TikTok users can't upload anti-ICE videos. The company blames tech issues

https://www.cnn.com/2026/01/26/tech/tiktok-ice-censorship-glitch-cec

by kotaKat • 6 months ago

1495 836 6 months ago

kotaKat• 6 months ago

well… i submitted it as https://lite.cnn.com/2026/01/26/tech/tiktok-ice-censorship-g... but i guess HN drops the lite off of it? le sigh, here’s hoping someone can frontpage one of these tiktok censorship stories today…?

JKCalhoun6• 6 months ago

Looks like this one made it to the front page.

Interesting times…

My mother was born just after WWII—died a few years ago. As sad as I have been (still am) when I watch the world fall apart around me I am thankful that she at least lived through perhaps the best stretch American history—does not have to see the shit I am seeing daily (she was the type that would have been unconsolably anxious about it).

I feel badly, so far, for my daughters born roughly in the period around September 11, 2001. Still, I'm hopeful they might yet see even a brighter future than I had growing up in the 70's…

pjmlp• 6 months ago

I am the first generation after the fall of Salazar's dictorship, so naturally I belong to those that had the opportunity to grow in freedom while hearing the stories from everyone that suffered from it, the dead and crippled from colonial wars, many sent as punishment for their political views and so on.

Never I though that I would still see the return to such politics in my lifetime, even in Europe it is getting harder to push back on them.

criddell• 6 months ago

Based on this comment, I think we are around the same age. I'm 55 and have two kids born in the early 2000's.

I was born in Canada in 1970 to loving and extraordinarily supportive parents and moved to the US in the mid 90's. I can't imagine a better time or place to have been born. I have kids around the same age as yours and their lives are so much more difficult even though they are smarter and harder working than I ever was.

BeetleB• 6 months ago

I am thankful that she at least lived through perhaps the best stretch American history—does not have to see the shit I am seeing daily

I think the Vietnam War was much worse than what you are seeing daily...

nomilk2• 6 months ago

Meta note: it would be awesome to collate a list of 'better ways to view populate sites'. For example, I only learned recently that replacing www with old in a reddit url takes you to a less cluttered version of the site. And I only recently bookmarked a couple of 'archiving' sites (important for reading content that's paywalled). TIL your cnn 'lite' technique.

JKCalhoun6• 6 months ago

Yeah, rock the 'old'. New reddit is TikTok Jr.

mark_l_watson• 6 months ago

The forced US hosted tik-tok sale is all about hiding information from the US public that most people in the rest of the world have easy access to.

gruez6• 6 months ago

is all about hiding information from the US public that most people in the rest of the world have easy access to.

Are we talking about the Trump administration or the Biden administration? The current ban was passed under Biden with supermajorities in both houses.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Efforts_to_ban_TikTok_in_the_U...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protecting_Americans_from_Fore...

throwforfeds• 6 months ago

Both.

I'm not sure why the meme on the right is that the left wants to protect Biden or anyone else. Who cares, they all can come crashing down.

pshirshov2• 6 months ago

How can that be that during any single administration there always are bipartisan votes in favor of digital surveillance and censorship, oh, I mean online protection for kids and puppies? Pure coincidence I think.

Boden's good, Grump's bad, simple as that. Or Grump's good, Boden's bad doesn't matter.

justonceokay2• 6 months ago

Why is it always a blame game? What dos that accomplish? There’s no “good guy” administrations. There’s just realpolitik. The current iteration of ICE is an outgrowth of the Obama admin, as is the problem with billionaires in politics. Biden put a target on Maduro's head before leaving office (continuing to fill a multi-administration powder keg re: Venezuela). Trump just had the panache to brazenly do the deed instead of waiting for the next guy to do it. Horrible? yes. Unprecedented? Hardly.

Now I’m not saying things are inevitable. Trump has a bull-in-china-shop mentality. But he is only being manipulated to set the same agenda, just faster than any president in living memory.

duskdozer4• 6 months ago

I think you'll find that pro-privacy, anti-right-wing people often don't have the highest opinion of "their" guy

wat100007• 6 months ago

The current nonsense has been enabled by decades of overreach. A small minority kept saying, this stuff is going to be really bad if a bad guy takes power. Well, guess what happened.

desolate_muffin• 6 months ago

I am not sure. I think we're talking about the one where Trump illegally and unilaterally ignored the sale or de-list deadline passed in said bipartisan bill so he could figure out which Trump loyalists would be taking over. I'm glad they finally got it sorted out a little over a year after the January 19, 2025 deadline in the bill.

saubeidl3• 6 months ago

The Democrats always have been nothing but controlled opposition, designed to give you the illusion of choice.

reliabilityguy• 6 months ago

the rest of the world have easy access to.

Except for China, where TikTok is nothing like the TikTok for the rest of the world

LauraMedia• 6 months ago

Which is basically what the US also wants.

embedding-shape• 6 months ago

Which used to be seen as "Ew, China has their own version? Crazy censorship" but after some time it seems like the US is aiming for the very same thing. Classy.

lambdasquirrel• 6 months ago

People in China know. Believe me they know.

Aurornis9• 6 months ago

TikTok is different in China, but the rest of the world isn’t getting a completely free TikTok.

TikTok is known for tipping the scales on political keywords everywhere. In the past they haven’t outright censored because that’s too obvious, but uploading videos on the wrong side (according to TikTok, of course) of a political topic will result in very few views.

I wouldn’t be surprised if as part of the transition they’re struggling with the previous methods of simply burying topics, so the obvious ban was their intermediate step.

The comments claiming this is specific to the US are simply wrong. TikTok has always done this everywhere.

fwip4• 6 months ago

Do you think anti-ICE videos are being blocked in China?

aprentic6• 6 months ago

A bunch of people around the world used 小红书 for months when they were worried about a twitter ban.

They got the same version of the app that people in China got. I haven't seen any formal studies but my impression, at the time, was that Chinese people were far better informed about the US than Americans were about China.

PearlRiver• 6 months ago

At least the Chinese are not pretending to be a free democracy.

andsoitis3• 6 months ago

hiding information from the US public

It is literally on the front page of news papers....

Also, you can see it on Instagram, X, etc.

Even a cursory search on TikTok reveals anti-ICE content...

hairofadog2• 6 months ago

TikTok is hugely influential, and the younger people they're trying to influence don't read newspapers and don't hang out on X or Instagram (both of which also censor certain political content).

https://www.npr.org/2024/03/26/1240737627/meta-limit-politic...

https://www.reddit.com/r/OptimistsUnite/comments/1i9zf5u/rco...

https://arxiv.org/html/2508.13375v1

ericmay9• 6 months ago

I've never in my life used TikTok. Can you please point to a specific article, news source, journal, any piece of information that is legal in the United States that I don't have easy access to so I can see what I'm missing?

tdb78932• 6 months ago

Larry and David Ellison have been buying media outlets and those media outlets have started spiking (or delaying, editing, etc) stories that look bad for Trump. It's not that you don't have access at all, it's that these specific platforms are starting to suppress it.

This is the notable example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inside_CECOT

woooooo7• 6 months ago

It's not about legality, its about scrolling and recommendations. Young people see stuff by other young people by default.

Its been a conservative/zionist talking point for years now that "the youth are getting brainwashed by tiktok", and Ellison in particular seems to be in the "I've gone hard right due to the latest Israel conflict" camp. So of course they're not being subtle about it.

JeremyNT2• 6 months ago

I've never in my life used TikTok. Can you please point to a specific article, news source, journal, any piece of information that is legal in the United States that I don't have easy access to so I can see what I'm missing?

Whataboutism. You presumably know full well what the parent was describing, but if not:

TikTok presents users with feeds of videos. For many users, this is their primary news source.

An American oligarch and party loyalist now has de facto control of the app. Therefore, the regime has the capability to shape the narrative by boosting or hiding videos from the feed (whether or not they are doing so is an open question).

Could users still hypothetically find the same information elsewhere? Sure. But if this app is their primary source of information, would they even know they should bother doing so?

asveikau3• 6 months ago

You have easy access in that you can find things if you look for it.

What that commenter means by easy access is that the information is in mainstream sources pushed to people such that you are likely to know about it without having looked.

For example I made a comment here on HN recently that immigrants commit crimes at fewer rates than US born people. That sends a segment of Americans into a flying rage even though they have access to that information, they were never going to hear it in their ordinary channels, even if they stick to "mainstream" media.

mc323• 6 months ago

I wonder where all the TikTok videos are about all the tanks and hotel shoot outs in Beijing over the last week or so are… where various party factions fought it out over control of the central committee and you have the disappearance of various generals in the PLA.

pjc5012• 6 months ago

Care to elaborate?

_vqpz4• 6 months ago

What do you mean "you wonder where they are"? Do you even use tiktok to be able to see them? Because if you search about that on there you can find videos

Aurornis9• 6 months ago

that most people in the rest of the world have easy access to

The information is everywhere. Visit any news site, open any general social media feed, turn on any TV. We’re discussing it right now in the front page of HN!

Everyone in the US has easy access to the same information. Acting like only the rest of the world has easy access to this information is ridiculous.

bearjaws• 6 months ago

_you_ have access to it, for an increasingly large number of people TikTok is their only source of news. Same as Fox News or CNN, one news source.

Censorship of TikTok is inevitable given the owners, and it will inevitably lead to a new news bubble.

34679• 6 months ago

Everyone has easy access right now. Everyone had easier access before the TikTok deal. That's the wrong direction for a free country and it's particularly alarming because the deal was forced by the government.

fcarraldo• 6 months ago

Censorship doesn’t become okay when it’s easy to work around it.

mrexcess4• 6 months ago

The information is everywhere.

For those who know to look for it, sure.

For those who do not already know it, discovery is increasingly challenged by the deliberately obscurant curators of the information space, who are oddly tightly and uniformly aligned with special interest groups openly declaring their intent to hide that information and punish dissemination thereof.

baby_souffle• 6 months ago

That information may be readily accessible but if it isn't on the screen you're currently engaged with, it may as well not exist.

zzzeek2• 6 months ago

tiktok always censored, it's just now it censors anti-Trump content instead of anti-CCP content [1]

both are bad, I liked when tiktok was supposed to be just "banned". it's always been a tool for repressive governments

[1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-11-28/tiktok-huawei-surveil...

pousada• 6 months ago

If it’s true for TikTok it will likely be true for all other forms of popular social media (twitter, instagram, etc) too, so a ban wouldn’t have made a big difference probably.

palmotea9• 6 months ago

The forced US hosted tik-tok sale is all about hiding information from the US public that most people in the rest of the world have easy access to.

No, at least during the Biden administration when the law was passed, it wasn't.

This shit is a lot more complicated that a hot take based on today's news.

nashashmi3• 6 months ago

It was even during Biden. The idea was to stop pro Palestine videos. Anti ice videos are in the same realm

gradus_ad• 6 months ago

Not really. It was about preventing CCP control of information.

Cyph0n• 6 months ago

The CCP angle is the PR version. From last year: https://www.axios.com/local/salt-lake-city/2024/05/06/senato...

Note that there have been multiple instances over the past two years of high level ex/current officials repeating the same general point.

cael4502• 6 months ago

This information is all over American social media... Even the article references that Megan Stalter posted her videos on Instagram.

boelboel• 6 months ago

A lot of American propaganda hasn't been about strict censorship (as in making it strictly impossible to find out about things). It's about shifting the narrative enough. Most people have been made lazy enough to the point they don't read anything, certainly not fringe opinions. As long as people get their Mcdonalds, Soda and TV they won't do much.

I don't think the original intent of the tiktok sale was about censorship as much as it was about the chinese not allowing american platforms in china. Doesn't change that they're trying to use it to its 'fullest'.

roxolotl• 6 months ago

Just because the information is out there doesn’t mean it’s where people are looking. You see this based on the news people watch where things they don’t cover might as well not exist. Which has always been true but it’s especially true today.

imgabe4• 6 months ago

Of course, because TikTok is the only way people in the US can access information.

