TikTok wants users to believe that errors blocking uploads of anti-ICE videos or direct messages mentioning Jeffrey Epstein are due to technical errors—not the platform seemingly shifting to censor content critical of Donald Trump after he hand-picked the US owners who took over the app last week.

However, experts say that TikTok users’ censorship fears are justified, whether the bugs are to blame or not.

Ioana Literat, an associate professor of technology, media, and learning at Teachers College, Columbia University, has studied TikTok’s politics since the app first shot to popularity in the US in 2018. She told Ars that “users’ fears are absolutely justified” and explained why the “bugs” explanation is “insufficient.”

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[–] 89 points 9 months ago* (3 children)

Yeah. Right.

"If you get caught, call it a bug." seems to happen a lot this administration.

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  • [–] 15 points 9 months ago (2 children)

    My bet is they tweak the backend instead to derank content they don't like softly next.

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  • [+] 122 points 9 months ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (12 children)
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  • [+] 25 points 9 months ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (2 children)
  • [–] [S] 16 points 9 months ago* (1 child)

    Most of us were teens during the 2000s. No one with fond memories of Myspace knew who Murdoch was.

    Also, he only owned it for the latter half of the decade before it got sold off again.

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  • [–] 5 points 9 months ago (2 children)

    shortform content, is addictive to people.

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  • [–] 2 points 9 months ago (3 children)
  • [–] 4 points 9 months ago (1 child)

    Or Loops? The federated, no special interests version of TikTok. You're already on lemmy, why advocate for yet another corporate social media company?

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  • [–] 4 points 9 months ago

    I like the idea of a federated version of that, but there are many problems:

    1. When people scroll, they need an algorithm to choose content for them.
    2. 99% of average TikTok content is low quality shit and it's the algorithm to find and promote what works
    3. All that 99% of shit is occupying exabytes on bytedance servers. Users are uploading terabytes of shit every hour, it's impossibile for a federated instance to keep all this shit on disk. Look how Lemmy is designed for example. I upload an image and then it's stored forever in hundreds of instances. For videos is untenable. Only companies that are profiting from this (for example using such videos for training ai models, or using this videos to hook people and serve them highly personalized ads) can host a TikTok clone
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  • Saw “no censorship” in the description, and had suspicions because it’s a common dogwhistle for “we’ll allow the most vile people as long as they’re not technically breaking the law”. Got the app, and immediately scrolled past a “Jews secretly run the world” post followed shortly by a “Hitler was right about the Jews” post. Yeah, the problem with “no censorship” is that it inevitably falls prey to the Nazi bar problem.

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    [–] 58 points 9 months ago (2 children)

    Wow, a bug that specifically automatically chose keywords like "ICE", and "epstein", then blocked them from appearing, while leaving literally all other content unharmed????? How conveniently specific and well-timed! /s

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  • [–] 9 points 9 months ago (1 child)

    Like someone else said, it might legitimately have been a bug: maybe they didn't mean for the censorship to be visible to the person using those keywords, and it'd just be everyone else who can't see them. That way you'd think everything is fine but mysteriously your Epstein / ICE content just doesn't get any views

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  • [–] 54 points 9 months ago (3 children)

    Maybe—and I'm going out on a limb here—just maybe, using centralized media to document State-sponsored domestic terrorism is a fucking stupid idea. Especially since the very same platform is co-owned by the State.

    Y'all, we already went through this with Xitter. Sorry you fell for it again, but this won't be the last time if you continue to cling to platforms owned by the very people who want to censor you.

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  • [–] 41 points 9 months ago (4 children)

    This is TikTok in America as managed by Larry Ellison and the US government btw. They Iron Curtained y'all.

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  • [–] 25 points 9 months ago (2 children)

    Balderdash! That type of stuff only happens in dictatorships.
    Next you'll be telling me there's a bunch of masked Gestapo goons running around shooting innocent people and kidnapping non whites...

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    [–] 26 points 9 months ago

    Weird timing these bugs seem to have, eh?

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  • [–] 17 points 9 months ago

    Why doesn’t anyone see this for what it is. They put monitoring for certain keywords but fucked up the code and it blocked some users through incompetence. They fixed the filters, but I guarantee they are sending reports to the White House…

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  • [–] 17 points 9 months ago (1 child)

    Okay good so they're going to fix it then?

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  • [–] 13 points 9 months ago (3 children)

    Hey, now I am not able to watch videos about my favorite fast train from Germany, the InterCityExpress, ICE. /s

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    [–] 13 points 9 months ago

    Translation: "We got caught"

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  • [–] 13 points 9 months ago

    How convenient.

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  • [–] 12 points 9 months ago

    Ironic that an app monitored and controlled by the Chinese communist party allowed more freedom of speech for Americans. How the turn tables.

