I understand your point, but I think the platform is relevant. There are four platforms that have a considerable number of users (TikTok, Youtube, Twitter, Facebook/Instagram), and they all have provenly effective censorship, especially optimized over the past couple of years. If it's one of those four, it does matter.

I would also claim that the platform is only irrelevant if removing that platform results in a negligible reduction in views. Removing TikTok removes 1/4 of the services, and probably the vast majority of younger eyes.

If everyone on Twitter, Facebook, and Youtube is talking about something, people will be talking about it on TikTok. If they aren't, that is noticeable and that too will be something people will talk about. That can actually lead to more attention on that platform due to the Streisand effect.

The primary concern would be if all the social networks censor the same thing, but that isn't a concern here due to the opposing political views unless your concern about censorship is just these platforms not allowing extreme violence, but that isn't what the article is discussing.

1) “Wtf, why’s your dog laying on a nail??” “It doesn’t hurt enough yet” 2) YouTube is paying people enough that they make a good living and questioning the policies means potentially risking their bills not getting paid.

Three of those platforms are American-controlled and one is Chinese-controlled. Even if all four have "effective censorship", it seems unlikely that American-controlled and Chinese-controlled platforms will block/manipulate in the same way and to the same end.

This is not a fixed set either – every few years, a new platform pops up. Tiktok is a relatively recent example, Instagram an earlier one.

If content restriction gets too heavy-handed, people will respond by moving to new platforms which are less restrictive – at least in free(-ish) countries. I personally think that inconsistent and overly heavy-handed moderation – punishing too many users by algorithm for innocent or trivial things, even while reports against other users doing seemingly much more serious things are dismissed – is one of the factors behind Facebook's recent slide in users.

Added to that, many people on the political right (30-40% of the population) view these platforms as politically biased against them, and are keen to find new places without that perceived bias. Attempts at establishing more conservative-friendly platforms generally come unstuck by being overrun by extremists (neo-Nazis, antisemites, etc) who push mainstream right-wing users away, and also through pure incompetence (both technical and business). But I think it is likely that sooner or later someone is going to come up with the right balance to succeed in that space.

The common idea is to assume that “the masses” move slowly, but the reality is that when properly motivated everyone wakes up early and changes technology in a matter of hours. Many of them bringing their followers with them with only the last of the followers being the ones moving slowly.

If not deep-fakes than at least propaganda, like this one of Chomsky stating that US promised no NATO expansion which is not true: https://v16-webapp.tiktok.com/c7fe2cbc57cb276832f49e2542fe4f...

People on TikTok aren’t reading twittter. They’re doomscrolling on TikTok and sponging information for better or for worse.

This is about trusting the source, sure it could weaken traditional media outlets, but some of them are driven by social media, you will often see stuff first on Reddit and then a day or two later its a DailyMail story.

That tiktok footage of the two jets fighting was shown on a UK tv news channel, but watching it, I couldnt tell you the date time or location, I dont recognise the location so cant say where it was, and its like watching the mainstream media, their reuse of library shots sometimes labelled as library shots and other times not, makes anything hard to trust.

Another technique I saw on the news, was one studio news reporter asking a military base commander some questions, the interview was shown again later on but 2nd time around, the studio news reporter was a different person asking the same questions.

Anything which doesnt include two people in the same shot is questionable.

In todays age, where CGI makes the past come aline, you can get software from Adobe which can instantly change the colour of clothes in video clips with minimal effort, and photoshopping, makes this a distraction.

If anything its a psychological measure of fear, to work out how people react to different situations, which the internet is very good at doing.

I also find it interesting talking to people to see what they bring up thats been on the news and not, I sometimes think in todays digital age with digital transmissions and digital tv and settop boxes we get a personal form of news. Why do I say this, well we are given an idea of how the news studios work, but what about the other studio presenters, are they doing the same in a different studio, have the news anchors recorded a variety of piece to camera's and they get edited and digitally delivered to different people.

Question everything, but unless you see it with your own eyes, dont rate it too highly and even if you saw something with your own eyes, have you been surreptitiously drugged, or are you just seeing some live performance with actors?

Obedience to authority experiments are always ongoing.

Introducing doubt into an argument is a valid debating technique.

Edit: I saw this as someone who witnessed some people winning the UK National Lottery in dubious circumstances.

It’s good to be skeptical of all media these days, just as long as you aren’t too skeptical or contrarian just for the sake of it. That line of thinking has led to fantastical conspiracy theory thinking. One side refused to admit that COVID vaccines can potentially be harmful and have a nontrivial amount of risk. The other refused to admit any benefit and didn’t get vaccinated at all. If instead we were presented the full story, instead of 4 minute sound bites, I suspect the pandemic would have been over a long time ago. Same with the anxieties of WW3 in this case.

Is the media culpable if it makes a normal, rational person go insane?

Also, it seems that since two days ago, pandemic is no more, at least in the media.

