t like. This shocking news and more at 11.
The chinese government doesn’t have any say in tiktok. Tiktok isn’t even available in china. This is an attemt to please repuplican politicians all the way.
Correction: The PRC owns 1% and has one person in the board of directors of bytedance. Still: the fearmongering against the chinese government is just a smokescreen to draw attention away from the NSA.
Every company in China has to surrender their data to China
ByteDance is corporated in the Cayman Islands
Bytedance is headquartered in Beijing, and the chinese version of the app, Douyin, is owned by Beijing Microlive Vision Technology Co., Ltd.
The place of the headquarter doesn’t necessarily reflecht the juristiction. And they developed both Douyin and Tiktok (it is the same app).
It’s not about jurisdiction though, it’s about the Chinese government’s rules controlling businesses that operate from within their country. You can’t really headquarter there and then tell them you don’t want to play ball.
Agreed that it’s the same app, that’s kind of my point regarding the Beijing-based company that owns Douyin.
Whatever. Let’s not pretend that authoritarian China doesn’t have its tentacles in the country’s business operations to steer everything to its will.
I’m seriously not a fan of China. But thinking that neoliberal western “democracies” are way less authoritarian is just a delusion.
Fair point. Many such places are just committing atrocities in a different configuration.
Whenever TikTok sees something that is remotely negative, they will fight at all cost to make sure it doesn’t exist on their platform. I have seen TikTok videos having to censor the word “orphanage” because according to TikTok that is a no-no word LOL
They try to do everything to make users stay on their platform for as long as possible. They were probably afraid that the concept of orphanages might bum people out too much.
If you get your medical information from TikTok you really have far bigger problems.
Bigger problems like the republicans and other far-right parties attacking reproductive rights? Yeah, you’re right.
That is not the topic at discussion.
Yes it is. Why do you think thah TikTok removes that content in the first place? It 's because they are afraid to give paranoid, xenophobic, republicans any “reason” to ban them.
I actuallyethink that you are trying to derail the discussion into “you showld never trust tiktok”.
TikTok is a cancer that always does this. It is a tool for censorship, propaganda and population control. You should never use TikTok. It is extremely unethical to do so.
That sure are some strong claims. Anything to back those up? Propaganda by whom/for what? Population control of what population by whom? How can a distribution platform also be a tool for cencorship?
TikTok is as all Chinese companies controlled by the CCP. There is extremely plenty of evidence of TikTok’s very sophisticated censorship: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_by_TikTok
Its more of an accessibility concern, people shouldn’t be getting medical info fully from TikTok but it’s a good way to disseminate basic info
You should get no information from TikTok. That is all there is to say about it. This is even much more true for medical information.
Given TikTok’s precarious situation, it’s no surprise they’re going out of their way to bend to the whims of US politics. Face it, there are a lot of Republicans ready to justify banning TikTok by pointing to teenagers getting abortion advice from the platform.
There are plenty of other reasons to ban TikTok, namely the massive and unchecked data collection by the Chinese government.
I’d prefer not to install Chinese spyware, thankyouverymuch.
Maybe ban targeted advertizing, or that degree of spyware, for all companies, instead of opening that pandora’s box of giving the power to ban social media apps altogether to the government.
Especially since the anti-tiktok bills actually include a lot of other stuff, up to and including making VPN’s illegal.
Targeted advertising isn’t even on the same playing field of sketchyness as “massive and unchecked data collection by the Chinese government”. Even mentioning it in the same sentence seems like an attempt at forum sliding.
And while I agree that the bill is an overreach and absolutely shouldn’t go through in it’s current form, it’s exactly what would be required to achieve your authoritarian stance of banning all social media.
Really? Because you could argue that targeted advertising lead to the January 6th riots.
The chinese government doesn’t really benefit from data collection on western citizens. At least not if they don’t work for intelligence agencies or want to proclaim that Taiwan is a country while being on mainland China.
If you think they’re not capable of if not already engaged in PSYOPS, I’d suggest you look deeper into targeted advertising and who is paying for it.