SilverBirch3• 6 months ago

No, they also access information through Facebook owned by Trump ally Zuckerberg, X owned by Trump doner and DOGE former official Musk, or via media organisations like CBS who have recently had their editorial standards changed to be more friendly to the regime. It's fine though people can here about the regime through neutral pundits like Jimmy Kimmel, who definitely hasn't come under any pressure to comply with the regime talking points. It's alright we've got NPR, which is definitely not under attack.

If you haven't noticed a sweeping attack on free speech in US media, then I just don't think you're paying attention, and playing it off as if it's "just" Tiktok is at best disingenuous.

dataviz10003• 6 months ago

It isn't so much as the rest of the world having easy access. It is what the Chinese want the rest of the world to see. If you are in a South American country using a residential IP in new incognito session, doom scroll, after the initial disturbing content, you will start to notice videos of the United States government physically attacking people born in the country of the residential IP address.

The TikTok algorithm in South America. Content about Tiananmen Square and Tibet gets filtered out. Content about the United States government rolling through protesters in armored vehicles, killing people in Venezuela with bombs, and threatening Greenland, straight to top of feed.

The most brutally honest propaganda is always the most effective propaganda.

potatototoo99• 6 months ago

TikTok US it no longer controlled by the Chinese.

mrexcess4• 6 months ago

It isn't so much as the rest of the world having easy access. It is what the Chinese want the rest of the world to see.

If your prosperity depends on using technocracy to deny 1.3 billion people the ability to communicate and share ideas with your citizens, a few things are true:

1) You have created a digital iron curtain

2) You are doomed because information wants to be free

3) If you succeed the result will be war, the only thing left when communication breaks down

direwolf2027• 6 months ago

We should let people know how bad politicians are. If everyone knows every time a politician is a mass murderer, it might provide an incentive for politicians to stop mass murdering people.

anthem2025• 6 months ago

Oh bullshit it’s entirely about controlling narratives around Israel, and now that they owe Trump it’s about censoring any opposition as well.

The TikTok ban was always an egregious attack on free speech.

lbrito3• 6 months ago

That's some very obtuse thinking.

The US has been applying soft power and hard power in South America - to put it euphemistically, as the most recent US intervention was just days ago - for close to a century. The Chinese... haven't.

Why should people in South America give a shit about Tiananmen or Tibet and at the same time not give a shit about the escalating authoritarian grip of the US regime, which is infinitely more relevant to their lives?

Fraterkes• 6 months ago

You don’t think that there could be purely organic reasons why content showing US hypocricy might be immensely popular in South America?

axus• 6 months ago

Content about the United States government rolling through protesters in armored vehicles, killing people in Venezuela with bombs, and threatening Greenland, straight to top of feed.

Aren't these recent events? A better example would be showing US atrocities from the last 50 years, but not Chinese.

Or hiding the suffering of Ukranian and Iranian peoples.

fogzen2• 6 months ago

The U.S. government has not publicly presented any concrete evidence showing that TikTok has actually been used to influence US public opinion in line with CCP policy.

parthdesai3• 6 months ago

Does China go around the world invading countries in the name of freedom?

Content about the United States government rolling through protesters in armored vehicles, killing people in Venezuela with bombs, and threatening Greenland, straight to top of feed.

None of this is propaganda, it's just facts.

elektronika2• 6 months ago

Content about Tiananmen Square and Tibet gets filtered out. Content about the United States government rolling through protesters in armored vehicles, killing people in Venezuela with bombs, and threatening Greenland, straight to top of feed.

There's also the degree of relevance. Tiananmen was over a quarter of a century ago. The USA is killing protestors, bombing Venezuela, threatening Greenland now.

tech_hutch• 6 months ago

the United States government rolling through protesters in armored vehicles

I'm sorry, did I miss something? Is this something that's happened (ever)?

WheatMillington• 6 months ago

I see people saying this a lot, but I've also seen videos demonstrating that you can easily post and search for Tiananmen Square content. I don't use Tiktok myself but it seems like this is basically untrue.

Joeri• 6 months ago

On mastodon, with the non-algorithmic feed, following mostly accounts that aren’t particularly political, those things are still at the top of the feed. If you’re not seeing those topics at the top of your feed you’re probably being misled by your algorithm.

Another reason why feed ranking algorithms should be published. If we can see the algorithm we can stop playing these yes/no games. The real enemies are social media companies, not the other side of politics.

freitasm• 6 months ago

Using whataboutism doesn't negate the fact that the first amendment is being trampled over by the US administration.

Buying TikTok to censor it is the move of a fascist government.

weinzierl2• 6 months ago

I'm confused. I thought there was Douyin in China and TikTok for the rest of the world. TikTok used to be under Chinese control but now is essentially under US control. Isn't western TikTok a single entity?

mktk1001• 6 months ago

I think the more concerning thing here is the US government attacking people of different ethnicities.

miki123211• 6 months ago

The TikTok ban is the hammer, antitrust is the anvil.

Without antitrust regulation, TikTok would have been sold to Meta, and that would be it. We'd have an even worse monopoly (which is not a good thing), but at least we wouldn't have this. With such regulations present, the US government both forced a sale and disallowed a sale to anybody who they didn't like, basically forcing TikTok to choose a government-approved partner. What did that partner do to become government approved? We'll never know.

Antitrust in the US (and GDPR in Europe) give regulators wide latitude over who to prosecute and for what. This makes it much easier to do under-the-table deals to achieve objectives that you can't or don't want to achieve by regulation, like restricting free speech.

Subjecting companies to such regulation was ok when it was about transporting cattle or selling bricks, but giving governments the ability to regulate companies that have a wide impact on speech, even if the regulations don't seem to have anything to do with speech, is just asking for trouble.

elAhmo• 6 months ago

but at least we wouldn't have this

I think you might have forgotten recent moves from Meta about removal of moderation, relaxing rules on hate speech, settling lawsuits with Trump and similar moves that imply they wouldn't really fight hard against what this administration wants.

xve8• 6 months ago

It's pretty clear this is a misuse of antitrust. Actually the details of these deals have very little to do with antitrust, it's likely simplecorruption. Antitrust might be used as a cover for those deals, not the other way around. The prevention of monopolies is one of the few regulations necessary for meritocratic capitalism to thrive.

johnhenry• 6 months ago

By preventing uploads, they are preventing the world from gaining access, not just the US public.

reactordev3• 6 months ago

No, the rest of the world operates on different servers now.

DoneWithAllThat• 6 months ago

You have no evidence that this is true and it sounds like a para kid conspiracy theory from the depths of the worst subreddits. Stop being silly.

gdilla• 6 months ago

tech bros voted for this.

mschuster912• 6 months ago

On Twitter, there's a bunch of reports that TikTok suddenly prevents people from sending the word "Epstein" in DMs [1].

I had expected an Orbanisation (aka, what happened to the media sphere in Hungary after Orban took over and his cronies bought up almost all media) of Tiktok, but not that fast, it's like less than a week after the deal [2].

Scary shit if you ask me, and it's made scarier by the fact that Tiktok has already been changing the way our youth speaks due to evading censorship (e.g. "graped" instead of "raped", "unalived" instead of kill/murder/execute/suicide).

[1] https://x.com/krassenstein/status/2015911471507530219

[2] https://techcrunch.com/2026/01/23/heres-whats-you-should-kno...

inetknght5• 6 months ago

but not that fast

Why not? All the tech was already put in place by China. All that the U.S. had to do was change the filtered words.

mschuster912• 6 months ago

I had expected a longer "cooldown" time so that people don't immediately jump to the conclusion that the forced TikTok sale was to suppress discussion of the Epstein files.

sosomoxie3• 6 months ago

What words were China filtering? I've never seen reports of censorship like this on TikTok before Ellison bought it.

netsharc2• 6 months ago

But this blatant move shows "We're no different to the Chinese ruling party now"... If it's a slow descent, people might accept the madness (imagine if a bombshell report showed Biden had links to Epstein, sexually assaulted 20+ women, and was moaning about the Nobel Peace Prize to the prime minister of Norway)...

Somehow I'm optimistic that this means the Trump Regime is on its last legs. But well, what's the quote about underestimating the stupidity of the American public?

JKCalhoun6• 6 months ago

Also: https://www.the-independent.com/tech/tiktok-epstein-trump-ce...

pjc5012• 6 months ago

The Epstein situation is .. weird. On the one hand, it's a massive nexus of corruption and abuse. On the other hand, it's just .. evidence. Nobody cares about evidence, they've already decided they want to protect the Trump administration no matter what. Rather like ICE shooting legal gun owner US civilians.

Sugimot02• 6 months ago

Funny how all the people contesting other adjacent comments are noticeably absent here. It's silly in the first place, given the US government and Israeli officials were very clear in their bluntly stated aims with the tiktok take over, what we're seeing now is just the execution of clearly stated intentions, too many ideologues are in denial.

nomilk2• 6 months ago

I hope for the good of mankind, all sides of politics unite against deplatforming and oppressing opposing viewpoints.

It's sad that certain topics (anti-ICE, Epstein) neutered on a social media platform, but this went on for years when the politics were reversed.

Let everyone have their say, I say.

conception3• 6 months ago

But the thing is people aren’t having “their say”. Social media companies are amplifying voices and viewpoints. They are not acting as “common carriers” letting quality sift to the top. It is curated and crafted.

tartoran2• 6 months ago

Now they're thumbing down the scale for censorship.

kortilla4• 6 months ago

“Letting quality sift to the top” implies that there is a way for this to happen without curation.

Pure user vote driven things like Reddit are a failure (echo chambers, emotional appeals, bot rings, etc). So I’m curious what you think would let that happen?

Even HN is heavily moderated to maintain topics.

infecto15• 6 months ago

I am not sure why this was flagged but I don’t think it’s wrong. I am not sure if it’s a uniquely American thing but the internet has caused an unfortunate case of brigading for almost anything. I like to think I sit fairly middle in a lot of American topics I lean left on some items, taxes, healthcare, free school lunches and right on others but I remember how easy it was a number of years ago to be labeled a racist. You really cannot have an opinion about much these days without someone labeling you something unfavorably. It’s unfortunate.

JKCalhoun6• 6 months ago

"Labelling" is different than censorship though, no?

pjc5012• 6 months ago

Ironically, "labelling" someone else is an act of free speech as much as anything else.

watwut• 6 months ago

You really cannot have an opinion about much these days without someone labeling you something unfavorably. It’s unfortunate.

That is free speech. And the violence you see is direct consequence of a culture that tuts tuts "this is rude" when someone says "these right wing people are fascists" rather then look at what those right wing people openly talk about.

lyu07282• 6 months ago

Yeah except when it comes to what this was really about, in which case "all sides" happily go along with it. As it turns out censorship to protect our precious zionist ethnostate is something everybody agrees with.

NickC252• 6 months ago

I don't know.

I think that over the years, bad faith actors in the world of geopolitics have taken advantage of this in a very nefarious way in order to sow chaos, bad-faith/purposefully-inaccurate "talking points" and capture the hearts and minds of the ignorant, the stupid, and the willfully delusional masses who are desperate to cling to a conspiracy if it fits their worldview which is in turn reinforced by said bad actors.

Is it a potentially unconstitutional slippery slope? yes, absolutely. Is it something we need to tackle as adults and citizens? yes, absolutely. Should the desires of SV tech bro billionaires have any input in those discussions? no, absolutely not.

rtp4me• 6 months ago

To me, the media is/are nothing more than drug sellers at this point. They have their weapon "of truth" sold to the very people you listed above. I do my absolute best to not consume any media because I know it is twisted and often wrong (eg. AI generated content). The best I can do is simply not participate in their war. Reddit, TikTok, X, etc are definitely supplying heavy drugs to anyone who wants to be hooked.

