A lot of folks have been empowered to say “end the war in Gaza”. A lot of those folks don’t quite know what to say to “should we allow Hamas to seize control of Palestine”?
If this were not the case, democracies would work best when the public was not taught to read. :-) Can we really argue that the public is too stupid to be trusted with the ability to communicate? If that is the idea we should admit, at least, that what is being considered inverts every principle of the free world.
Having a foreign government control the narratives that reach mass audiences is not at all the same as trusting the public with the ability to communicate.
You’re just spouting one cherry picked narrative of an incredibly messy situation.
Bombing people indiscriminately tends to cause them to oppose you and support the people who are most credibly able to stop you - regardless of anything you do. So it was inevitable that support for Israel would plummet and for Hamas would rise, once people learned about the situation.
TikTok only had a hand in this to the extent that it helped Western citizens bypass Western soft censorship and learn about the situation sooner.
Notice that if TikTok was spreading a false or one-sided view of the situation, Israeli and Western government could have effectively countered it by providing an even more complete information with even more evidence, but they did not. This in itself is weak evidence that there isn't a more complete view to provide.
I don’t believe we should determine who rules Palestine. But I also don’t believe we should allow a hostile state to just bankroll effective seizure of Palestine and the military intimidation of Israel.
It’s frankly insanity to tell Israel to be chill while a hostile nation, which is posturing a potential nuclear attack, is actively funding a large and growing base of terrorist operations next door.
Palestine is a proxy battleground of many foreign actors. Reducing it to a conflict that is just Israel vs. Palestine is bullshit
The entire conflict is that Israel believes their safety necessitates that Palestine not be sovereign because they believe a sovereign Palestine will try to take back the land it lost whether in Israel itself or the various illegal encroachments over the years. Palestine on the other hand is not going to accept Israeli sovereignty over it. And thus the conflict. However many or few foreign actors are involved doesn't change the root of the conflict.
It is messy geopolitics. There are dire consequences to sitting back and doing nothing. It’s a prisoners dilemma with large moral negative externalities to playing.
No, but is there a question that china still might try to influence and leverage it?
Market place implies transparent exchange of ideas. But if the TikTok algorithm is political biased, it is not a honest exchange of ideas anymore. (same goes for X's or FB, or whatever). But personally I am cool with not using those services.
In essence, the government wants to ban foreign news sources. TikTok may have been less editorialized than Al Jazeera, but it had wider reach.
With data ranging back years, sometimes even birth of the individuals?
I don't think so.
Newspaper editor edit one newspaper for everyone.
If FedGov is going to be fixing problems with the domestic news and entertainment industry, they should start by reversing that consolidation of control.
In short, you have no idea whether it is more or less editorialized than other news outlets, and that's the central issue here.
It is a sign of weakness for a free society.
Ideally in my oppinion, intelligence services would proof the manipulation - and show it to the public. Who then decide on their own to be sceptical of TikTok content.
I am against a direct government intervention.
But it is still a very different situation in terms of impact compared to a single local newspaper.
Based on the fact that FedGov is presenting evidence to the court under seal, it seems likely that intelligence services have proof (or -more likely- "proof") of manipulation, but are only showing it to the judge.
Does the likely fact that the US government is refusing to provide for public inspection and discussion what they're using as evidence of alleged national-security-relevant Chinese interference in domestic affairs make you more comfortable with the veracity of their claims that the Chinese government not only has substantial control over TikTok, but that that control is so harmful to national security that it must be unilaterally terminated?
Why or why not?
The newer apartment renters (20s-40s typical young urban dwellers) are not surprised by anything they see on the news regarding the conflict. I think they had ways to see what the older generations had just been blind to since before this latest flare up happened.
Despite brigading from any side, anyone can get anything trending on social media, including videos of the aftermath of israeli air strikes, meanwhile nothing but filtered news headlines make it out of editors.
A fun exercise is comparing how big news websites frame headlines when Palestinians die (passive voice) and Ukrainian / israelis are killed.
If one newspaper can convince the United States to support the Spanish-American War because one of her own warships blew up due to poor maintenance, It's not a stretch to believe a sufficiently well-funded state operation with relatively unfettered control over an entire media application could run a similar opinion shaping operation.
Public opinion is the cornerstone of the US system, but the public can be misinformed at scale.
Correct. But (until relatively recently) the proposed solution to deception and propaganda was dismantling them with facts and reason. "Free and open discussion in the public square is critical to a well-functioning society." is one of the foundational principles of our country.
This notion that adults should be protected by deception and propaganda by censorship, rather than frank and open conversation is a distressing resurgence of authoritarianism.
As always, when looking at the machines of control that politicians are assembling, ask what can be done with it by someone who is dedicated not to the protection of their citizens, but rather the suppression or destruction of a section of the citizenry they disfavor. If someone who hates can legally do more harm with the machinery than someone who cares can do good, either ensure that it is built differently, or that it is not built at all.
If you've never looked into it, you'd do well to learn a bit about what it takes to become an AS and get an ASN. There was a post on the red site a while back about someone doing it on the cheap as a dare for their stupid hobby project.
Nobody in the open knows, that is the problem.
But also russian millitary bloggers are outraged by the IDF. Simply because it is war in the information sphere, not that they care about the people there. Just like China don't give a damn about them - but they can and do use it to weaken the self declared western moral leadership.