An edited meme image featuring two stills from MegaMind. The top still shows Titan speaking to a the mayor, who is labelled “TikTokers getting censored by China” and saying “You have freed us!” overlaid. Titan has a US flag as a label, and is saying “Oh, I wouldn’t say freed, more like under new management.”
Still better than having our vulnerabilities dug up with the intention to militarize them. China would be ecstatic for us all to be dragged into “Pig Butchering” as they call it, and I’m sure our infrastructure makes easy targets for them, now.
The USA has far less to benefit from the destruction of the USA.
Oh, I’m judging. I wonder if this guy you’re replying to pretended to care about the Uyghur people, a few years ago. That was pretty fashionable. Weird how everyone stopped giving a shit about them, right?
Not surprising, though. Because now we’re back to “pffft, all sides are the same. Both parties are the same. All the countries are the same. Everything’s the same.” That’s the fashionable sentiment, among certain political quarters.
But no, goddammit, it’s not all the same. The way we’re headed, maybe we’ll eventually have the kind of constant state surveillance and trips to reeducation camps that the PRC furnishes to its people, BUT WE ACTUALLY DON’T HAVE THAT SHIT, RIGHT NOW.
That matters. We’re waaaaaay far from perfect and we’re definitely headed in a shitload of wrong directions, but we’re not actually a totalitarian goddamn dictatorship, yet. We have a de facto oligarchy. And a corporate klepto-state. That needs to be fixed.
But I’m fed up with this “nah, the USA is the worst” attitude. I see our country as a shitty old Ford Fiesta, with no air conditioning and a transmission that keeps making weird noises. Sure, it sucks, and it’s gonna cost an arm and a leg to fix…but it’s the only car we’ve got. So there’s no sense in ignoring the problems until the transmission blows up on the highway, and it’s catastrophic.
That’s basically what jokers like the guy you’re replying to are advocating, though. Not only do they resist taking our shitty car into the shop while it’s still fixable, they’re looking over at guy in the Yugo with the bald tires and the potentially deadly exhaust leak, and saying “we’re no better off than him.”
Yet to be seen really. Depends on who buys it (or if the CCP decides to sell it at all).
In the US it’s not quite the same as in China as all information in China is controlled by the government, there is no free speech protection and no separation between what you see and what the government wants you to see. In the US by contrast it would likely be a private entity, who will set their own rules for good or bad.
I think there is a good chance the CCP refuses to let it go, because it was never about profit to them. It was about control, and judging by the amount of death threats our legislators received that goal was exceeded.
My honest thoughts are that they won’t sell it and just shut it down cmpletely. The CCP has zero interest in monetizing the platform. Now imagine having 175 million people pissed about their beloved platform taken away. The CCP has about a year to do real psyops damage before shutting the platform. This will enrage the people addicted to it.
I never thought about it that way. Basically any algorithm that sorts posts could be argued to be censorship. But you can’t sort based on straight vote either because of fake accounts and bots. I guess we are just doomed to be manipulated.
Platforms can still participate in the “I don’t want you to see this”/“I want you to see this” game. Governments aren’t the only parties that benefit from looking to control public sentiment.
They are all biased, often deliberately so. Whether you think the US forcing ByteDance to sell TikTok to a US company will have a positive outcome or not, the reason the US is doing it is so they have control over the information being shared on TikTok instead of China. The method the US uses to control information is different from China but no less effective. It’s arguably more effective because the passive manipulation of information the US carries out is less transparent, making it harder to determine exactly how the narrative is being manipulated.
Literally none of that has anything to do with there being three different things.
Showing someone videos related to ones they like is different from suppressing or promoting videos with content your company has reason to want suppressed or promoted, which is different from the government doing or compelling others to do the same.
Alright. I understand your point. I don’t believe there’s as much coordination as you do, but that’s fine.
Do you understand what I’m saying, which is that there are three different things? And that a person saying “as long as there’s an algorithm there’s censorship” might be conflating some of those categories? Lemmy sorts and tries to present relevant data, but I have no reason to believe that it’s engaged in explicit or implicit state level censorship or propaganda.
I think we’re pretty much in agreement, as I don’t think corporate censorship and propaganda is coordinated so much as it is aligned towards similar interests. This lack of coordination can actually be a strength though because it creates divisions that can then be levaraged by the same corporations towards their aligned interests (such as suppression of labor organizing). I believe this element of division actually makes censorship/propaganda in the US more effective - at least in some ways - than the censorship/propaganda of more autocratic regimes.
Of course US oligarchs don’t have the same tight control over the sharing of information that oligarchs in autocratic regimes do, as evidenced by the existence of platforms like Lemmy, but as long as the alternatives remain small and ineffectual it doesn’t matter. TikTok is not small and ineffectual, and by nature of it being owned by a Chinese company is free from manipulation by US oligarchs. This resulted in narratives that the US wants to suppress (such as pro-palestine/anti-israel narratives) being widely disseminated on the platform. This is the main reason TikTok is being forced to sell to a US company.
How is bias not inherent to curation? Preference for one thing over another is bias. Curation is literally showing you things it thinks you’re biased to like. These groups aren’t revealing their secret sauce for curation algorithms so we’d never know anyway.
There’s prioritizing the viewers preferences, and then there’s prioritizing the platforms preferences.
If I don’t show you a video because I don’t think you’d enjoy it, that’s different from not showing it to you because I don’t want you to see it.
User preference is a type of bias, but you wouldn’t typically call a platform “biased” unless it was putting it or some third parties preferences ahead of the users.
If I don’t show you a video because I don’t think you’d enjoy it, that’s different from not showing it to you because I don’t want you to see it.
I wouldn’t disagree those are different reasons for not wanting to show a video but both are curations based on biases.
I guess I just have a more neutral connotation for bias than “biased against you for others’ own interests” and so I didn’t find bias to be a useful term here to distinguish the reasons behind curation choices.
Nothing really in disagreement here, just fiddling with common usage.
To me bias from a service or platform would be a bias that’s contrary to what was expected or requested.
It’s when they put their finger on the scale.
Bias, as a term, has heavy connotations of being unfair, or to have distorted results, which is why I kinda shy away from using it to describe “everything working as expected and no one would complain if they knew the details”.
If the grocer tampers with the scale so you take home less carrots than you wanted, that’s not fair, and so we would they they biased the scales.
Sounds like we agree, but I also like talking wording sometimes. :)
So, you think it’s a protected right to speak freely on a privately owned platform? Tiktok, Xitter, etc., don’t need to make allowances for anyone. They exist to make money off of their users.
It astounds me to this day that people don’t understand the basic tenets of social media: if it’s free, YOU are the product.
Legally permissable censorship is still censorship. Just because you’re allowed to do something doesn’t mean that it isn’t that thing, and it’s silly to argue that because someone is allowed to do something means that people can’t complain about it.
Maybe, but the expectation that your can also speak freely on the platform is protected by the almighty capitalism compact we implicitly embrace as Americans and other (not all) 1st world citizens.
Just because you think you have a right doesn’t mean you do.
I think the clear solution is the user being able to choose between highest rated for a defined period or by chronological without ratings considered, with a heavy focus on anti-bot moderation. Of course, searches are trickier, because sorting search results chronologically doesn’t work that well. It’s also harder to attempt to interpret contextual information about a search query without using an algorithm.
Fun fact, “show whatever has the most votes” and “show whatever was published most recently” and even “show something completely at random” are all also algorithms.
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