At some point, we definitely need a cooling-off period where people from both sides refrain from inciting anger from the masses.

bakies• 6 months ago

You can't have all side of politics unite when one side is doing that thing you want to unite against.

Havoc• 6 months ago

Definitely not censorship

tartoran2• 6 months ago

/sarcasm

malfist• 6 months ago

Is it a technical glitch that prevents the uploads? Or is it a technical glitch that let's people know that that content is being censored

jimmydoe• 6 months ago

They have to block upload bluntly as they are still figuring out the algorithm how to shadow ban them.

smashah• 6 months ago

They consider free people sharing information with each other against the consent and interests of MEGAPEDOELLISON Cabal in power a "technical glitch" that they're trying hard to "patch" by slaughtering the First Amendment.

infecto15• 6 months ago

Anecdotal to myself. I shamefully sometimes use TikTok, I particularly like recipe clips and even I noticed something in the last week, most noticeably around this weekend where the algorithm for recommendations changed. It’s like they completely wiped my preferences. I try not to watch anything political so I cannot say much about censorship of content but something was noticeable in the last week.

torben-friis• 6 months ago

Have you been using it for long?

I no longer use TikTok, but I was pretty hooked for a while, and I felt those “waves” every now and then.

It was pretty noticeable because each time I started getting extreme right political content from my country, and I neither consume anything local nor right wing content.

infecto15• 6 months ago

Yes I have and this reset was very different than anything I have experienced. I would like a specific recipe and then they the feed would show me someone else’s attempt of that recipe. I haves used the app for years off and on.

davidmurdoch5• 6 months ago

It does this all the time. I think it is called "exploration injection". It increases engagement by trying to prevent boredom.

infecto15• 6 months ago

It’s amazes how confident people will describe your lived experiences and say you are wrong. No this was entirely different and coincided in time with the complaints of censorship.

thewebguyd• 6 months ago

Same experience here, and also I noticed several channels I used to be following I was no longer following after the hand offs. The feed is completely different now.

Something definitely broke.

cardamomo• 6 months ago

I noticed exactly the same thing. I don't recall which day it started (probably this past Sunday), but it was as if a switch flipped. My For You Page no longer has anything to do with my preferences. I'm familiar with Tiktok nudging me in different directions in the past, but I was always able to steer it back to videos I was interested in within 10-15 minutes. Three days later, and it's as if Tiktok not only has forgotten everything about my watch history, it also hasn't learned. That said, it doesn't seem to be entirely about politics. I had a mix of political/protest related content, native plant content, and woodworking videos on my For You Page. None of those are showing up for me.

infecto15• 6 months ago

Very similar for me as well. And yes no connection to the politics angle. It was very pronounced for me because I would like a video and then every other video it showed me was someone else’s version of it. It was very bizarre.

kenjackson2• 6 months ago

It’s crazy to think that Instagram Reels, owned by Meta, is preferable to TikTok now. At least Reels now is at least competitive in terms of content - unlike two years ago when people were worried about TikTok being banned and Reels was not a good alternative.

logicchains• 6 months ago

Isn't Reels content more right-wing, while TikTok has lots of both left-leaning and right-leaning content.

kortilla4• 6 months ago

Reels skews older in the user-base, which skews the average to the right.

kenjackson2• 6 months ago

TikTok historically has, but if this is truly the new owners trying to block content then that can change rapidly.

qingcharles• 6 months ago

Sample of one, but I scroll Reels at least 30 mins a day and I've never seen any right-wing content on my feed.

Tiktaalik• 6 months ago

Reels is just AI and engagement slop

hiprob• 6 months ago

Is Instagram better at this? Since their racist content is so unfiltered nowadays, surely they would allow this at least?

jmyeet4• 6 months ago

Heh, no [1][2][3][4].

Meta and Google (including Youtube) kowtow to the administration in what speech they promote and suppress in the exact way the administration (both parties) says China might theoretically do in the future.

[1] https://theintercept.com/2024/10/21/instagram-israel-palesti...

[2] https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/metas-israel-policy-chief...

[3] https://www.972mag.com/social-media-ukraine-palestinians-met...

[4] https://www.hrw.org/report/2023/12/21/metas-broken-promises/...

seanieb4• 6 months ago

Anecdotal: uploading a video of original songs with political/protest lyrics will have random background noises added to the audio track, making the songs audio seem amateurish.

Edit: here’s a link to an example https://bsky.app/profile/seaniebyrne.bsky.social/post/3mby7j...

duskdozer4• 6 months ago

This author has chosen to make their posts visible only to people who are signed in.

Welp, guess I didn't want to learn about that anyway

seanieb4• 6 months ago

Sorry. Thats fixed now.

prodigycorp• 6 months ago

can you relax the restrictions on your link or share a direct link to the video, i dont have a bluesky account

seanieb4• 6 months ago

Yes. Sorry I’d no idea/forgotten it worked that way. Thank you for pointing it out. I’ve updated my settings.

nerdsniper2• 6 months ago

https://www.bskydownloader.com/

aendruk• 6 months ago

Have a mirror of the TikTok version for comparison? It’s just showing me “Video currently unavailable”.

seanieb4• 6 months ago

Dang. I didn’t download it. But when was live it had the deep sound of chopper type motorcycles in the background.

nerdsniper2• 6 months ago

https://www.bskydownloader.com/

krick• 6 months ago

That's super curious. No offense, the noise didn't make it sound more amateurish to me personally, so I wouldn't go as far as to immediately conclude that this was intentional by TikTok, let alone that it is because it didn't like the lyrics, but I'm very curious what is it anyway.

Reminds me of how someone lately was going crazy about weird video-artifacts on Youtube. It was fixed (for his videos) after contacting somebody on the technical side of Youtube, but there was never an explanation AFAIK of what actually went wrong, so I was left pondering if that could be a result of some more ambitious ML-experiments in attempt to improve compression rates or something, but never found out conclusively.

derbOac2• 6 months ago

Honestly I'm surprised people don't jump ship more often with social media platforms. With TikTok this is kind of new news, but there have been related problems with it that have been pretty obvious for some time.

The same with X and, before that, Facebook.

TikTok has never worked for me though so maybe there's no real equivalent alternative. Maybe time to make one if not?

To me it says something about the public, but I'm not sure what. I'm tempted to attribute it to indifference or complacency but I'm aware of network effects and the reality of alternatives.

Sometimes I feel like education and theory about security practices needs to extend beyond micro-level phenomena like passwords, to things like administrative conflicts of interest and strength in decentralization and competition. Private monopolies and quasi-monopolies aren't just economically bad, they're bad for privacy and security, and make the public vulnerable through lack of choice. In important ways it doesn't matter if it's the government or a private company; whenever power concentrates it is easier to align and abuse.

Aurornis9• 6 months ago

Honestly I'm surprised people don't jump ship more often with social media platforms.

Most people don’t pick one social media platform and use it for 100% of everything.

They’ll switch between TikTok, Reddit, Instagram, and others during the day.

It’s not hard to see when one of those platforms is missing discussion of current events.

duskdozer4• 6 months ago

Are you really surprised? I find the interest entirely unrelatable, but I'm not surprised. They tune these platforms for addiction. I mean, I don't even use them but I still immediately recognize their branding video-end sounds just from random exposure here or there. (I hate it)

derbOac2• 6 months ago

I'm surprised in the sense that it seems a few times we've been exposed to various problems arising from social media manipulation or censorship — of the right and left variety actually — so I'd think people might be more sensitive to it at this point.

Part of it too I guess is my personal experience with people I know who will complain about a platform repeatedly (in terms of algorithmic political manipulation) and then turn around and continue to use it voluminously, sending links to stuff on the platform over and over again, etc. (not speaking just about TikTok in particular, with a few sites). It has this feeling similar to if they complained about how awful a food item tastes, and expressed concerns about it being poison, but then continued to binge eat it daily.

Maybe they figure it's just inevitable or something, or maybe you're right about reinforcement contingencies. Maybe it's as simple as that.

PurpleRamen4• 6 months ago

They are in transition, so for the moment I believe them to have technical problems, because it also matches my experience. Yesterday I encountered problems with several videos, which are working today. And not all of them were political.

Going by the comments, people on TikTok seem very fast in seeing conspiracies, when many problems can be simply explained with normal problems or human failings. And it's good to be critical and aware of dangers, but I fear if they are so easy to call out problems, it will wear of fast, and people will start to ignore real problems again, like they used to be.

whatwhaaaaat• 6 months ago

Just technical problems in their “banned topic” identification models. No need to be concerned.

PurpleRamen4• 6 months ago

The point is that people are more aware of problems happening with that topic, but ignore whether it also happens with other topics. So at the moment it's a very skewed view.

HelloMcFly2• 6 months ago

The presumption of good faith has been justifiably obliterated when it comes to Topics Such As These with our right-wing extremist political and media leadership.

PurpleRamen4• 6 months ago

Especially with extremists, you should have a solid foundation of argumentation, because they will not ignore even little fails and weaponize everything against you if necessary.

biophysboy2• 6 months ago

I am also skeptical (despite having 0 faith in the new owners). However, I am a bit confused: why would new ownership alone cause technical issues? It seems like they set new requirements that required new software. Even if the reqs are content-agnostic, I am curious what they are and how they differ from the previous tiktok.

mvdtnz5• 6 months ago

Data migrations, new staff permissions and policies, merging AWS or other cloud accounts and their complex IAM policies, enrolling devices into new corporate networks, Okta setup, corporate firewalls. There are hundreds of reasons that moving to a new corporate ownership can cause technical problems.

hathym• 6 months ago

freedom of speech my a*

lingrush43• 6 months ago

Freedom of speech has literally never prevented a private company from controlling the content on its platform.

mothballed3• 6 months ago

It did before the internet. See Marsh v. Alabama where publicly accessible ( private sidewalk) on private property was ruled the people there still could exercise 1A rights and could not be trespassed for doing so even if the owners forbid it.

michaelt• 6 months ago

Platform allows criticism of a government.

That government forces the platform to be sold to a billionaire ally.

Platform’s new owner immediately bans criticism of said government.

“Not a first amendment issue, it’s a private company”

eatsyourtacos• 6 months ago

"private company"

Ah you mean an app that the US forced to be sold to a private company that certainly agreed behind the scenes to certain terms of the government?

Yeah.. completely independent private company...

alex1138• 6 months ago

It's kind of amazing that all the companies act in lockstep. Apple, Google, TikTok remove anti-ICE stuff, rightly or wrongly (I'll go with 'wrongly' because of freedom of speech/freedom of app choice, among other things)

They ALL do incredibly corrupt things

jokoon• 6 months ago

it's obvious that tiktok is doing this intentionally, pretending it's a technical issue, so that people can blame the US government for forcing the sale of tiktok

it's just retaliation

and obviously, trump will play into this

estearum4• 6 months ago

Or the right wing ideologues who now allegedly control (components of) TikTok are as dumb and ideological as they appear.

Note: They also are having "technical difficulties" transmitting DMs with the string "epstein" in them.

webdoodle• 6 months ago

If you care to fight them directly, upload them using "Ellistein" or "Epsteen". But really you should delete the app, and find an alternative. Vote with your attention/wallet.

cbeach• 6 months ago

There have been a number of fake AI-generated videos of police confronting ICE officers lately:

https://gothamist.com/news/ai-videos-of-fake-nypdice-clashes...

I suspect these are some of those that have been banned from TikTok, and there's probably heightened moderation around this content at the moment since people are sharing AI-generated propaganda and riling others into violent confrontation with ICE.

estearum4• 6 months ago

TikTok: Notoriously tough on bullshit ragebait

nixass• 6 months ago

Some guys from the other French thread will tell me that government should legislate social networks.. yeah, sure bud.

mekdoonggi4• 6 months ago

Anecdotally my feed dramatically shifted. My politics are very leftwing, and prior to the transfer virtually every video was discourse on ICE. Following the transfer, I get content that is all over the place. At one point, I got 8-9 tiktoks in a row of obviously bot-created rightwing text.