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  • [–] 11 points 9 months ago

    Every time. Facebook said the same thing when things that upset the powers got hidden or deleted.

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  • [–] 10 points 9 months ago (2 children)

    Lol, that's not how it fucking works.

    Key words like that don't just accidentally get filtered out with a "bug".

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  • [–] 2 points 9 months ago (1 child)

    We were developing a feature to push for those posts, but a bug made it so that they were blocked.

    I guess this is one of the few cases in which that could be the result of a bug.

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  • [–] 3 points 9 months ago

    Not a chance. Not even remotely possible if they have automated testing (which they do) and qa staff verifying features (which they also do), and smoke/regression tests after deployment (which they do).

    I've worked in this industry for 30 years, and the chance that that's what happened, immediately after a takeover by people who really don't want those terms searched on, and the feature was released in that state, and stayed in that state without a hotfix or patch going out and it wasn't caught by their own testers, is practically nil.

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  • [–] 6 points 9 months ago*

    Hopefully the Streisand effect takes place and people wake up to the fact that Israel was blackmailing our politicians with trafficked children and bribing the rest. History will call these people traitors https://www.trackaipac.com/

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  • [–] 6 points 9 months ago (1 child)

    Once again, they are using this mainly to censor anti-Israel content. No one is mentionning this in the articles and comments.

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  • [–] 5 points 9 months ago

    I’m not expert and I call BS. No need to be an expert for this hahaha

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  • [–] 5 points 9 months ago

    Might not be a lie. They might be silently rolling a feature to selectively censor/ show ICE fascists and accidentally censored all by mistake lol

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  • [–] 4 points 9 months ago

    Not "bugs"..."features."

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  • [–] 3 points 9 months ago*

    I hope tik toc loses so many users it goes bankrupt

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  • [–] 5 points 9 months ago (4 children)

    it was one of the last platform that allows significant criticism against ISrael without being censored, thats why.

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  • [–] 6 points 9 months ago (2 children)

    Ah, but that's the thing. There are always new platforms.

    The current winner seems to be a new one called Upscrolled.

    The guy behind it is a Palestinian out of Jordan, with Australian citizenship?

    Anyway, that's all I currently know about it, the app is being hugged to death by tens of thousands of new users over the last day or two.

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    [–] 2 points 9 months ago

    You mean “experts” who have even the slightest understanding of how software works?

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  • [–] 2 points 9 months ago

    Sure. “Bug”. It’s just a way of them begging people to come back to their Zionist spyware bullshit.

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  • [–] 2 points 9 months ago

    By bugs they mean bending over backwards to please daddy.

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  • [–] 1 point 9 months ago

    A bug right. Just EA is blocking/censoring the name as well.

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  • [–] -3 points 9 months ago (1 child)

    So people are upset that they can't get the info or propaganda they want on tick tock...

    Which tells me that these people think that tick tock is a reputable place to get this kind of information

    I have heard more about this tick tock bullshit than I have heard about the ice bullshit today and that should say a lot about nature of our society here in America.

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  • [–] 1 point 9 months ago*

    it was the only place to get actual unspun news about the genocide in gaza, which is so heavily censored in the west that a couple livestreams threatens the whole house of cards. obviously the chinese have their own censorship but if your in the west your trying to escape western propaganda not chinese propaganda

    same reason why chinese kids flock to discord/other services. though from what i hear chinese doesn't really care so much if you know/speak about X internal-propaganda subject, just long as you don't "agitate" or try to orginize against it.

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  • 10 comments in c/boycottus@lemmy.ca view that post
    [–] 26 points 9 months ago

    Given TikTok's origins, the censorship infrastructure was already baked in.

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  • [–] 13 points 9 months ago (2 children)

    It's very hard to imagine on a technical level how this kind of censorship issue could occur as a glitch.

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  • [–] 12 points 9 months ago

    It was just an innocent mistake in calculating how much they could get away with while everyone is still watching closely.

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  • [–] 8 points 9 months ago (1 child)

    I guess I'm glad they're doing the censorship stupidly and hamfistedly, rather than subtly and competently?

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  • [–] 6 points 9 months ago

    Lol "experts". Okay.

    Anyone with a fucking brain knows what this is. I guess we're all "experts" now!

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  • [–] 3 points 9 months ago

    In Soviet Russia, it's not a bug it's a feature,

    In freedom America: it's not a feature it's a bug.

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  • [–] 3 points 9 months ago

    They didn't mean to block them, it was meant to just secretly filter them out

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  • 3 comments in c/antisocialmedia@piefed.social view that post
    [–] 5 points 9 months ago

    It's not a risk.. it has happened

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  • [–] 3 points 9 months ago
    1 comment in c/DeclineIntoCensorship@lemmy.dbzer0.com view that post
    [–] 5 points 9 months ago

    So you fixed the bug, videos agitating against ICE and Trump aren't being deranked now right?

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