Much like when communications go down and the amateur radio enthusiasts come out. Or how when the roads are impassable in the UP by car, you'll see people out on snowmobiles. There are enough people with reserve tech skills that I genuinely don't think it would matter if the big platforms attempted to suppress all information.

What's far more likely is that things are going to be selectively suppressed in a way that's invisible to the average person in order to control their feelings and support for whatever is occurring.

In theory and in reality, they will and have had no idea it's manipulated because they have no basis for comparison. Social media manipulation is hardly new; Russia itself has been doing it for many years. And most people say they don't care and still use Facebook, Twitter, etc., and many buy into and spread the disinformation.

> whether there is enough ambient knowledge

That 'knowledge' has to come from someplace. In fact, I would say that 'ambient knowledge', and the belief in it as some source of truth, is the medium of disinformation.

That works only if people know it's manipulated and then are motivated to act. It's hard to know if query results (broadly: search results, timelines, etc.) are manipulated because you have no basis for comparison. And IME most people don't care about social media manipulation - the disinformation campaigns have been well researched and documented for a long time.

There is definitely a dangerous tool here too because there already has been a lot of fake images and videos appearing. It's unclear who is posting these but it certainty generates a lot of noise for OSINT. While the former situations had low noise but high bias in the current situation we may just have so much noise that it is impossible to figure out what is real or not. Though I think it still changes things since military analysts have better tools and know corroborating information to sort through this noise more easily. But fake news travels faster than truth.

Sure, we've been discussing war online since the Web started (I sure did; I was online after I got out of school on 9/11), but that was all or mostly text. All the photos and video we were provided were still carefully controlled.

It's not TikTok. It's the smart phone. In the Gulf War, if the one guy with a camcorder agreed not to show you committing a war atrocity, that was it. It was done. Now? Good luck.

And medium matters. The outrage generated by the Vietnam War is partially due to it being the first major US conflict after a substantial portion of the population had access to TV.

I imagine these hypothetical "other platforms" (could you name one?) will be deemed as "that bad place that platforms <insert scary thing here>", omitted from search engine results/feeds, advertisers blasted on twitter/pull out, and payment systems cancelled, with direct sharing being the only real way to propagate the videos. We've clearly seen effective censorship like this over the last few years, with other unfavorable topics (right or wrong). I don't see how it's possible to consider the internet as some free place where unfavorable ideas can be exchanged, at a public/viral level.

Reddit, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, WhatsApp, PeerTube, Signal, Telegram, Matrix. Need I go on?

> We've clearly seen effective censorship

I'd beg to differ.

>"In the summer of 2019, as pro-democracy protests raged throughout Hong Kong, U.S. employees of TikTok were horrified to discover that content moderators on the global team, who reported to TikTok managers in China, were taking down videos of the demonstrations, according to a person involved in the discussions.

[1] https://www.theinformation.com/articles/tiktok-wants-to-avoi...

They are still pushing this "nazi" narrative weeks later, when social media and many of the millions of people that attended the protests are like, what are you talking about?

It's been truly eye opening to see blatant lies by the government.

I was at the protests for 3 weekends. I guess that's my "source". I think that's as close as you can get to a true source (your own experience). And I say that as someone that leans left, previously voted liberal, is vaxxed, and was also against "anti vaxxers" previously to attending the protests.

I'd say the actual narrative is it's a group of diverse people all affected by mandates, lockdowns and other government responses to covid. I don't agree with what they all want, but I can understand their pain. And I think we can figure out a solution that would make life better for them while also protecting our hospitals and vulnerable.

Imgur used to show currently viral images and was all about entertainment and filled a fairly similar niche to Tik Tok. Nowadays it has gone down the outrage engagement path(?) Politics seems like most of the content and it's so curated that it's feels like Pravda levels of blatant propaganda - even reading takes that seem to agree with what you were already thinking gives you pause that you must have missed something. I'm predicting there will be zero "anti-war" posts advocating that the US stay out of the Russia-Ukraine disaster. None. Such a position, right or wrong, is likely to be held by a signficant fraction of Imgur users and indeed Democrats.

Imgur is so extreme as to be obvious especially in the light of how dramatically it changed, which is instructive for us as an example. How would we know if facebook and twitter were playing with their algorithms with just a little more subtlety than that? (And maybe in an utterly different, unpredictable and unexpected direction?)

Maybe it's all organic and a totally fair reflection? How do you explain the change from an almost equal amount of eye-rollingly bad pro-trump stuff as there is pro-biden stuff now to zero. There was vast amounts of pro-sanders, anti-democratic establishment stuff ranging from fair to pretty silly that all suddenly vanished too. I also have trouble with the sheer consistency of the viewpoint. It's one voice, there's no variation to speak of at all. I've never seen any realistic crowd chatter that works that way. Have you?

But sure, I guess it's possible. How would you know that's what it is? How would you know if Facebook and Twitter were tweaking their algorithms to drive public opinion? It's the whole point of this. How would you find that out?