At least on the surface level, I could believe this is just a full algorithm reset and they are having problems with it. But even after other algorithm resets that I believe I've experienced, Tiktok figured it out extremely quickly. If this continues, I will believe in the heavyhanded censorship theory.

telotortium2• 6 months ago

As a former employee in TikTok US Data Services, the division that was stated working to separate the US TikTok service and infrastructure, I wouldn’t be so quick to dismiss the algorithm reset theory, because the reset this time is qualitatively unlike the others.

Since 2020, when the first Trump administration attempted to ban TikTok, work has been ongoing to separate out the TikTok US business in all aspects from the parent company Bytedance. Setting up dedicated infrastructure for US users was already accomplished by 2023 for the most part, and this included the restriction that US user data couldn’t be used to train or otherwise influence non-US user operations.

However, there were a few major caveats. First, all the actual videos, at least if they’re public, were considered to be Bytedance data, even those created by US users (although the actual user intent signals - likes, watch behavior, and the like, were considered to be US user data). This allowed them to be used to train the main Bytedance-owned algorithm. Second, the Bytedance-trained algorithm continued to form the basis of the algorithm to serve US users. At least when I was there, US user data was used to tune the algorithm for US users, but the algorithm was not necessarily trained from scratch only on US user data in practice.

One of Bytedance’s main conditions for the TikTok US sale has always been that they own the algorithm (both the code and the models) and would not transfer it to the US, so this was definitely a foreseeable issue. With the chaos of the TikTok Us divestment between the Biden and Trump administrations, though, I suspect that it was hard to hire and retain ML engineers that could build a proper replacement for the algorithm in time for the divestment, let alone build one that matches the behavior of the previous algorithm.

If the algorithm is separated between US and non-US as strictly as the TikTok US Data Services mission always aimed for, then TikTok for US users is in many respects a new service entirely that shares the same UI and features. I also don’t know how US users get trained on non-US content, or if they’re even exposed, nor if any other countries use the US algorithm. So this change in content may last at least into the medium term, if not permanently. The question will be if you start seeing more left-wing anti-ICE content in the coming weeks or months.

jauntywundrkind3• 6 months ago

Will US folks still get other nation's video's? Will other nations get US videos?

iugtmkbdfil8348• 6 months ago

Allow me to offer some words of wisdom. If you help building weapons to be used against $currently_designated_bad_people, you can rest assured that given enough time, those weapons will be used against you. I am watching all this with a mild sense of bemusement.

mekdoonggi4• 6 months ago

A NYT columnist Jamelle Bouie suggested (in jest) that the next Democrat administration send armed IRS agents to gated communities in Florida, to "investigate tax fraud".

But this is exactly why all citizens should be concerned about the infringement of rights happening in Minnesota. If it is allowed without prosecution, you are next.

iugtmkbdfil8348• 6 months ago

Zero disagreement. Rules of engagement should be clear to everyone. How can you possibly play the game if the rules keep changing based on political expediency. And we all know.. that that kind of a game is rigged from the start.

That said, I was thinking more about people all of us building tools that got us into the situation we are in now.

terespuwash• 6 months ago

His brilliant columns is the only reason I would ever consider a NYT subscription.

antonymoose• 6 months ago

Why would anyone be opposed to the IRS catching tax cheats? This seems like such a bone-headed take.

In any case it’s also historically illiterate, the IRS has long been used as a political weapon, infamously against “Tea Party” activists.

gadders2• 6 months ago

Not massively different to Obama weaponising the IRS against the Tea Party.

direwolf2027• 6 months ago

A democratic administration would be extremely unlikely to do that, I think. Democrats are usually middle–of–the–road, don't–upset–anyone types. Radical centrists, if you will. That's why the elections of people like Mamdani are so shocking.

rurp2• 6 months ago

Right, if a future democratic president starts sending masked government thugs out to assault and kidnap American citizens we all know that 100% of the people who are defending the current ICE atrocities will suddenly be outraged about government tyranny.

eunos2• 6 months ago

If Dem could win big soon the lawfare against Trump business could be huge. DOGE purge alone was making a lot of bad blood.

jimbokun2• 6 months ago

Would probably be very popular, outside the kind of people whose donations fund political campaigns.

jcul• 6 months ago

I'm repeatedly shocked by the images of these ICE agents dressed like they are soldiers in a war zone.

I was just thinking how in my country immigration officials would be probably wearing formal clothes and have clipboards and paperwork.

Your comment about armed IRS agents made me laugh / reminded me about this.

lingrush43• 6 months ago

And you think they won't be used against me if I don't help build them?

Seems unlikely.

If the implication is that the tools won't exist if I don't build them, that's beyond a pipe dream. We'll never get a globe of 8 billion people to agree unanimously on anything. Let alone agreeing not to build something that gives them power over their adversaries.

iugtmkbdfil8348• 6 months ago

I will offer a benign example. A new team member was given a task to generate a dashboard that, as per spec, in great detail lists every action of a given employee within a system that generates some data for consumption by those employees.

As simple as the project was, the employee had the presence of mind to ask his seniors some thoughtful questions of what makes sense, what is too intrusive, what is acceptable. He felt uncomfortable and that was with something that corps build on a daily basis.

Now.. not everyone wakes up thinking they are building database intended to enslave humanity as a whole, but I would like to think that one person simply questioning it can make a difference.

nathan_compton2• 6 months ago

[flagged]

iugtmkbdfil8348• 6 months ago

On occasion, it is worthwhile to take a step back and recognize that what is happening is not new or novel. Likewise, it is useful to recognize a pattern when it presents itself. It is extra useful ( and helpful ) that this is brought to the attention of other people who may still be going through the steps of processing of what seems to be happening.

If it helps, I appreciate going meta after me, but there is not much to dissect here. I stand by my bemused. You may think it is some soft of grand struggle and kudos for you for finding something to believe in, but don't project onto others.

ActorNightly3• 6 months ago

Tik Tok wasn't built to be used as a weapon though.

pixelatedindex• 6 months ago

Weapons can come in all forms and sizes. When wielded with the blend of censorship and propaganda, (social) media is absolutely a weapon. Is there a reason why it won’t be?

buellerbueller2• 6 months ago

Are you sure about that?

culi3• 6 months ago

This is called "boomerang theory" in sociology

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_boomerang

Etherlord87• 6 months ago

The imperial boomerang is the theory that governments that develop repressive techniques to control colonial territories will eventually deploy those same techniques domestically against their own citizens.

This is different from what parent post describes. Parent means developing tools by one side of a barricade, that the other may eventually use against them, e.g. when the power shifts to them. Whereas you speak about developing the tools to be used abroad, but those tools eventually also get used domestically, but the administrator remains the same.

topspin• 6 months ago

those weapons will be used against you

On the matter of social media "moderation," this is the phase you're actually in, right now.

gcanyon6• 6 months ago

The problem I was listening to a historian discuss the other day is that we're stuck in a cycle of:

   1. Republican breaks norms/laws
   2. Democrat cleans up after, but by *not* breaking norms, doesn't go far enough to actually undo all the damage
   3. We end up with a more broken governmental configuration, and head back to (1)

They said this pattern goes back to Nixon.

Jcampuzano2• 6 months ago

Theres a reason 99% of actions taken by democrats are just "strongly worded letters" and how they consistently come up with the exact small number of Democrats needed to push legislation and bills that the party proposes to be against.

Most Democratic politicians are in on the game too. Its all just political theater and their in-group rotates out who gets to be the bad guys.

Yes Democrats clean-up by not breaking norms, but as mentioned they never go far enough because they legitimately do not want to go too far due to corporate interests and the elite.

I am left leaning but do not align with the majority of the Democratic party because they are in on this too. They have the tools to be much more antagonistic to the GOP but they purposely don't use them

deaux6• 6 months ago

One willing to break the norms and campaigning on this in Trump-like weasel words would landslide the next election. Not a chance in hell that'd be allowed to happen though, as big tech, the DNC, and the rest of the capital class would put a stop to their platform long before.

dogleash• 6 months ago

Corollary: building a benign system that doesn't make the levers of control as small and close to the user as possible, is inviting someone with ulterior motives to use those controls.

jimbokun2• 6 months ago

This seems to be an argument that defense spending is never legitimate?

agilob• 6 months ago

If you help building weapons to be used against $currently_designated_bad_people

Democrats would really love some extra help from WikiLeaks right now, if only not Bidens administration who helped to extradite Julian.

cosmicgadget• 6 months ago

Afaik only one side of the aisle asks for Russia's help with offensive cybersecurity.

Hasz• 6 months ago

I have been arguing this point for several years now -- but wrt to the Democratic party's relationship with guns. The same justification used to limit the second amendment is the same justification that can be used to limit the 1st, 4th, etc.

Both parties seem to be on an authoritarian bent over the last 10-15 years, which sucks.

xve8• 6 months ago

It looks like some are moving over to upscroll, anyone know anything about upscroll? what other apps are you using?

I remember when everyone migrated from MySpace to Facebook and I assumed everyone was going to just keep moving over to the next big thing every few years but that actually didn't happen. Facebook became an institution.

LightBug1• 6 months ago

Thanks for the heads up ... we're really entering some shitty internet times

xve8• 6 months ago

Yeah, but there might be some kind of opportunity arising too, I try to focus on that.

lingrush43• 6 months ago

Nothing. These apps are mental poison. They're designed to be addictive. Healthy adults don't use TikTok or any equivalent.

xve8• 6 months ago

I would agree with you, but its pretty disturbing that the general public doesn't have a good outlet, especially to discuss unconstitutional ICE actions. It’s unfortunately very convenient that at a time when the pros outweigh the cons (open discussion vs. addiction) that some might stay offline. I would encourage you to overlook the mental poison and continue to support open communication. That's more important right now.

wvenable• 6 months ago

What do you suggest then to stay informed for those without televisions?

btmiller2• 6 months ago

Really? I have bookmarked:

- 758 posts on home construction and interior design - 487 posts on cooking - 58 posts on relationship health - 605 posts on leadership - 58 posts on fitness - 19 posts on woodworking

, and countless others on travel and dining.

Would you like to restate your claim with more nuance? I have collected a vast amounts of knowledge through TikTok. Their algorithm is insanely good at capturing whatever it is you’re after. It’s a challenge to put the app down and I think any person that can’t impose their own healthy limits or can’t modulate their topical interests is going to have an even harder time. Let’s remember that amidst the real negative aspects, there is a really great system for learning buried in there.

vaindil• 6 months ago

Healthy adults don't use TikTok or any equivalent.

This is a pretty obnoxious comment. You're welcome to your opinion that the apps are harmful, and I'm inclined to agree with you even though I use TikTok myself, but a blanket statement that only unhealthy people are on the apps is just inflammatory.

kmfrk• 6 months ago

I checked out the website, and it looks more like Instagram than TikTok. We've had a few TikTok-like apps, and it didn't work out. Even the people behind Vine couldn't make their own Byte app take off:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huddles_(app)

TikTok showed that the platform lives and dies by the algorithm and ease of use. I'm not even a huge fan of TikTok's recommendations these days with too much slop slipping through the cracks. And their comment moderation is some of the worst.

If another platform ever gets popular enough, I'm sure the same people will find another way to neutralize it.

SV_BubbleTime• 6 months ago

Yeah, I read about this thing called network effects on blue sky.

stronglikedan2• 6 months ago

Nit, but it's upscrolled

xve8• 6 months ago

thank you!Seems I can't edit.

js8• 6 months ago

When I was 11, on 17th Nov 1989, in Czechoslovakia, my father was watching the evening news on our (black and white) TV, as usual.

There was a protest and the state media was reporting on it. When the reporter said, "our camera broke down and we can only show black and white pictures", my father IMMEDIATELY jumped up and angrily said, "that's bs, you don't want to show how they [the protesting students] got beaten up [by the police]!"

