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TikTok: Cheerfulness and censorship

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Re: TikTok: Cheerfulness and censorship

#111

Post by rsynnott »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #30
TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no such thing as a politics-free network, only one that only allows politics you agree with.

The "there's no such thing as apolitical, apolitical = supporting status quo" meme needs to die. It's just a slightly smarter-sounding variant of "if you're not with us, you're against us". It purposefully conflates two groups of people - people who don't engage with an issue because they like the status quo, and people who don't engage with an issue because (within reasonable bounds) they don't care which side wins.…

> they don't care which side wins.

That is, itself, a political stance (and arguably a rather dangerous one; low political engagement tends to be a sign of sick democracies).

Re: TikTok: Cheerfulness and censorship

#112

Post by madiathomas »

andrepd wrote: post #75
_akei wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you just call Hacker News apolitical? I feel even Reddit is better when coming to political debates because on Reddit you can find a subreddit that aligns to your political ideology. On HN, if you are from China, India, Russia, African country, the best thing you can do is to avoid articles about those geographical locations because comments will be mostly negative and any dissenting view will be downvoted until…

>On HN, if you are from China, India, Russia, African country, the best thing you can do is to avoid articles about those geographical locations because comments will be mostly negative and any dissenting view will be downvoted until it becomes unreadable. I agree that downvoting for disagreement is bad, but have you considered you might simply be wrong? I strain to believe that anybody attacked you simply for being…

I feel a downvote must only be used for a comment that has vulgar, strong language or anything that isn’t in the good spirit of a good debate. Downvotes must be used only to flag comments violating guidelines, not as a way to silence those who share differing views. If you disagree, write a comment. I realised most people use downvotes powers to silence those who disagree with them.

Re: TikTok: Cheerfulness and censorship

#113

Post by wildmusings »

CPLX wrote: post #109
pgeorgi wrote: post #4

Their approach to moderation is unusual in that they don't even pretend to be a neutral platform and as such it's a powerful differentiator to businesses that are rooted in a "free speech" culture. Shadow-banning individual posts ("Visible to self") is relatively unusual and acts as a demotivator to publish controversial content because such content doesn't drive engagement, as is actively demoting entire classes of…

I mean I’m as much a fan of free speech as the next guy, but there are some pretty key differences between the concepts of “free speech in the culture” and “a giant collection of unmoderated user generated internet content”. I mean actual free speech would just be an endless collection of penis videos. Nobody is actually advocating for free speech. I don’t think every app has to be about political issues. Where did t…

>I mean actual free speech would just be an endless collection of penis videos.

I agree with the main thrust of your post, but to nitpick, American free speech jurisprudence is not so daft. Where some restrictions are necessary, the principle of “viewpoint neutrality” still works to prohibit censorship. So, where the government allows pro-abortion expression, it must also allow anti-abortion expression. And this applies even where its more general obligation to allow all expression does not hold.

Re: TikTok: Cheerfulness and censorship

#114

Post by kds3 »

jessaustin wrote: post #90
kds3 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> More generally, is there anything on TikTok which is banned by Facebook? That's wrong question. It usually doesn't matter what is banned, but what is "shadow-banned" really matters. You can't see what is shadow-banned on Facebook because they don't tell us how they do moderation on their news feed.

The difference is important on the level of individual users, but it's not important for this discussion. As TFA demonstrates, it's possible for diligent researchers to reveal unpublicized policies through their research. Users can assist researchers by pointing out what content they've had banned. I haven't seen a reason to suspect that TikTok have been any more open about their moderation policies than Facebook or…

> it's possible for diligent researchers to reveal unpublicized policies through their research

It's possible to reveal __some__ policies (like trivial one with breastfeeding), but I think that reverse-engineering of non-trivial policies is really hard.

Like moving some type of content to the bottom of the feed for some category of users. It may not look like a ban, but who is gonna scroll to the bottom of the feed? Or 25% bias in news priorities of one political party over another for some users.

Their non-trivial policies may also change over time, so it would be hard to prove any of them. They had years to optimize their news feed.

And who will have time and knowledge to do statistics? With millions of eyeballs we still have tons of trivial bugs in open source software.

> I haven't seen a reason to suspect that TikTok have been any more open about their moderation policies than Facebook or indeed any other social media platform have been.

I don't know any of big news players who have open editorial policy, but TikTok is new in the industry and I think they don't have knowledge and technologies to develop non-trivial policies like Facebook, Twitter, NYT or any other big player.

