But the current strategy of appealing to China to at least not help Russia in any way, is the best outcome.
And thankfully China has opted to pursue a rather novel way of fighting COVID, which prevents them from getting stronger economically.
I'm not saying that they didn't just make up the article, but how do we know?
How do we know their bots didn't have bugs in them that pushed the results in favor of the tone of the article?
You don't need the bots source code to reproduce the experiment, just as you wouldn't ask to borrow/inspect a biochemist's beakers to reproduce their experiment.You simply follow the same steps they did and see if you observe the same results.
Bots may be prejudice to the war content in terms of how they watch videos and how they scroll through them, and as such changing recommendation algorithm, but the original reporting is about censorship of war related content. Which doesn't require that much of a proof, it is officially confirmed by TikTok even in the statement at the end of a submitted report - it doesn't show newly uploaded content in rus region.
[1] https://www.pling.com/p/1515346/ [2] https://github.com/tigr1234566/TikTokMod
Russia can't upload new things at all. There is nothing about the show from Russians to show.
Russia's are also not being shown new Ukraine videos. This is as designed as mentioned and as you know due to technical-implemnted regional bubbles.
What were you saying in your last two sentences?
> How do we know their bots didn't have bugs in them that pushed the results in favor of the tone of the article?
> how they watch videos and how they scroll through them, and as such changing recommendation algorithm
This is but one example of a larger systemic issue with media in the 21st century, and an issue with how people consume that media.
Virtually every platform is like this, not just TikTok. It's not like TikTok tries to present itself as a neutral, unbiased source. Their whole premise is delivering "highly curated" content to you as fast as possible. The problem is that people have accepted that as normal and it's doing horrible things to the world. There's a reason everyone feels like we're the most divided we've ever been...and it starts with things like this.
As far as the war in Ukraine is concerned, this is just like classic WW2 propaganda but turned up to 11 due to the nature of how fast and easy it is to spread [mis]information these days.