This was an interesting life lesson. So yeah, sure, technical difficulties..

culi3• 6 months ago

I think history has shown that this is a fruitful intuition to have

stronglikedan2• 6 months ago

As always, it depends. More often than not, the opposite is true, hence the existence of Occam's razor.

lbrito3• 6 months ago

You don't understand.

Its different: _they_ were doing it. The Bad Guys. Now _we_, the Good Guys, are doing it. Therefore, the thing itself is no longer Bad - it is Good.

The comment above was ironic. I have to specify because supposedly intelligent people really think that way: https://x.com/garrytan/status/1963310592615485955

jmyeet4• 6 months ago

What you're describing here (ironically) is unironically the basis for Western political thought.

What I'm referring to here is idealism [1]. Whether it's European colonial powers or the US, the basis for foreign intervention is, quite simply, that we are the Good Guys. Why? Because we're the Good Guys. Even slavery was justified in Christianity by converting the heathen and saving their immortal souls, a fundamentally idealistic argument.

What's the alternative? Materialism [2], the premise of which is that there is not anything metaphysical that defines "goodness". Rather, you are the product of your material circumstances. There is a constant feedback loop if you affecting your material surroundsina and those surroundings affect you.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idealism

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Materialism

epistasis2• 6 months ago

In extreme cases: "I’m not licking the boot. It’s my boot. I voted for it. I’m the one stomping…" [0]

People imagine that they are part of the in-group, and not the out-group that gets the boot for exercising basic rights that the in-group gets. And perhaps they are, if they have enough money and power. But ultimately most of these people know that they are not in power but that as long as they see the boot stomping on others, and they can imagine a boundary that keeps them in the in-group (skin color, political ideology, gender, etc.), they approve as long as that group boundary is clear.

Now, when that boundary begins to blur, and people understand that the person getting the boot could be themselves, then attitudes start to change.

[0] https://bsky.app/profile/joshuaeakle.com/post/3mdfsnpy57k26

mrighele3• 6 months ago

You can also reverse it.

(Western) Internet was mostly censorship free, unlike places like Iran, China and the like. Things were removed only if outright illegan, and then just because of a court order.

Then about ten years ago things changed.

ISIS videos about the Syrian revolution removed from Youtube because they were radicalizing people.

Conspiracy theories about COVID purged because they were dangerous.

Posts against Woke ideals down-ranked, purged or the people posting themselves canceled.

"Be careful, once the tables turn, it will be your turn" some people said.

Guess what, the tables turned, and the result is ugly.

ActorNightly3• 6 months ago

I have to specify because supposedly intelligent people really think that way

It is the right way to think (with caveats).

Basically, no matter which way you put it, people need some form of government (or more abstractly a state that has authority over people with those people having reduced set of freedoms compared to anarchy). Human nature doesn't bode well with long term planning. For example, with unrestricted capitalism, you have a price on human labor hours that doesn't account for the value of human life - i.e as long as someone can do the job, it doesn't matter what their health is at the end of the job as long as they are replaceable, as this is the most optimal in terms of labor spending. So you need people to collectively form an entity with power of enforcement that is agreed upon by everyone, so that the entity can step in and take action.

Therefore, the goal shouldn't be to restrict the entities power. Doing so is essentially very selfish, which is on par with any libertarian/conservative mindset - as history shows, everyone on the right wing who was crying about censorship on social media for social/political issues has no problem when their side censors it, and broadly oversteps in their alloted power, ignoring the law.

The goal should be to determine whether or not the restricted access makes sense given the current status of the country, and the most importantly, ensuring that the state follows the code of law before anything else. I.e on a very broad sense, instead of arguing who is right and who is wrong, argue what is the metric by which you can get the answer, and then codify it as law.

In a lot of cases, censorship makes sense. And as with any rule, there is going to be some cases where its applied and the outcome is worse than if it wasn't applied. That should be acceptable. In the end, friction in the process still means that things are moving forward, but it also prevents much worse effects if things start moving backwards. Removing that friction means you can go backwards very quickly, like US has done.

direwolf2027• 6 months ago

Wow. I thought this was going to be one of those false comparisons, you know, like when someone says censoring conspiracy theories is the same thing as censoring science. But no — it's mass surveillance on both sides. He says mass surveillance is good when the US does it and bad when China does it. Wtf

noitpmeder2• 6 months ago

Wouldn't it be awesome if that X post was satire? Wishful thinking ...

danudey2• 6 months ago

Taking away people's guns is unamerican, unless you're taking them away from someone I consider to be unamerican, like an immigrant or a liberal; in that case, it's for the good of America that we take away their guns, and the people who wrote the constitution never intended for it to apply to all people the way it says, but only white people and non-white people those white people find to be convenient allies for the time being.

IIAOPSW• 6 months ago

Dare I say, the Revolution will not be Televised.

mothballed3• 6 months ago

Sometimes it is

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TcRWiz1PhKU

https://static.independent.co.uk/s3fs-public/thumbnails/imag...

Almad2• 6 months ago

That's from the good old days where truth mattered. Like how many action movies are about "getting the truth out" where that act in itself brings consequences, cut, happy ending?

Compare with now: revolution may be televised, but its spread not amplified and its authenticity denied. And if you have sufficient tribalism, it will not make a dent.

animal_spirits• 6 months ago

I do love this song and I find it resonates to read the lyrics as though revolutions are censored by media (which is true). Though I found an interview with Gil Scott-Heron about the meaning of the lyrics and I find it more interesting; The revolution will not be televised because the revolution starts in your mind, at the dinner table, or reading books in the library. It won't be captured on TV because the revolution occurs when you question your own beliefs and understand something bigger.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZvWt29OG0s

aa-jv2• 6 months ago

The revolution has been tokenized.

Bombthecat• 6 months ago

Dare I say, there won't be a revolution.

AIorNot• 6 months ago

Lets remember that tech bros have been explicitly funding the oppression

25 Million donation to MAGA from Brockman alone! I suspect he is a single issue donor (AI infra above all)

https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/867947/o...

Its insane how immoral people can be - anyone can see Trump is a conman

babypuncher2• 6 months ago

These "single issue donors" are the most morally corrupt. I can understand someone who genuinely believes in the cause, even if that cause is disgusting. But this guy...this guy knows that the things happening are wrong, and he doesn't care as long as he gets what he wants from this administration.

These people should be made social pariahs.

like_any_other• 6 months ago

They used to not even bother to hide behind technical difficulties, so this is an improvement: https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/tiktok-pledges-to-do-more-t...

layman51• 6 months ago

Something similar happened in the 1988 President Election in Mexico which is widely considered to have been stolen. There was a very memeable phrase, “se cayó el sistema” which was used to describe how the computing system to count votes was glitching out or failing.

TheAlchemist4• 6 months ago

As a fellow Eastern European of similar age, I suddenly feel quite nostalgic.

I really wonder how my life would be different if someone told be that the US, which for me was as close to a paradise as it gets, will go down the same road in the future - I think it would shatter quite a lot of my dreams of a better life.

US is nowhere near as bad as it was on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain, but it's on a fast track to it for sure.

palmotea9• 6 months ago

I really wonder how my life would be different if someone told be that the US, which for me was as close to a paradise as it gets, will go down the same road in the future - I think it would shatter quite a lot of my dreams of a better life.

That reminds me of one of the things that stuck with me from The Man in the High Castle (the book). The main story is an alternate timeline where the Nazis/Japanese won WWII and conquered America. Then there's an alternate-timeline-within-the-alternate-timeline where America/Britain won WWII, but it's not our timeline (and it's hinted there that the liberal US was eventually defeated by a British Empire gone full authoritarian). Everything passes away. The good guys sometimes win, but eventually they lose too.

elbci• 6 months ago

maybe it's not too late to find out that US was always like this and the fairy tale our parents listened on CIA's RadioFreeEurope was just - a fairy tale for gullible grown-ups ;)

nxobject2• 6 months ago

As someone who's lived in a SEA military dictatorship and has been through the same shenanigans - including protestors who've given their lives - I think the best way to honor their memory would be to heed those lessons in the spirit of prevention. Once we say "well, now we can compare this to Eastern Europe/the (former) third world", it's far too late.

RegW• 6 months ago

It is sad. It's now happening west of us. In Europe we have been trying to protect ourselves by not saying too much and attracting the attention/wrath of the bosses. I don't think it will work.

If you are in Iran - keep your head down.

silisili• 6 months ago

The rise of AI is going to make this even worse. Think Running Man instead of 'technical difficulties.'

giancarlostoro• 6 months ago

Yeah I can't fathom what sort of technical issues would produce this result. I'd love to read a detailed article about it. Your move ByteDance or whatever org owns you now. The only thing that would make sense to me is a partial outage of some sort, but that would not be permanent and very rare for Tik Tok.

As an aside, if you check in on r/tiktok every time something major like this is happening with Tik Tok you can see how users feel about it. I've seen different waves of users flat out deleting their Tik Tok accounts in protest.

1potatonagger• 6 months ago

"Technical" difficulties, indeed... https://xcancel.com/DillyHussain88/status/201571258730906466...

selcuka• 6 months ago

CNN Turk famously aired a documentary on penguins during the Gezi Park protests [1] that happened in 2013.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/jun/09/turkey...

heresie-dabord• 6 months ago

This was an interesting life lesson.

They thought they were free.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/They_Thought_They_Were_Free

yesitcan• 6 months ago

"But in this case, it's a private corporation. It can censor what it wants" - average HN reply

MattDaEskimo2• 6 months ago

It feels like federated networks with open-sourced feed algorithms are the best path forward.

If AI removes any technical limitations, and automates content management, what's stopping a content creator from owning what they create and distributing it themselves?

How can centralization continue to survive?

pjc5012• 6 months ago

The magic lies in the two-sided coin of promotion vs. spam filtering.

The web started off as a pretty peer to peer system, but almost immediately people built directories and link farms as means to find things. You can make a system as distributed as you want, but that only works for content which people know to find. Which is great for piracy, as e.g. movies and TV shows are advertised everywhere else and can be found by title.

For social media, the recommendation engine is a critical part of the appeal to users.

causalscience2• 6 months ago

The distinction between promotion and spam is solely that the promotion side can be entertaining enough that the users will willingly chase it.

AlienRobot• 6 months ago

Do you actually believe anything you just wrote?

If TikTok falls TikTokers will just use another centralized app.

Content creators don't have peertube instances for a reason.

jmyeet4• 6 months ago

Why do so many tech people push this "federation is a panacea" idea despite all evidence to the contrary? I don't get it.

First, the obvious: if federation was clearly superior, it would've won. No medium since email has been federated and even that's dominated by a handful of players. Running your own email server is... nontrivial.

Second, users don't care abou tthis. Like at all.

Third, supposedly tech-savvy people don't seem willing or able to merely scratch the surface of what that looks like and how it would work.

Fourth, there's a lot of infrastructure you need such as moderation and safety that would need to be replicated for each federated provider.

Lastly, zero consideration is given to the problems this actually creates. Look at POTS. We have spam and providers that are bad actors and effectively launder spam calls and texts. You need some way to manage that.

shimman• 6 months ago

Well for one we've seen how great and powerful federation can be, email is completely federated and the design of email has enabled hundreds of multibillion dollar companies.

Why wouldn't this also apply to social media? Why is it better for 5 players to exist rather than 1000s?

MattDaEskimo2• 6 months ago

Running your own email server is not trivial.

Federated networks are theoretically and systematically superior to centralized, that's why people push it.

Humanity and social media isn't about technological superiority. Current platforms have inertia. Why would people fragment when all they care about is basic actions, and their network is already built?

Federated networks have been burdened by an onboarding tax, but this, along with moderation, can all be abstracted away by AI.

Let's see the current reality: social media platforms are currently American-dominated. A serious geopolitical problem, especially considering the amount of time younger generations spend on it.