Re: TikTok: Cheerfulness and censorship

#115

Post by microcolonel »

sangnoir wrote: post #110
andrepd wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>On HN, if you are from China, India, Russia, African country, the best thing you can do is to avoid articles about those geographical locations because comments will be mostly negative and any dissenting view will be downvoted until it becomes unreadable. I agree that downvoting for disagreement is bad, but have you considered you might simply be wrong? I strain to believe that anybody attacked you simply for being…

> but have you considered you might simply be wrong? You don't have to be wrong to be downvoted, most of HN just has to feel you're wrong, and boy oh boy - can the HN group-think be wrong (even on facts)

Nonetheless, when defending the CCP, one is often wrong. CCP literally has rape-and-torture camps where people die suspiciously and graciously donate their organs.

With regard to african countries, it kinda matters which ones you're talking about: there's a world of difference between the DRC and Ghana.

Re: TikTok: Cheerfulness and censorship

#116

Post by microcolonel »

oefrha wrote: post #49
_akei wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you just call Hacker News apolitical? I feel even Reddit is better when coming to political debates because on Reddit you can find a subreddit that aligns to your political ideology. On HN, if you are from China, India, Russia, African country, the best thing you can do is to avoid articles about those geographical locations because comments will be mostly negative and any dissenting view will be downvoted until…

I excluded Hacker News from social networks I'm in the market for. HN is political as hell, and yes, whenever I make a niche (on HN) political comment I'm always prepared to burn karma.

I think there are some fairly minor functional changes that could be made to HN in order to address this problem. At very least it should not be possible to downvote a comment without replying or upvoting a reply.

If it's against the rules, flag it. If it's against your view of the facts, refute it.

Re: TikTok: Cheerfulness and censorship

#117

Post by dang »

microcolonel wrote: post #115
sangnoir wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but have you considered you might simply be wrong? You don't have to be wrong to be downvoted, most of HN just has to feel you're wrong, and boy oh boy - can the HN group-think be wrong (even on facts)

Nonetheless, when defending the CCP, one is often wrong. CCP literally has rape-and-torture camps where people die suspiciously and graciously donate their organs. With regard to african countries, it kinda matters which ones you're talking about: there's a world of difference between the DRC and Ghana.

Please don't take the thread further into nationalistic flamewar.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: TikTok: Cheerfulness and censorship

#118

Post by lonelappde »

fwxwi wrote: post #20
conformist wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sympathetic to the argument for banning politics outright. However, this would imply making sure that all politics is banned in practice, and not that the platform has the right to selectively ban politics. I'm not convinced tic toc does that.

Yes you have a point. As I've said I don't use it, so I don't know how it goes. What I'm saying is that a politics-free social network is not only possible, but desirable.

What is the definition of "politics"?

Re: TikTok: Cheerfulness and censorship

#119

Post by CPLX »

wildmusings wrote: post #113
CPLX wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean I’m as much a fan of free speech as the next guy, but there are some pretty key differences between the concepts of “free speech in the culture” and “a giant collection of unmoderated user generated internet content”. I mean actual free speech would just be an endless collection of penis videos. Nobody is actually advocating for free speech. I don’t think every app has to be about political issues. Where did t…

> I mean actual free speech would just be an endless collection of penis videos. I agree with the main thrust of your post, but to nitpick, American free speech jurisprudence is not so daft. Where some restrictions are necessary, the principle of “viewpoint neutrality” still works to prohibit censorship. So, where the government allows pro-abortion expression, it must also allow anti-abortion expression. And this app…

Yeah I get it.

But like it’s fine for Flyertalk.com to be about frequent flier programs, and for Woodweb.com to stick to discussions of router bits and edge banding.

It seems to me that the reason people are applying some kind of double standard to Tik Tok is because it’s Chinese. But like it’s fine to make an app for kids to share only positive light hearted videos and keep it focused on that.

But of course the more interesting question being raised here is if the other model —- the extremely moderated some kinds of “free speech” but not others Facebook model — is in fact better.

That’s not clear at all.

Re: TikTok: Cheerfulness and censorship

#120

Post by rhizome »

booleandilemma wrote: post #89
pgeorgi wrote: post #4

Their approach to moderation is unusual in that they don't even pretend to be a neutral platform and as such it's a powerful differentiator to businesses that are rooted in a "free speech" culture. Shadow-banning individual posts ("Visible to self") is relatively unusual and acts as a demotivator to publish controversial content because such content doesn't drive engagement, as is actively demoting entire classes of…

...as is actively demoting entire classes of content (like critical commentary on politics) from the start The closest app TikTok is comparable to is Vine. What kind of critical commentary on politics are you expecting on these apps? People watch these apps for the memes and hot girls.

Every means and mode of communication can be used for politics. Surely you don't mean to argue that this is impossible when it's TikTok.
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