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One App – Two Worlds: This Is TikTok in Russia and Ukraine

nrk.no

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Re: One App – Two Worlds: This Is TikTok in Russia and Ukraine

#101

Post by user3939382 »

My position is that Russia's Article 51 legal justification for the invasion is a stretch at best, but that the US policy of unnecessary, aggressive NATO expansion [1] baited Putin into this war whereas he was very clear Ukrainian NATO membership was a red line for him. We also made no effort to encourage Ukraine to honor the Minsk accords which would have almost certainly prevented this. If Mexico was hostile and Russia was in the process of working with them to put nukes in Tijuana I wonder if the US would sit idly by? Meanwhile was have Condoleezza Rice without a hint of irony on the news agreeing that invading a sovereign country is a war crime (does Iraq ring a bell?)

I see my point of view reflected only in alternative, independent media. This includes, for example, Pulitzer-prize winning journalist Chris Hedges who had years of his work purged from YouTube simply because he had a show on RT which was never once sympathetic to Putin.

My anti-war, pro-diplomacy POV is banned from corporate media, and flagged/downvoted into oblivion on Reddit and even Hacker News. From my perspective most supporting sending arms and money to Ukraine has been the victim of a policy campaign by the arms industry which has already generated windfall arms sales to Ukraine and now Germany (!). So am I surprised by this story? No. I've been seeing a banned perspective on this conflict in the US from day 1.

[1] “We reiterate the decision made at the 2008 Bucharest Summit that Ukraine will become a member of the Alliance” June 2021 https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/news_185000.htm

Re: One App – Two Worlds: This Is TikTok in Russia and Ukraine

#102

Post by nicce »

GoRudy wrote: post #22
cbjoerke wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi! Thanks for your kind words. We have corrected it to kilometeres. All the best, Christian/NRK

What software / platform are you using to serve that kind of content? Very well done

In Finland, national newsmedia Yle is forced to serve mostly similar content because of some legistlation that it cannot purely act as normal news site (text only), as it is traditionally broadcasting company. They serve content like this to bypass these rules.

Re: One App – Two Worlds: This Is TikTok in Russia and Ukraine

#104

Post by sidlls »

ianbutler wrote: post #97
Joeri wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like the zen koan, does a piece of information exist of no one is around to read it? Self-hosting is mostly pointless because the problem is the walled gardens trapping global attention. Many people barely see a browser window, and consume all online information inside the walled gardens. Whether you publish outside that garden or not it is effectively the same, because they will never see what you write.

I’d say you have to know your audience but it seems to work fine here. Plenty of self hosted blog posts make it to the front page of HN. I don’t see anyone writing for the broader masses and maybe that’s more the type of writing you think will be quashed, but writing for a niche seems to proliferate to the specialty sites just fine.

" writing for a niche seems to proliferate to the specialty sites just fine."

Does it, though? I'd actually like to see a thorough study done on this. My hypothesis is different from yours: the proliferation of "specialty sites" is a product and symptom of the walled garden phenomenon, and further serves to sequester and censor undesirable content from the wider audience.

Re: One App – Two Worlds: This Is TikTok in Russia and Ukraine

#105

Post by toxik »

GuB-42 wrote: post #67
toxik wrote: post #24

The dream of the internet as some sort of great democratizing force is already dead and buried, but for any who still believes, this must surely be the final nail in that coffin. Controlling the narrative is only a problem for existing democracies with press freedom. All bets are off once the threat model includes control of the media. So cherish your freedom of speech, and exercise and defend it. I don’t know what t…

This is TikTok, it is not a platform for freedom of speech or whatever. It is a platform to see cute dance videos and more generally a happy place to waste time. For that I'd say that the Russian TikTok is more in like with what TikTok is for and that's the Ukrainian TikTok that is unusual. I guess that you can't avoid it when there is a war in your country, despite all the efforts TikTok makes to keep things carefre…

You are parroting an old tired “it’s only protected speech when it’s the government meddling”, and to that I ask, did you not read the part where TikTok is doing this because the Russian government decided to jail people over “fake news”? Does this not constitute a textbook violation of the freedom of speech?

Re: One App – Two Worlds: This Is TikTok in Russia and Ukraine

#107

Post by toxik »

tempodox wrote: post #47
toxik wrote: post #24

The dream of the internet as some sort of great democratizing force is already dead and buried, but for any who still believes, this must surely be the final nail in that coffin. Controlling the narrative is only a problem for existing democracies with press freedom. All bets are off once the threat model includes control of the media. So cherish your freedom of speech, and exercise and defend it. I don’t know what t…

Exercising your freedom would start by not using such a closed platform where you have no control over the content you provide and are subject to arbitrary rules.

Alright, I did and nobody cared. What now?

Re: One App – Two Worlds: This Is TikTok in Russia and Ukraine

#108

Post by depaya »

GuB-42 wrote: post #67
toxik wrote: post #24

The dream of the internet as some sort of great democratizing force is already dead and buried, but for any who still believes, this must surely be the final nail in that coffin. Controlling the narrative is only a problem for existing democracies with press freedom. All bets are off once the threat model includes control of the media. So cherish your freedom of speech, and exercise and defend it. I don’t know what t…

This is TikTok, it is not a platform for freedom of speech or whatever. It is a platform to see cute dance videos and more generally a happy place to waste time. For that I'd say that the Russian TikTok is more in like with what TikTok is for and that's the Ukrainian TikTok that is unusual. I guess that you can't avoid it when there is a war in your country, despite all the efforts TikTok makes to keep things carefre…

On my TikTok page I watch stand up comedians, cooking videos, comedy sketches, political commentary, engineering videos, goofy out of context clips, song mashups, video game footage, and yes very occasionally a dance video.

Re: One App – Two Worlds: This Is TikTok in Russia and Ukraine

#109

Post by rospaya »

sourthyme wrote: post #30
toxik wrote: post #24

The dream of the internet as some sort of great democratizing force is already dead and buried, but for any who still believes, this must surely be the final nail in that coffin. Controlling the narrative is only a problem for existing democracies with press freedom. All bets are off once the threat model includes control of the media. So cherish your freedom of speech, and exercise and defend it. I don’t know what t…

To me TikTok is not the "internet" because no matter how much the app gives, the user doesn't own their content. You can still write anything in a blog that you own and have people see it. To me that freedom is the "internet".

> You can still write anything in a blog that you own and have people see it. To me that freedom is the "internet".

It's easy when you have a domain, server in your basement, a reasonable ISP. But as soon as you break the ToS with your provider or registrar getting the word out becomes practically impossible without resorting to IPFS or Onion or whatever in which case the content you own becomes a little ghetto that nobody reads.

Re: One App – Two Worlds: This Is TikTok in Russia and Ukraine

#110

Post by toxik »

viraptor wrote: post #87
toxik wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, I was also surprised that the EU would do the very thing that is supposed to set it apart: media censorship.

RT was targeted multiple times in the past - this is not exactly a new thing. RT itself was not really censored either (not in the way specific information is outright illegal in Russia for example) - you can still go to the source if you really want to. (See the comment below about domain blocking though) They're just forbidden from using the national broadcast, since that was always controlled by various orgs. In m…

Thank you for this nuance. I thought it sounded crazy.
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