There is more and more reason for governments to get involved and force the fragmentation of these platforms.

megolodan5• 6 months ago

For almost all of human history information has been centralized among a small actors, for some time period we had a large independent press but those days are gone.

Everyone has a stake in getting accurate information, and therefore they have an interest in owning part of that system.

beepbooptheory• 6 months ago

If the better, truly good thing was always also the winning, "superior" thing, we would live in a very different world.

ddtaylor• 6 months ago

The utility of federated networks increases a lot when bad actors cause harm to people. What had a minimal value and failed to get attention yesterday when they need was low may be drastically different today when that need is high.

smw2• 6 months ago

Isn't the web federated?

Barrin92• 6 months ago

if federation was clearly superior, it would've won.

no because we don't live in the best of all worlds. it starts to win pretty rapidly when centralized abuses of power become apparent. Bitchat (p2p mesh network messaging app) has been becoming quite popular in Uganda and Iran.

Decentralization is the basic guarantor for most of the freedoms we take for granted in democratic systems. Just because the average user doesn't exercise them, just like people who only start going on the treadmill when their chest starts to hurt at age 50, doesn't mean it isn't the answer.

megolodan5• 6 months ago

Beyond federated systems, P2P systems seem to have a strong advantage here in identifying bad actors.

Ranking posts/comments by the exponential of inverse IPAddress-post-frequency would solve bad actors posting behind VPNs/proxies like evil bot farms / state actors and marketers.

Real users have their own IP address, and IP addresses are expensive like $20-50 a month which would make mocking traffic an extremely expensive proposition.

Mocking 1% of reddit's 120M daily active user would cost 58M and you wouldn't want to share/sell these addresses with other actors since it would ruin your credibility

skulk• 6 months ago

Ranking posts/comments by the exponential of inverse IPAddress-post-frequency

Doesn't this just incentivize posting a bunch of comments from your residential proxy IP addresses to launder them? This smells like a poor strategy that's likely to lead to more spam than not. Also, everyone has to start somewhere so your legit IP addresses are also going to seem spammy at first.

direwolf2027• 6 months ago

I think it would do the opposite. The regular user posts 5 times per day, but the spammer has bought access to 65536 IP addresses and posts once from each, boosting his posts 5x. And the town in South America with one CGNAT IP address to go around gets censored.

hsuduebc22• 6 months ago

Surprisingly convenient accident that happened miraculously just a few days after ownership transfer to the US owners.

josefritzishere• 6 months ago

State-owned social media?

abraxas• 6 months ago

You elected yourself oligarchy. Good luck getting rid of it now.

jmyeet4• 6 months ago

I predict a future showdown over Section 230 because "algorithms" are used to cheat on the safe harbor protections. Let me explain.

The general principle of Section 230 is that a platform provider isn't generally liable for user generated content. This was a key piece of legislation that enabled forums, Reddit and ultimately social media. The platform provider does have responsibilities like moderating illegal content and responding to legal takedowns, etc.

Alternatively if you produce and publish your own content you are legally liable. You can be sued for defamation, etc in a way that you can't if you simply host user generated content (unless you fail to adequately moderate).

REcommendation algorithms (including news feeds) effectively allow a platform provider to select what content gets distributed and what doesn't. All algorithms express biases and goals of humans who create those algorithms. It's not a black box. It is a reflection of the company's goals.

So if you wanted to produce content that's, for example, only flattering to the administration even if you outright lie, you can be sued. But what if your users produce any content you want but you only distribute content that is favorable to the administration? At the same time, you suppress anti-administration content and content creators. It's the same end result but the latter has Section 230 protections. And it really shouldn't.

This isn't hypothetical. The Biden administration revived the dead Trump 1 Tiktok ban to suppress anti-Israel content [1][2][3].

What I find most funny about all this is that the American administration--both parties--are doing the exact thing they accuse China is possibly doing in the future.

[1] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/11/10/tiktok-faces-renew...

[2] https://www.internetgovernance.org/2024/03/18/yes-its-a-ban-...

[3] https://x.com/snarwani/status/1725138601996853424

therobots9272• 6 months ago

And HN users can’t upload anti-ICE articles or discuss politics without getting flagged and downvoted.

So I guess HN was just ahead of the curve.

_vqpz4• 6 months ago

Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.[0]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

This has not changed in over ten years https://web.archive.org/web/20140702092610/https://news.ycom...

therobots9272• 6 months ago

Like I said. Ahead of the curve.

devsda• 6 months ago

It may have not changed over ten years but its enforcement I believe has been lacking over the past 1-2 years.

leke• 6 months ago

So it went from being a social manipulation tool of one county to another and ownership changed hands.

pickleglitch• 6 months ago

Dupe of another post that was mysteriously flagged: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46777652

drcongo2• 6 months ago

Why on earth are grownups using TikTok anyway?

_vqpz4• 6 months ago

Because it has content that's enjoyable for them and they like to interact with the community. Same reason you're on hackernews.

adi_kurian5• 6 months ago

Hopefully people will start seeing social media as what it is: a cheap, shitty, and extremely addictive drug. I am confident that in time, the opposite opinion will be viewed as insane.

superkuh6• 6 months ago

As much as I dislike TikTok, I dislike this dangerous mischaracterization even more. If you start propagating the meme that screens are like chemically addictive drugs the governments of the world will feel emboldened to use violence force to 'regulate' them. Screens are not drugs. They do not directly manipulate the biochemistry of incentive salience regardless of valence of perceived stimuli. They just provide enjoyable stimuli. It is VASTLY different. Conflating them is playing in to the hands of the authoritarians.

NoGravitas3• 6 months ago

I dunno, why do grownups watch TV?

rcpt3• 6 months ago

Nuts that the whole company is in on it. Missing such a huge story is something that rank and file engineers would notice. But nobody is saying anything.

Perhaps on the tiktok Blind?

megolodan5• 6 months ago

I used to think that most engineers had strong ethics, but It seems thats not the case.

I wonder if it is widespread knowledge internally or if just the select few know.

spacechild1• 6 months ago

I used to think that most engineers had strong ethics

Civil engineers maybe. Software "engineers" were never known for their strong sense of ethics.

pickleRick243• 6 months ago

Why would you think that engineers have stronger ethics than the population at large? Following this logically, some profession would have to have lower than average ethics or perhaps only the unemployed do?

I don't think that one's personal moral compass and one's profession have much correlation at all. Otherwise, moral philosophy professors would be near saints. Moreover the moral philosophers at Harvard would be more ethical than those at Ohio State.

philipwhiuk2• 6 months ago

You need remarkably few engineers in the loop to actually pull a thing like this off (if it is/was true).

rcpt3• 6 months ago

Implement the filter? Yeah that's like one guy. But then all the internal dashboards and experiments have this big obvious miss that everyone sees

intermerda2• 6 months ago

The Blind community is one of the most toxic communities out there. It made me sick even before the tech industry had its mask off moment 1+ year ago. Since then they’ve only amped up the racism and hate. I wouldn’t expect to find any serious discussion there.

rcpt3• 6 months ago

Blind is fine. It's close to the forums of the ancient Internet.

If there was some "mask off" moment I don't know what it was, and I've been in this industry for a while. Perhaps you're just projecting out from Elon? It's a popular thing to do nowadays.

SilverElfin• 6 months ago

Not just anti ICE videos - you can’t even mention Epstein

https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/tiktok-epstein-trump-cens...

actionfromafar• 6 months ago

Thankfully, I learned from our leaders that was just a hoax!

timpera• 6 months ago

It's also blocking the word "test": https://www.theverge.com/news/868362/tiktok-epstein-ban-hoax... Looks like it's just a bug.

throwaw122• 6 months ago

I will save this for the future, when people complain about Chinese open models and tell me: But this Chinese LLM doesn't respond to question about Tianmen square.

ndkap2• 6 months ago

Currently, Tiktok US is owned by US Companies

throwaw122• 6 months ago

that's exactly why I said, I am going to save this.

Then I will ask: what about TikTok US owned by US companies censoring anti-ICE and anti-Israel narrative, do they have freedom of speech?

hnfong2• 6 months ago

That's the GP's point.

At this stage it's the kettle calling the pot black.

philipwhiuk2• 6 months ago

Glowing endorsement for the Oracle investment

jnovacho2• 6 months ago

How is TikTok able to screen this en masse? Are they going after tags? Political issues aside, I am really interested in the technical background in this.

financetechbro• 6 months ago

The only thing I could come up with, assuming this isn’t a technical glitch, is that TikTok already had the infra to silence anything they want on the platform and as soon as the keys were handed over they turned that filter up to 100%

jnovacho2• 6 months ago

Sure, but are they running audio recognition and image recognition models on each upload just to classify it?

mkmk• 6 months ago

How would you distinguish this from the case where they turned the 'magnify dissent' filter down from 200%?

sudosysgen2• 6 months ago

Every large social network has fairly advanced mass screening setups for advertiser-sensitive topics. They just need to change the configs. On YouTube for example they will transcribe audio and run OCR on text to flag sensitive topics using MLP in order to flag certain topics (ex: Palestine/Israel), and prevent most ads from being shown (and demonetize and down rank).

Basically every large advertiser requires this so it's pretty trivial to turn on.

tomaskafka• 6 months ago

So, US has their own Tiananmen Square. How the turntables.

ndkap2• 6 months ago

TikTok easily bends over backwards authoritarian government. In Nepal, during the GenZ protest, TikTok disabled the search for "NepoBabies" which is the term people used for the affluent lifestyle of leaders' children and which was why the GenZ protest happened. Every other social media was banned but not TikTok because they happily censor whatever the government tells them to

b00ty4breakfast• 6 months ago

even setting aside the particulars of a US-controlled tik-tok, that our entire view of the world is through these narrow balistraria controlled by a few platforms is extremely detrimental to a free society, especially one so dependent on the flow of information.

You could leave tik-tok but that's where folks are at and the average tik-tok viewer is unlikely to leave their dank maymays just because of some "alleged" (and I use that term lightly) censorship

jacquesm2• 6 months ago

This is building an interesting case for those that say that the rest of the world can not build successful competitors to US entities: they can, but then they get taken away. I wouldn't use TikTok, but I find the whole situation a bit strange, ostensibly the rest of the world has a capability problem, but then when they are successful that can't left to stand.

letmetweakit• 6 months ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_They_Came stays relevant

hammock2• 6 months ago

Someone I know told me they think about this when they see the people who voted for gun bans talk now about how they need guns to defend against unlawful ICE folks

mvdtnz5• 6 months ago

But not a single person has actually done so. Until it can be shown that armed citizens are making a genuine difference against government agents it's still just bluster.

causalscience2• 6 months ago

That's because those people are all brainwashed.

They were told: buy guns because freedom, and they repeat "we buy guns because freedom".

Then they were told: never mind freedom, lets shoot this unarmed person, and they repeat "never mind freedom, shoot the person".

"we need our guns to protect our freedom against the government" idea could have some merit, but the reason right wingers say it is different. They say it because that meme has infected them, and uses them to replicate. A meme in the original sense

A meme is a term referring to a unit of cultural information transferable from one mind to another.

jmorenoamor• 6 months ago

Classic big. You just have to set the MANIPULATE env var to false in the container. It's true by default.

phendrenad2• 6 months ago

If there's a flash of light and a town in North Korea suddenly vanishes and becomes a giant crater, and the North Korean government claims it was a natural disaster, I'm going to guess they accidentally nuked themselves.

If TikTok suddenly blocks videos on a topic, and they say it was "technical issues", I'm going to guess the new US overlords accidentally pressed the wrong button.

Wonder how long before that button comes for HN. If Dang starts talking like ChatGPT we'll all know.

Rastonbury• 6 months ago

This was quick, it was never about the money, who needs Truth Social and Twitter when you have tiktok. Best of luck America

btown• 6 months ago

See also re: censorship of messages containing the word Epstein: https://xcancel.com/krassenstein/status/2015911471507530219

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

"We don't have rules against sharing the name 'Epstein' in direct messages and are investigating why some users are experiencing issues," a spokesman for TikTok's U.S. operation told NPR in a statement.