What is your point? Tell me, what the chinese government is supposedly doing with non-chinese user-data that is not worse than what the US surveillance capitalism is currently doing?
Do you seriously think that China spread misinformation about “stolen elections”?
Every US bill includes a lot of other stuff. That’s Congress’s gig.
The US needs a tighter set of restrictions like what the EU has been passing out lately. But, that doesn’t change the fact that ByteDance is a Chinese corporation, under the control of the Chinese government, and has no pretenses of data regulations.
ByteDance is corporated in the Cayman Islands, buddy.
They are about as cooperative with the CCP as Apple and Facebook are.
It is not the chinese government you should be worried about, my friend.
Blah, blah, I hear the same tired argument over and over again about how Google, Facebook, Amazon are just as bad as China. But, it’s just not true.
These large corps are definitely something we should paying attention to and they get away with far too much. They should be broken up just like Ma Bell. But, they are still subject to the same data restrictions that the US and the EU have put into law.
TikTok, on the other hand, is owned by a Chinese company, and by extension, the Chinese government. Any data it collects goes straight to the Chinese government. ByteDance, of course, denies this, but the US military, CIA, and other government entities know better, as they have specifically banned the platform for any of their personnel. The data tracking permissions you have to allow on phones is far higher than any other social media platform. It’s a more aggressive data collection platform.
TikTok serves a wildly different set of media to the non-Chinese public. It wants to dumb down the non-Chinese population by serving addictive short-form content that hones in on their interests, in a more extreme fashion than any other social media platform, and gets them into a constant loop of video watching for hours and hours.
TikTok really doesn’t perform that much more data collection on their apps than Google does, if at all more. Sure, data going into the Chinese government might be a bit more concerning, but I’d say most if your argument is dangerously close to Chinese fear-mongering.
The CIA has banned that stuff because their employees are high value targets for chinese intelligence agencies.
You don’t have any data collection restrictions in the US (thanks to the patrion act).
Law enforcement has coplete access to the ring doorbell cameras. Google and Facebook have repeatedly worked together with the CIA and FBI. It has been established that the US elections have been tampered with via targeted advertising in combination with misinformation. As a regular US citizen, you are simply not a target for China. The US government however has repeatedly proven that it spies on foreign and their own citieens.
And all that “dumbing down” conspiracy theory: It is far more likely that a profit driven corporation simply optimizes for maximum engagement for ad revenue.
But when I google tacos I get ads of tacos and that’s just as bad as the Chinese government choosing the content I get to see on the internet
Yeah. The chinese government clearly wants you to see as many ads for some shitty car or makeup or whatnot. That’s definetly the CCP and not some Ad company who pays ByteDance. /s
It abso-fucking-lutely is.
The chinese government neither wants to sell you shit, nor will harrass you with their cops (unless you live in China).
That’s incredibly naive.
It’s not more naive than trusting the US government. That one has a more direct control and interest in implementing a surveillance police-state.
Yes, it absolutely is, because the US government does not require companies by law to hand over any and all information they collect to them.
If you’re concerned about Chinese spyware, You might want to also be concerned about US spyware as well. The US justice complex is not a friend to the US public, nor is the US national security complex.
TikTok users are afraid to say the word “die”; it doesn’t surprise me at all that content that could facilitate literal crimes would be disallowed.
Yet they don’t censor the information on how to steal cars which has caused a widespread issue in the United States with Hyundai/Kias being stolen.
What happened to unfiltered free speech on twitter?
This is an article about TikTok.
You are correct! I dont know what the heck was my brain doing this morning. I even clicked through the article and ran through it and everything and thought I saw some twitter nonsense on there in addition to tiktok.
PSA dont post while still drowsy!
It’s “Don’t tread on me”. Not, “Don’t tread on others”
“Leave me alone”
**OPPRESSION!!!1
Would a federated tiktok be possible, imagine it’s got to be easier than a federated youtube.
It’s still a ton of video bandwidth and storage. Petabytes worth.
