Celebrities say they are being censored by TikTok after speaking out against ICE

https://www.pride.com/culture/celebrities/tiktok-censoring-megan-stalter-and-finneas

by saubeidl • 6 months ago

377 142 6 months ago

pride.com

deanc• 6 months ago

Poor celebrities. Having their voice stifled by foreign governments on a platform they helped promote.

saubeidl5• 6 months ago

It's being stifled by their own government. US TikTok has been taken over by a government-linked oligarch.

MrGilbert• 6 months ago

It's their own government, at least for US citizens since TikTok was forced to sell their business in the US.

BoredPositron• 6 months ago

First, they’re screaming OH, THE HUMANITY! over censorship before their favorite puppets take the wheel. Then, they’re the first ones ridiculing anyone else for complaining about the exact same thing.

libertine• 6 months ago

You're missing the point, celebrities just happen to have a huge reach and noticed the reach being cut.

This probably means everyone else is also getting their reach crippled.

Remember that even with clear video evidence, the administration lies about the events and tries to spin it as domestic terrorism.

So imagine what they are doing, and will do, without video evidence.

This is probably one of the darkest times in America... You have an administration that normalizes lying and violence, and a tens of millions of Americans that are choosing to close their eyes and suspend their morals because they're scared and confused.

sorbusherra• 6 months ago

voice stifled by oracle inc you mean?

rvnx• 6 months ago

Happening because TikTok is under US laws. Use https://www.douyin.com/ then.

And if they wouldn’t, they would be blocked or prevented of doing business in the US.

SanjayMehta• 6 months ago

Laws? Rules based order.

throwaway2056• 6 months ago

Rules of DJT, SV, FAANG.

saubeidl5• 6 months ago

US laws, hmm.

Wasn't there something about an amendment to their constitution? I believe it might've even been the first? Something about freedom of speech?

Maybe I'm just misremembering, but I could've sworn conservatives kept harping on about it.

0xy• 6 months ago

Did you have the same concerns when Biden's DoJ was colluding with social media to censor narratives they didn't like politically?

https://judiciary.house.gov/media/press-releases/google-admi...

defrost• 6 months ago

The Constitution is silent on the matter of the cutting room floor and Ellison lawnmowers.

It only restricts the Federal government (later extended to state governments IIRC?)

This is one of many reasons Federal government is now partnered with private business.

pavlov• 6 months ago

Ellison’s Murdoch killer flexing its muscles for a mild warmup.

They got Paramount and CBS and TikTok, are allied with Twitter, and still have a chance of grabbing Warner.

I don’t think American billionaires ever particularly liked Murdoch, an Australian, controlling so much of the media environment in their country. Maybe they’ll make an offer for Fox News that the Murdoch heirs can’t refuse.

gadders• 6 months ago

Maybe no-one is interested in celebrities virtual signalling any more?

jesseendahl• 6 months ago

Finneas (Billie Eilish's brother) isn't one for virtue signaling from what I've seen over the years from his posts. He keeps it very real and down to earth as far as celebrities go.

gambiting• 6 months ago

Since when is speaking out against fascism virtue signalling? Like, how bad does it have to get before it's just speaking out against the attrocities happening around us and not virtue signalling? Or are celebrities just flat out not allowed to do it?

oefrha• 6 months ago

This is quite out of character for a lawn mower; lawn mowers shouldn't care.

ilogik• 6 months ago

for those curious about the lawn mower: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=2312s

tanganik• 6 months ago

More context: the video speaks about Oracle and TikTok has been bought by an investor group headed by Oracle's Larry Ellison (which the article also references).

Maken3• 6 months ago

Is the lawn mower already in control of TikTok?

johneth• 6 months ago

As of a few days ago, yes: https://newsroom.tiktok.com/announcement-from-the-new-tiktok...

