Reader's Note - There has been no evidence submitted showing any of the allegations towards TikTok are true. In fact TikTok publicly embarked on a project to silo all US Data.
Lol, fair play, I editorialized the titles too. But really once you click into them it's super obvious these guys have an axe to grind. For example, (from the relevant paper) they state that serving up less Anti CCP content is a bias. But they compare it to YouTube and Instagram. Two services pretty famous for taking people down far right tracks if you let their algorithm auto play. So in this case even a neutral position is going to have less Anti-CCP propaganda.
And the entire paper is flawed in this way. The baseline they establish is itself flawed. They also claim causation but can only show correlation with their skewed baseline.
The team next looked at engagement to see if this explained why anti-CCP content was performing less well. But it found that TikTok users “liked or commented on anti-CCP content nearly four times as much as they liked or commented on pro-CCP content, yet the search algorithm produced nearly three times as much pro-CCP content”. This didn’t happen on Instagram or YouTube.
Yes. I already said it was censorship. Again: how is this pro-CCP propaganda? Do you understand the difference between censorship and propaganda?
If you don't think that suppressing content that goes against a point of view whilst simultaneously boosting content that agrees with a point of view is propaganda, I suppose you must think Twitter's recent developments over the past two years (or so? Time is getting fuzzy) are not a propaganda effort either.
My point is that propaganda is not necessarily evil. I dislike propaganda from the CCP as much as the next non-tankie. But claiming "this platform is spreading propaganda, therefore evil" is ignorant as best and condoning the other imperialist propaganda at worst.
Know it's from China and don't believe anything Tiktok says on the CCP. Done.
I happen to like the Palestine propaganda on Tiktok and dislike the imperial core censoring dissidents, that's all.
My point is that propaganda is not necessarily evil. I dislike propaganda from the CCP as much as the next non-tankie. But claiming “this platform is spreading propaganda, therefore evil” is ignorant as best and condoning the other imperialist propaganda at worst.
What kind of propaganda is the CGP pushing, exactly? Is it with us in the room, right now?
Umm, that’s not really propaganda, homie. That’s simple censorship. There’s a difference.
Again: how is this pro-CCP propaganda? Do you understand the difference between censorship and propaganda?
Sounds a lot more like 'denying propaganda is being pushed'
Propaganda can be for good or bad. But acknowledging that it is propaganda is a necessary first step in either case for any citizen worth the name, whether a citizen of a nation or the world.
No, it's the other way around: Propaganda is trying to influence one's political beliefs. Most news is propaganda, political memes are propaganda, "go vote!" signs are propaganda, uncle Sam is from propaganda, etc.
I'm talking about the neutral definition. From Wikipedia:
Beginning in the twentieth century, the English term propaganda became associated with a manipulative approach, but historically, propaganda had been a neutral descriptive term of any material that promotes certain opinions or ideologies "Ideology".
My point is: if we all would use a more broad definition of the term propaganda, instead of calling nothing but political messaging we didn't like propaganda, we'd all live in a more politically literate society.
I think this meme actively reduces media literacy.