Remember about a decade ago, when you’d read about YouTube’s algorithm creating an “alt-right pipeline”?

Without making any judgments on the alt-right label, it was absolutely a real thing. Many documented cases showing how a fresh account could go from “Sesame Street, cooking videos, and CNN” on the default feed - and, within ~10 relatively innocuous clicks down the suggested video rabbit hole, the home feed would be full of Alex Jones tier stuff.

TikTok is heavily reminiscent of the old YouTube. Just taking a few steps down the Free Palestine recommendation road will get you into “Happy Birthday, Uncle Adolf” videos (hyperbolic, but only slightly).

I don’t blame certain parties for getting rather nervous over that. But I wish we could have some honesty from elected officials about why TikTok is suddenly such a pressing issue again.

Whatever happens, I hope they’ve learned from YouTube’s earlier mistakes. In trying to break the alt-right pipeline, they ended up breaking the entire recommendation engine for years (tbf it’s a lot better now).

I think the short form content inherent to TikTok - in some ways makes it worse than old YouTube was, because its multitudes of different people making the same or similar points - its more reinforcing.

That said I otherwise agree with you 100% - I saw folks get sucked down you YouTube pipeline then, and I've watched people get sucked down the TikTok one now, I got one person in my life to switch to FB reels, because I would correct the purported facts in each video and they found that annoying.

Agree (even if it is hyperbolic) on the yellow brick road model of radicalization.

Do you remember the bin laden reactions that surfaced on tiktok? That was radicalization that the US attempted to suppress after 9/11.

Really? People get radicalised on the American social media all the time. Then go shoot people, all the time. Numerous shootings were organised on 4Chan&similar. What did your radicalised ones did may I ask? I hope it's more than having the "wrong" opinions on hot topics.

Can we please stop admiring China, Russia, DPRK and other similar countries where having the "wrong opinions" is considered radicalisation?

If those wrong opinions are actively harmful to others and/or lead to policy decisions that are actively harmful to others, then maybe "radicalized" still isn't the appropriate term, but I hope we can agree it's a bad outcome.

What are examples of harmful opinions that harmed others?

>I've watched people end up radicalized by content on TikTok - in ways that twitter, facebook, youtube, et al doesn't seem to do.

QAnon, birthed in 4chan and largely disseminated to Boomers through Facebook isolated people and convinced a large number of people to stage a coup on the US government. I can't tell if you missed the QAnon craze, or you are intentionally being ignorant. I can't think of a single TikTok trend that comes close to the level of radicalization of QAnon.

QAnon was massive on TikTok in 2019/2020, to the point that TikTok took measures to address it, blocking hashtags and banning accounts.

There seems to still be a large conspiratorial rabbit hole on TikTok that still leads to QAnon influencers (using more generalized hashtags and catch all conspiracies).

QAnon related topics were banned in July/Aug 2020 and became community guidelines violations. Facebook did nothing about QAnon until post-January 6th.

Given the demographics of those most heavily influenced by QAnon, it's ridiculous to imply that Tiktok had even a 10th of the influence of Facebook wrt to QAnon.

So what you're saying is TikTok actually took action against the most dangerous conspiracy movement the country has seen in our lifetimes while other American companies left it alone? And I'm supposed to be pissed at TikTok and support them being banned?

Well, HN libertarians think the conspiracy should flourish.