Only TikTok in the U.S., though; everywhere else it's Bytedance still.

xinuc• 6 months ago

it does not care. it just want to make more money.

rasz• 6 months ago

Not if censoring was part of the deal, then its just a payment.

jauntywundrkind• 6 months ago

pretty impressive how quickly Ellisons managed to make this whole situation suck and reek badly. they'll turn down the heat & stuff the frog back in the pot, then crank the heat up a bit slower this time, but there is just going to be such endless utterly preposterous censorship and algorithmic biasing for the right wing & ultra capitalist agenda, on and on now.

incredible beyond words that this was a unanimous decision by the supreme court. letting the us government set up whatever arraigned marriage it felt like for buying a social network is some wild meddling with businesses. and here we are, with the ultra capitalists doing exactly what they want to with one of the most popular social networks.

excellent write up for this absolute madness of a court decision, TikTok v. Garland and the First Amendment Anticanon by Evelyn Douek, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6118706

0x3f8• 6 months ago

Capitalism is when bad things happen. And the more badder they are the more capitalism it is!

keybored4• 6 months ago

This was the logic the West used throughout the life of the Soviet Union but for [Cc]ommunism.

tormeh• 6 months ago

I don't think the parent said it was. This is clearly closer to mercantilism, given the degree of government involvement.

scotty794• 6 months ago

I recently saw an interesting explanation. The point was, that capitalism is not (just) an economical system. It's a system of power in which capital can (and almost always does) overrule everything else. If you take this stance, capitalism is to blame for all the good and bad things that happen in the capitalist country. Democracy is just the way how capital rules.

BigglesB• 6 months ago

I’m reading “ultra-capitalists” here as “those that control an extreme proportion of capital” rather than “those who believe really strongly in capitalism as a system”, though tbf that venn diagram may well be a donut…

iinnPP• 6 months ago

This isn't very compelling. It's 2 anecdotes and a pretty damning final paragraph. Is there any more reliable data?

peyton• 6 months ago

I believe the headline is missing a “mistakenly”. Very strange article given the headline.

SilverElfin• 6 months ago

Data? No. None of these companies are making their data freely available for analysis or being transparent about how their algorithms work. People have complained for a while that Twitter / X seems to suppress the visibility and reach of profiles or posts that disagree with Musk’s views. The recent open sourcing of their algorithm is meaningless since there’s no evidence of what they actually have in production or what data / configuration is used with it.

So the best we can do is anecdotal examples. And it’s also obvious that Trump avoided banning TikTok for months, illegally, because he wanted to have another platform serve as a mouthpiece. He now has that by forcing a sale of TikTok to his friend, Larry Ellison.

ethbr1• 6 months ago

The fact that social media companies aren't mandated by law to provide transparency into reach / visibility is a travesty.

It should be fucking table stakes for being able to run a business with that much power and influence.

theshrike792• 6 months ago

Anecdata is strong, I have multiple cases myself just from browsing this morning.

But I'm leaning towards incompetence. Some US generated stuff was most likely moved to Oracle shitboxes, causing encoding issues and unreliable streaming.

...or it's malice and they're scanning the data and intentionally throttling traffic for unwanted content.

c420• 6 months ago

Would the incompetence include deleting messages that used the word "Epstein"?

https://i.redd.it/2stz13v1bsfg1.jpeg

There are quite a few reports on Reddit of users having any dm using that word being deleted.

https://old.reddit.com/r/TikTok/comments/1qnxxgi/were_being_...

bjourne• 6 months ago

The whole point of the forced sale of TikTok was for the American-Israeli hegemony to exert control over the narrative of the platform. And now it is doing exactly that. Color me surprised.

krapp• 6 months ago

No no no no no, it was because TikTok was owned by the CCP and was literally and directly controlling the minds of millions of people and indoctrinating them with communist propaganda, turning them against the United States.

You may have gone onto the platform and seen nothing but the same sort of vapid memes as anywhere else, but you see that's just how insidious and clever those Chinese are.

We're not exerting control over the narrative, we're protecting the truth from foreign influence.

There is no genocide in ba sing se.

Alifatisk• 6 months ago

Is the country falling apart? So many extreme events is happening over there.

tempodox2• 6 months ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46757822

misja111• 6 months ago

according to TechCrunch, this language has been included in the privacy policy since Aug. 2024, and wasn’t changed in response to the Trump administration’s latest escalation of immigration enforcement, and is “primarily there to comply with state privacy laws like California’s Consumer Privacy Act.”

This is the problem with any kind of censoring media. The initial intentions of those policies might have been good, but these kind of policies can so easily be abused for malign intentions.

wormpilled• 6 months ago

Makes sense since Oracle now has complete control of it.

baxtr• 6 months ago

I have a bit of experience with video platforms.

It’s really hard to say which video will work or not. What people react to and what not.