But the evidence in that Twitter thread should be weighed against the spokesperson's statement.

BatteryMountain• 6 months ago

I wonder when Americans will wake up and see their system for what it is. It is almost too late to fix it. What comes next is going to change the rest of our lives (everyone, the whole world).

kayodelycaon• 6 months ago

A large number of people don’t want the existing system.

They want Jesus on the throne, enforcing morality and making sure the poor people to work instead of being lazy grifters that take good people’s hard-earned money.

This isn’t a hot take. I’m a Christian who grew up that community. :(

It’s everywhere. And I hate what they are doing to my LGBTQ friends.

NewUser763123• 6 months ago

Meta comment: it seems like you can only voice a particular direction on the politic topic of immigration enforcement on this thread without getting downvoted. The opinion is obvious because everyone automatically jumps to malice as opposed to incompetence as the prevailing theory for the article's claim.

I had a condescending response from a HN mod the other day telling me that HN isn't all that left wing, just a 'slight skew'. Well OK buddy, exhibit A, read through the diversity of opinions that aren't flagged in this thread. I'd go as far to say that HN is basically like Reddit, except more of you happen to have computer science degrees.

And that's fine, it is what it is, but let's not pretend this website doesn't have a heavy bias in a particular direction.

Almad2• 6 months ago

From what I know, politologists are analyzing the situation in US from a perspective of "mid intensity civil war".

So what you're writing is aligned with tactics you'd expect...?

ImPostingOnHN7• 6 months ago

immigration enforcement has existed for as long as HN has existed, yet there was never this much attention paid to it. Even under the same president during the previous term.

So simply supporting or opposing "immigration enforcement" must not be it. Something must be different about this situation. I encourage you to dig deeper, or actually ask those who disagree with you, what that difference might be. And beware of falling victim to the easy dismissal of 'more people are less rational and/or less informed than before', a variant of 'this person who doesn't agree with me must be less rational and/or less informed than me'.

NewUser763123• 6 months ago

Here's what's actually different:

- This admin is deporting less than Obama was during his first year in office despite promises to the contrary,

- There is now organized harassment and resistance stopping federal agents from removing illegals that are also criminals from our country.

Ironically, you need to take your own advice.

One side is crazier, and it's not mine.

vfclists• 6 months ago

What happens if the creators load the video first with a different title and different contextual information, then if the video gets loaded, they change the title and the content afterwards?

areoform• 6 months ago

Ladies and gentlemen, the frog has been boiled.

jauntywundrkind3• 6 months ago

My bet is that too many frogs are gonna leap, that this is far too shitty a situation right now. They are gonna work extra overtime to cool it down some for now, collect & put some frogs back in the pot. And then slowly turn up the heat again.

I also do believe this is an incredibly hard technical moment. Elli-Tok has nearly no chance of suceeding in building their own algorithm, from square 1, since they don't have access to the ByteDance algorithms. I don't know what access they have to international content and internstional viewing habits, don't know if US content flows to TikTok actual and if they get any algorithmic help from that. This feels like a suicidal business, buying a brand name but lacking any and all of the means to maintain product quality.

There probably are real technical problems here. And feed preferences are probably just gone, while Elli-Tok rebuilds its own perhaps isolated perhaps loosely connected fork, while as said above probably lacking the content and viewer data to work from.

But just as Ellison's bought CBS then let it be overrun & destroyed by the hollow Free Press propogandists (pretending to be neutral, I say as my eyes roll out of my head), I also tend to think they thought they could get away with doing what they want. Maybe they will get away with this project. Maybe it is all isolated US only content, maybe it is swamped with right wing agitprop from here on out. Maybe half those viewers here keep scrolling forever and that's good enough to make the incredibly fantastically rich happy with their US government facilitated acquisition, that sundering an interesting diverse well tuned network is maybe or maybe not a delight but a necessary thing to claw under for this desired class propoganda. But I tend to think they're alas probably smart enough to learn quickly this is not how you boil a frog, and tend to think Elli-Tok is going to (suck for a long while either way, but work to) dial down the right wingism & divisionism a lot, then slowly work it back up.

(But man, watching these buffons mishandle CBS, watching ridiculous bald faced "salute to Mark Rubio" sure makes it hard to believe they have any competence at all.)

Different topic but the extremely critical TikTok v. Garland and the First Amendment Anticanon by Evelyn Douek skewering the unanimous Supreme Court decision that ok'ed this absurd international media property theft is amazing to read. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6118706

actualwitch• 6 months ago

Turns out, all you needed to do was say "jumping out of boiling water is woke" and frogs will turn up the heat themselves.

Nasrudith• 6 months ago

The frog in those experiments had its brain destroyed first. Just saying.

naikrovek• 6 months ago

what a bunch of enormous pussies ICE are, to have tiktok do this... lol, they're children, man. children with guns.

nashashmi3• 6 months ago

https://www.forbes.com/sites/conormurray/2026/01/26/tiktok-c...

Upscrolled looks like a promising alternative.

eunos2• 6 months ago

Lmao, I know that 2020 Trump was the first to brought up banning TikTok but it was Biden and Democrat who were vigorous in "controlling" TikTok.

Worthy for fell for it again award.

gcanyon6• 6 months ago

I'm not seeing this. I uploaded a video earlier today comparing sending in Tom Homan to replace Greg Bongino to sending in Ghostface to replace Jason Voorhees -- both still murderers. Unless they're lying to me about the view count and fabricating comments, something like 400 people have seen it and a dozen have commented -- most calling me an idiot, but whatever.

AlexC04• 6 months ago

it seems like our software engineers included `censorship=true` in the latest build when someone filed a JIRA ticket that said "censor stuff"

we're going to class this one as low priority / won't fix.

tastyface• 6 months ago

Just say no to any/all forms of corporate owned social media. They are toxic and antithetical to freedom of speech and true community building. Inevitably, all of them will eventually be used to disseminate propaganda.

wswope• 6 months ago

Just throwing these out there for people looking for options: Check out Piefed for a Reddit-like, and lobste.rs for an HN-like.

The fediverse might not be booming with activity to the same degree as the big names, but there’s plenty out there and it has a pleasant small-forum vibe that went extinct on the bigger sites a long time ago.

JohnTHaller• 6 months ago

Sure, 'technical issues'. Just like the filtering around epstein, mussad, etc. Right-wing billionaires like to ensure the speech matches their preferences.

cdrnsf• 6 months ago

They weren't concerned about privacy of US citizens so much as they were about their ability to directly influence the platform.

EngineerUSA• 6 months ago

The purchase of TikTok is interesting. Ellison is first and foremost pro Trump, and pro-Israel. TikTok was one of the few companies that allowed videos against the status quo (the propaganda our media pushes), which has only grown more biased now that Bari Weiss (again, a Pro Trump, pro Israel shill) is heading a large media organization. Censorship and controlling the media is one of the first tenets of bad actors. By controlling the flow of information, the truth can be obfuscated (that is why for instance, Israel has a total ban on covering Ghaza for western media. So that war crimes can go unnoticed, and thereby, it is as if they never occured). If we do not share anti-Ice videos, then they simply do not occur. For is the truth really factual, if it is left in darkness. A war on facts is concerning. I see videos of Mr Preti in drag on my feeds, clearly generated by AI, and shared by boomers. Disparaging the dead and the war on facts is highly concerning. That is why Noem does not release body cam footage of the ICE execution of Good and Preti. The only comfort I can find is that Noem and Ellison, and the Trump admin and Israel, are just plain bad at their job. Many years ago, Ellison was well known in SV circles to badly desire to be called like Jobs, in an almost comical way, like a kid asking his parents whether he is like that wrestler he saw on TV when he imitated one of his moves (he used to dress like him, and ask anyone around at his parties about the similarities between the two). They still miserably fail at controlling public sentiment, which is only growing against them day by day, as it rightfully should. Whether or not that leads to a tangible action against these bad actors is to be waited for. Rarely does anything happen though. The war criminals that lied and killed civilians in Vietnam and Iraq enjoyed their ranches. Netanyahu and trump will someday retire and enjoy their old days, after wrecking havoc on the innocent.

notepad0x90• 6 months ago

Where is that HN thread where everyone was saying how bad it would be for Biden to ban Tiktok? Let's see how it can be used to manipulate the upcoming elections in the US this year. Except now they can't be banned, they're American!

onetimeusename• 6 months ago

TikTok said in a statement that glitches on the app were due to a power outage at a US data center. As a result, a spokesperson for TikTok US Joint Venture told CNN, it’s taking longer for videos to be uploaded and recommended to other users. The tech issues were “unrelated to last week’s news,” TikTok said.

There was a major storm over the weekend. I think the issues have been resolved. Is it still the case anti ICE videos can't be uploaded? Seems easy to test.

brailsafe• 6 months ago

It seems to me that the hard part to test would be whether or not videos are allowed to circulate in the same way they would be if they were of a different subject. Upload status seems like red herring

Much like how even relatively innocuous comments on many subreddits will just be shadow-deleted.

throwaway5752• 6 months ago

If someone demonstrates they are liars, there is a reasonable default reaction. Most people can ignore what they say, because liars made the conscious decision not to be credible.

It is an incredible time-saving productivity hack to disregard what habitual liars say.

latency-guy2• 6 months ago

This is a reaction to reputation, which is sometimes reasonable. But reasonable people also confirm their suspicions with evidence regardless of the situation.

Go ahead and save your time, but remember your reputation is at risk as well, and I would consider you unreasonable.

Animats2• 6 months ago

Can't mention "Epstein", either.[1]

It was better when TikTok reported to the Third Department of the People's Liberation Army. They don't censor outside China.

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

Animats2• 6 months ago

And now you can't mention "ICE Watch" on Meta's sites.

It's getting to be like China's censorship.

mandeepj• 6 months ago

Well, besides that TikTok is censoring “Epstein” now. Is that a tech issue as well?

If you can upload any video but ICE brutality then I want to conduct system design session with their architect, tech lead, and CTO!

_Donny• 6 months ago

A few weeks ago, I reported a compilation video of ICE officers beating people. The description included the phrase "The deportations will continue :)".

I reported it for promoting violence, but TikTok found no violation of its guidelines.

It probably didn't help that the video was posted by the official White House TikTok account..

rsolva• 6 months ago

Do not expect your rights to be honored on large platforms. They are fenced gardens regularly weeded, using algorithms with very specific preferences.

The only information outlet where we can have a reasonable expectation of freedom is the web itself, a good old websites on your own domain. Could be a txt file if you want to keep it simple ;)

jauntywundrkind3• 6 months ago

I really want to know which directions data is flowing. How much of an island is Elli-Tok? Do videos from the US appear internationally? International to US? ByteDance famously isn't giving up the algorithm, but what user data does Elli-Tok get and what do they send, or does Elli-Tok have to totally rebuild the algorithm from scratch using only US viewers?

This whole thing is such a shit show. The US government right now looks like a total ass of all asses on the world stage, but this TikTok business of the US demanding our country get to take over a social network preceeds this era of major fuckery by a good tick. And is just so stupid, so not what governments should do. Even if we hadn't had Trump just hand it over to his preferred "buyers" the Ellison's, it's just a grade a fuckup, absolute bedlam to do this, completely delegitmizes the US.

TikTok v. Garland and the First Amendment Anticanon paper by Evelyn Douek just came out, talking to what a first class First Amendment fuck up the unanimous Supreme Court decision was. Excellent read. Just could not have done a worst job, unbelievable nonsense that let this madness just persist & amplify. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6118706

Spooky23• 6 months ago

We didn’t go after TikTok because of PRC propaganda. We wanted a platform for US propaganda.

bradgessler2• 6 months ago

Remember all the grievances about the previous executive administration's "Twitter Files" censorship? Rules for thee, but not for me.