All I’m saying is that this could also potentially be explained by "The Algorithm" per se.

scotty794• 6 months ago

Support for ICE is in minority (although a large one). I don't think algorithm would suppress negative opinions on it, especially among viewership of celebrities that don't appeal to the right side of political spectrum.

ap993• 6 months ago

You should qualify your statement with "amongst the few people I talk to and the narrow spectrum of media I consume."

Also, do you mean minority of the total US population or minority of the voting population?

For one reference point I fully support ICE. And I think it's wild you have local and state politicians encouraging actions against federal agents who are enforcing federal law.

filoeleven6• 6 months ago

Well, you're wrong. This article has more info but is login- or paywalled.

https://www.theverge.com/news/867625/tiktok-down-weekend-bro...

mrtksn• 6 months ago

There’s lots of myths in social media, some weeks ago I kept seeing people on TikTok claiming that if you put some keyword in you profile(I think it was “Oracle”) or some of your post you will start seeing the protest again because the algorithm will “reset”. I assumed that someone was trying to farm accounts interested in politics or maybe indeed the algorithm steers by the introduction of the new for the account word.

Anyway, considering that the purchase of the American TikTok was done with a purpose and there is documented collusion between the involved tech Billionaires and the political class behind the street executions in American cities that drive those protests, I wouldn’t be surprised that they are actually throttling this time.

krautburglar• 6 months ago

That a handful of private companies (of which, Ellison has big investments in several) have cornered the market on NAND and DRAM -- with some sources saying that these reservations extend into 2029 -- should be far more concerning. They're sprinting toward super-intelligence, while potential competitors can't even buy equipment. Both pro-immigrant and anti-immigrant arguments will seem fatuous when we are all slaves.

docdeek• 6 months ago

That’s not a very convincing article. One person leaving TikTok claiming she was silenced, and another where a claim of silencing is made but, within 24 hours, the ‘silenced’ video "has more than 220,000 views and over 70,000 likes”. Perhaps there is some silencing going on, but it doesn’t appear that there is much evidence of it in this particular article.

b65e8bee43c2ed0• 6 months ago

those who were OK with malinformation being suppressed by every platform for two years (from 2020-02 to 2022-02) should be OK with this as well.

rsynnott2• 6 months ago

Celebrities should consider maybe not using social media things controlled by the regime? Like, other social media is available.

vanviegen• 6 months ago

Like, other social media is available.

Social media that actually have a large audience and that cannot be easily pressured by the US government?

Maken3• 6 months ago

This specific social media was not controlled by the regime, and they are taking every step necessary to correct that.

filoeleven6• 6 months ago

They will follow wherever the network effect goes, the same way that more influencers are posting to Bluesky in addition to Twitter now, and some of them are making the move entirely.

tremon• 6 months ago

They're celebrities. The network will follow where they go.

niemandhier• 6 months ago

In transparency will do this.

No one can know what TikTok censors or penalizes in its algorithms. All other social media platforms are equally intransparent, what is new is that TikTok is not American.

SiempreViernes• 6 months ago

In this particular case the censoring of anti-ICE post is most likely because TikTok is getting American (read: Trump allied) handlers.

https://www.bbc.com/news/live/cp374n3ggngt

filoeleven6• 6 months ago

TikTok is now owned by an American company. As soon as that change happened, the censorship began.

https://www.theverge.com/news/867625/tiktok-down-weekend-bro...

stanislavb• 6 months ago

Get used to it. Both TikTok and X(twitter) have been used and will be used to manipulate the public opinion in favour of Trump. I'm aware that I can't prove it; however, this explains how Trump won, and how he will win again - manipulating the zombies.

ozlikethewizard2• 6 months ago

There are studies on it but the conclusions are pretty thin right now because data collection is hard, but I'd say youre right

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00104140241306955

dudefeliciano4• 6 months ago

hasn't this been pretty clear since Cambridge Analytica?

blell• 6 months ago

Wait until you try to criticise Israel.

self_awareness• 6 months ago

This is so American.

They raise alarms because they have low TikTok view counters. But mass killings of Iranian protesters is Iran's own business.

macshaggy• 6 months ago

Celebrities need to stop giving their sht to these SM companies and used Federated social media. So they can own their product and not have to worry about being censored for being anti-government.

Which is hilarious sentence now because this government so pro free speech!!! sarcasm*

But seriously this is something that if my main gig was to create music or some art form, I wouldn't want to be on a corp run platform. I would want to own it myself and the all that data.