To be clear, I think both censorship regimes are not good, but I can't say I'm surprised.

barbacoa• 6 months ago

The pendulum is in full swing. Soon it will be ban worthy offense to suggest there are more than two genders.

Though I am morbidly enjoying the irony of seeing those on the left suddenly discover an interest in free speech, and those on the right discover their love for campaigning to get people deplatformed.

bradgessler2• 6 months ago

I'm beginning to put together that party-lines are strictly about gaining and holding power at all costs. Irony disappears through that lens and the way people act makes much more sense.

N_Lens• 6 months ago

I think there's a stark difference between government control of free speech and authoritarianism (Right wing) and activists using social clout or 'mob justice' to deplatform people (Left wing). Both aren't good, but there's a huge difference.

johnsimer• 6 months ago

for what it's worth many solopreneurs on the X/twitter solopreneur committee were reporting their uploads to TikTok were failing, and I saw at least one conservative complaining that their (conservative political) videos were not uploading to TikTok either

raydev• 6 months ago

At least within Canada I'm continuing to get anti-ICE content from various creators.

throwaway87543• 6 months ago

TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC is only within the US (controlled by Larry Ellison). You still get ByteDance.

wtcactus• 6 months ago

I believe everyone here realizes there are several highly used media platforms (some bigger than TikTok, like Instagram), that are posting the videos without any issues. You also realize that there are US TV stations playing those videos almost non-stop, right?

People laugh at MAGA conspiration theories backed by Fox News, but their conpiration theories - backed by CNN - sound just as insane for anyone that didn't buy into any of the 2 extremes...

OpFour• 6 months ago

A riff on "The Revolution Won't Be Televised"...

the revolution won't be televised because the bastards who own the networks won't let you see it and you probably wouldn't watch it anyway— you're too busy with your beer and your phone and your comfortable numbness.

the revolution won't be televised because it's not entertainment, not something you can half-watch while you're scratching your ass and wondering what to eat for dinner.

you can't consume revolution like you consume everything else— passive, bored, already thinking about the next thing.

the revolution won't be televised because it happens in the place you're most afraid to look: inside your own goddamn skull.

it starts when you stop lying to yourself, stop swallowing their garbage, stop pretending this is fine. it's not on TV. it's not coming to save you. it's just you and the choice to keep sleeping or finally wake the hell up. nobody's going to film that.

siliconc0w• 6 months ago

You also can't talk about Epstein apparently.

robflynn• 6 months ago

The new TOS also says it tracks: immigration status, political affiliation, whether you identify as non-binary or transgender, religion, activist content you consume, etc.

JohnMakin• 6 months ago

What's disappointing is that this precise thing was happening during people trying to report on Gaza issues, and were encountering ghost "technical issues" and shadow bannings/outright bannings, but any such discussion about it here seemed to be getting flagged.

tsoukase• 6 months ago

CEOs and boards of directors treat the regular public as either slaves or stupid. I don't know if they believe that or pretend to believe.

dmix• 6 months ago

I'm happy anti-censorship is becoming more popular generally. Tiktok blanket banning terms and aggressive moderation of political topics didn't start here, but if it gets people talking...

rustymonday2• 6 months ago

So this was uploaded only 6 hours ago and has over 1,000 points and is at the very bottom of the front page (#28 right now).

jjice• 6 months ago

Comments like this appear on every single post like this. Hacker New's algorithm lowers posts that have too much engagement too fast as a way to prevent flame wars. Is it perfect? No. But I highly doubt this is HN demoting this on purpose.

From the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

The basic algorithm divides points by a power of the time since a story was submitted. Comments in threads are ranked the same way.
Other factors affecting rank include user flags, anti-abuse software, software which demotes overheated discussions, account or site weighting, and moderator action.

This could very well be marked as an overheated discussion.

This comes up on HN constantly. The reason I feel confident that this is actually the case and not selective moderating is that these same exact comments pop up across posts from the entire political spectrum.

TheAlchemist4• 6 months ago

I believe the reasons for this system where initially good - don't want too many political discussions, keep it on tech only.

The issue is, that the tech is not a niche thing anymore - the biggest companies on earth are all tech now, and they played a very major role in installing the current US government. This topic is a great example too. Any current or future authoritarian state will be a very heavy user of technology, so it may very well be worth it debating these things here on HN.

rustymonday2• 6 months ago

Thanks for explaining this.

pessimizer2• 6 months ago

When you force the sale of a company in order to control the political messages that its users post, the wailing and gnashing of teeth that comes when that power is exercised is entirely performative.

Weren't anti-ICE people just calling it "freeze peach" a minute ago? This is what that looks like. This is the group that repeated "nothingburger" over and over again when you said that government directly and publicly threatening private businesses if they didn't censor individuals was bad.

This is political. The Democrats began their open hatred of the left in the 90s when the Democrats cracked down on free speech during the anti-globalization protests (the introduction of fenced-in "free speech zones"), the party went all in on Iraq against the wishes of all people who were paying attention, Hillary Clinton mocked the left for objecting to a wall between Mexico and the United States, and Rahm Emanuel described people who wanted single-payer as "fucking retards."

Now the bizarre group of media-addicted partisans that now calls themselves the "left" fight for free trade and imported slave labor. They remind you that there are jobs that are too awful for Americans that are totally appropriate for Mexicans. That manufacturing is actually worthless, and we should import everything because as a reserve currency there's no need to produce anything. Trade deficits can be infinite, and America is meant to be a black hole, sucking in the worlds production and handing it to the rich. But the rich are bad, although we're giving them every single thing they want. Their politics judged on policy are to the right of Nixon. The only illegal immigrants they know are their employees. They've left behind Floyd, Illegal is the new Black.

Now, on HN, this isn't politics. This is something else. Only black people and women are politics. The creation of a masked, militarized federal police force filled with morons to enforce federal immigration law because Democratic cities and states are refusing to enforce it themselves? Not politics. The performance of Trump's street roundups to rally his base (and the working people in this country that are undercut by illegal labor, and the racists who think every Mexican is a rapist) while ignoring and writing exceptions for the corporations that employ illegal labor? Not politics.

Sorry, I meant something something something Russia, China, Iran, Nazis. And some specious, offensive comparison of people who just got here in order to make money to Black Americans enslaved and segregated over centuries.

afpx2• 6 months ago

I became entralled and hypnotised by 90s liberalism. Convinced that their ‘change’ would actually happen, I backed their candidates and media for 30 years waiting for a solution to even the lowest hanging fruit. Instead of getting any solution at all, I watched them rope in more rubes for ‘bigger and better issues’. The self-righteous, like the younger me, are so easily redirected.

fudged71• 6 months ago

It's insane right now browsing tiktok and seeing every 3rd or 4th video on my feed have consistent glitches (in the same places of a video, as if my internet was slow which it isn't), on only the videos mentioning resistance topics from the US. Very black mirror. Feels like it's meant more to send a message that your content is flagged, and to watch what you say and do. Otherwise they would just block it or hide it from your feed.

changadera• 6 months ago

Did the consensus shift about TikTok? I thought it was a given that as tech/IT people TikTok isn’t an app worth having on your phone due to spyware/attention brute forcing/curated propaganda by Chinese government.

Tadpole9181• 6 months ago

There are people with a wide variety of opinions here. TikTok is one of the most popular social media platforms, so naturally a lot of folk here will use it too.

And a thread about something on TikTok will naturally select participation from people who have first hand experience or care about it.

Grimblewald• 6 months ago

Well, I had it _becuase_ it was non-us propaganda. Otherwise all I have is US propaganda. If i must be manipulated, then let folks with competing objectives have an equal shot, hopefully they cancel each other out.

Now though? Tiktok isn't worth having, it is same old.

sys32768• 6 months ago

Glitch or not, anything that helps get people off TikTok and hopefully off their phones is a good thing.

loudmax• 6 months ago

Under the current administration, the US is in the process of throttling long term economic growth, cutting itself off from its traditional allies, and pulling back as a global power. China's Communist Party has the most to gain from the end of American greatness.

pbiggar• 6 months ago

Meanwhile, UpScrolled was #1 in social media App Store charts in the US, and #2 overall.

atoav• 6 months ago

The free speech crowd who demanded to stop censorship of vile racism and bigotry (while pretending to not believe in it themselves) are awefully silent when actual state censorship happens.

gigatexal• 6 months ago

Oh man. The fix is in. This is becoming more and more like 1984 every day.

ldng• 6 months ago

Freedom of speech, right ? ... My god, the US are so fucked up.

3acctforcom• 6 months ago

It's really nice that I can still post here anonymously.

I really only come here for tech news, but I doubt ICE cares.

hysan• 6 months ago

I’m guessing this is related to and corroborates this early flagged article? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46777652

resters• 6 months ago

This is the first political story that HN hasn't killed in a while. Well done! Time to wake up to what is happening.

insane_dreamer4• 6 months ago

At this rate the US will soon have its own Tank Man image censored from mainstream social media.

mayo369• 6 months ago

“Oracle admits it broke TikTok.Without explaining why its cloud status page doesn’t list any outages” https://www.theverge.com/news/869037/oracle-admits-it-broke-...

mattmaroon• 6 months ago

It’s crazy to me how people on the left react hysterically to what people on the right dealt with for years.

Remember when the story about Hunter Biden’s Laptop got banned from all major media? A story that could have been confirmed true by just emailing the subjects and asking them if the emails were real?

Remember when Google admitted to being pressured (and caving into said pressure) to censor conservative voices?

When we learned that Twitter allowed the US Military to run influence campaigns at people in the Middle East?

This isn’t new, we just don’t like when our weapon gets turned on us.

Free speech absolutism is the only sensible option.

wolfi1• 6 months ago

<airquote> tech issues </airquote>

topmax• 6 months ago

Most Americans lack long-term thinking and fail to recognize that a purely foreign social media platform could be beneficial to them.

freakynit• 6 months ago

I summarized all comments using LLM for better reading: https://hn-discussions.top/tiktok-ice-censorship/

ndsipa_pomu5• 6 months ago

Please stop

yanhangyhy• 6 months ago

no suprise at all... isn't this the whole point for USA to control Tiktok? 'free world' or `democracy` countries love to control the media

another_twist• 6 months ago

Not sure if douyin is available in the states.

Nihilartikel• 6 months ago

While I can TOTALLY believe that TikTok might be doing classification and censoring of uploads - tech issues that happen during notable events will INEVITABLY be interpreted as partisan censorship.

A personal brush with this was with Scientology Protests around 2008 if I recall - I was at YouTube and there was a great kerfuffle among many of the top personalities who uploaded videos siding against Scientology. Their videos were not making it into the top rankings or getting the expected visibility. To them the obvious answer is that they were being deliberately suppressed - after all Scientology was a paying advertiser and brand on YT.

The reality was that the entire viewcount pipeline, and downstream aggregations were busted for about a day. Nobody was getting their full views counted in a timely way for that time.

gcanyon6• 6 months ago

I ran an experiment this morning. N=1 but:

I created two videos that contained nearly the same content. I recorded both by hand in one take, so they're not identical, obviously. Each talked about this issue. One used the term "Frozen Water," the other used "ICE". After eight hours:

   The "ICE" video has 5 views
   The "Frozen Water" video has 419 views

Again, N=1, and of course the "Frozen Water" video is more appealing to conspiracy theorists.

FWIW

Sugimot02• 6 months ago

Honestly I've noticed this with political content on Instagram. Random bugs occur where I can't post, or can't comment or repost, and it's usually posts that aren't in line with US foreign policy on Gaza, Lebanon, Venezuela, etc. I'll go about fine looking at normal stuff, memes, etc but whenever some big geopolitical event occurs is usually when I hit those bugs on IG. I probably experienced more bugs post 10/7 then my entire history using the app prior. Also had lots of posts removed that I contested and won later but it doesn't matter if the moments already passed and that wave of information was repressed on the algorithm.

TikTok users can't upload anti-ICE videos. The company blames tech issues

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