OrangeMusic• 6 months ago

You expect Billie Eilish fans to be on Mastodon?

akagusu• 6 months ago

Why does everything ICE related gets flagged on HN?

saubeidl5• 6 months ago

Pro-Regime enforcers exist in the digital world as well.

21st century brownshirts, if you will.

tessierashpool9• 6 months ago

Seems like there's a pattern:

https://www.npr.org/2026/01/27/nx-s1-5689104/tiktok-epstein-...

iceflinger• 6 months ago

Not sure why this is flagged? One of the largest social media platforms in the industry changed ownership, its user base is noticing an unexplained change in functionality? Surely that warrants a discussion among tech people?

saubeidl5• 6 months ago

There is a certain proto-fascist contingent here that sees it to their duty to stifle all discussion critical of the regime.

Schmerika4• 6 months ago

And there are people who own and run this website with extremely aligned interests.

Altman and Thiel have long had YC connections (obv); and for the last year or so Garry Tan and PG have been full-throatedly cheerleading Musk and DOGE on their Twitter pages.

Then there's the many connections between YC and the 'defense' industry; you know, the one making billions of dollars from wars that people speak out about on social media.

It's very easy to explain why posts get flagged here. It's a lot harder to digest why they don't get unflagged. Especially when all the posts about it are quickly removed, every single one.

tempodox2• 6 months ago

By now it’s confirmed full-blown fascism. Nothing proto about it.

dudefeliciano4• 6 months ago

these topics are controversial for people who support the current US government, they don't want to see it on their tech-news website (even though it's called hacker news, the spirit of the hacker manifesto is not alive here).

Funnily enough, these flagged topics seem to spark a lot of conversation, and the voices of the government supporters are not heard here...So they just flag and move on, not even trying to defend their position

zombot• 6 months ago

not even trying to defend their position

Hard to do when your position is essentially indefensible.

xtracto• 6 months ago

My problem with these type of posts in HN is that the discussion doesn't offer ANYTHING constructive.

I comment a lot about these matters on Reddit, and I'm very much against all that's happening in the USA.

But the reality is that the discourse i see here in these types of political posts is the same as on Reddit and the like. (Whether For or against )

It would be great if somehow the discussion added something different. Like the post about Iran censorship and the suggestions on technology to bypass it (I learned about Snowflake) .

But the problem with US related politics is that HN people are very emotionally invested (being Americans most of them) and that makes the discussion become very visceral.

thunky2• 6 months ago

the voices of the government supporters are not heard here

This is sad to me because I really want to hear the other perspective, and there is no place that exists (that I know of) for people who disagree with each other to have a real conversation. Nothing left but echo chambers.

But I think HN falls into this trap because the down vote button is used when people disagree with the other person, which imo is a misappropriation and what prevents people from sharing unpopular opinions.

dogleash• 6 months ago

voices of the government supporters are not heard here...So they just flag and move on, not even trying to defend their position

Why are you're assuming flagging indicates support of the government?

Maybe they're flagging because it's a topic that will generate much more heat than light. It doesn't have to be deeper than that.

direwolf20• 6 months ago

It only takes 4 HN users in support of something to silence opposition to it

solaris2007• 6 months ago

Most original "hacker" (1980s, 1990s) and open source people are quietly right wing anyway.

rsynnott2• 6 months ago

Minihands's fans tend to flag anything unfavourable to Dear Leader.

NoGravitas• 6 months ago

It's flagged because so much of the HN userbase are aligned with the SV oligarchs that took over TikTok-US, and don't want them criticized in public.

pickleglitch• 6 months ago

There is another post about this exact topic on the front page: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46779809

So I can only assume this one is flagged because the source is pride.com

Make of that what you will.

dudefeliciano4• 6 months ago

your link was posted a few hours after this post was flagged

sgnelson• 6 months ago

fascists are going to fascist. Dang et al will just look away and say. "we don't have any power over what our users do. Email us to let us know." Because apparently the mods don't visit their own website? They'll just keep their heads buried in the sand. Everything is fine as long as that sweet ycombinator check keeps getting cashed.

esalman• 6 months ago

Current administration have plenty of time, 3 years to be exact, to turn USA into another Iran.

GeorgeOldfield• 6 months ago

it's almost like it's better to have an external owner of social media companies

Celebrities say they are being censored by TikTok after speaking out against ICE

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