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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

#151

Post by ryandrake »

vilius wrote: post #36

If governments are censoring our internet we need to change the way we're being geolocated. VPN is too much configuration and centralisation. TOR is over the top privacy. I want something as accessible as turning the flight mode on my mobile. The button can be placed next to flight mode and called CENSORSHIP. You can turn it on. It will then reveal your true IP address and make the internet very fast. However it's of…

Having IP addresses whose most significant bits can roughly map to a location (because IP "blocks" are allocated to distinct ISPs that are in known locations) was a big mistake. It would be much harder, but not impossible, to graft geopolitical borders to the internet if every public address that a computer got was random.

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

#152

Post by cabirum »

Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter are blocked in Russia because they only allow pro-Ukraine narrative. The social platforms became weapons in this war. Anyone noticed they blocked accounts of most Russian media companies and news sources? Or users with "wrong" opinions are being shadow banned? Or Google deprioritised or excluded some Russian gov services (even non news)?

Sorry, but unbiased sources do not exist. Free speech does not exist. It's not two worlds, but two bubbles.

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

#153

Post by kcb »

user3939382 wrote: post #101

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 Ru…

Your perspective is the same tired idea that the US is the only country that controls world foreign policy and everyone else just plays along. What of the Ukrainian people?

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

#154

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

jl6 wrote: post #124
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…

The issue is that despite the internet appearing to be an infinite sea of nodes that can all participate in a global village, the reality is that “the media” is the very finite set of nodes that have control of users’ attention. We’re surely all guilty of facilitating this. Forget the global village of a billion voices - the number of news sources I regularly read isn’t even dozens. Anybody can still put up a web ser…

Is there a "Jevons paradox" equivalent for information and media? That is, Jevons paradox states that as efficiency of resource usage improves (e.g. MPG goes up) that usage of that good can also, somewhat paradoxically, also go up, because the relative cost of that good goes down so it can be used in more ways, people can drive further, etc.

With information and media, lots of us originally thought that lowering barriers to entry for media dissemination would make it easier to have this "global village of a billion voices". But instead what it has done is made it easier for users to filter to the top content, and easier for producers to use tons of data mining and machine learning to filter in on the most addictive (if definitely not the best) content. In the long term it can make it harder for smaller producers because they are competing against a much larger set of competitors for attention.

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

#155

Post by WillPostForFood »

jl6 wrote: post #124
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…

The issue is that despite the internet appearing to be an infinite sea of nodes that can all participate in a global village, the reality is that “the media” is the very finite set of nodes that have control of users’ attention. We’re surely all guilty of facilitating this. Forget the global village of a billion voices - the number of news sources I regularly read isn’t even dozens. Anybody can still put up a web ser…

the number of news sources I regularly read isn’t even dozen

At least you've added "nrk.no" to your list this week. The problem is real for people who live in Facebook or TikTok bubbles, but the democratized news dream of the internet is still alive, but it takes some work to break out from the world of the algorithmic feeds.

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

#156

Post by d23 »

vilius wrote: post #36

If governments are censoring our internet we need to change the way we're being geolocated. VPN is too much configuration and centralisation. TOR is over the top privacy. I want something as accessible as turning the flight mode on my mobile. The button can be placed next to flight mode and called CENSORSHIP. You can turn it on. It will then reveal your true IP address and make the internet very fast. However it's of…

I think Apple is roughly trying that with their VPN service? I'm not sure; I never used it since I'm not a full 100% Apple device person, and if I'm going to pay for a VPN I want to be able to use it on all my devices.

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

#157

Post by ajross »

verisimi wrote: post #59

This is a fair point - that people are seeing different things in Russia and Ukraine. But can we reflect for a second that we are all in the same boat? We don't know what we are presented on screens is real either. Who's to say we are receiving the truth? Are our leaders beneficent? I think not. We are all in the same boat. We are all propagandised. We don't even know what is going on anywhere else, except for what w…

An important distinction is that if I want to find foreign spin in the west, I can do so trivially and legally and share it with anyone I want. And the worst punishment I will see is a downvote.

The core claim in the liked article isn't about content moderation, it's about censorship. And it's really upsetting to see the extent to which HN commenters want to conflate them.

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

#158

Post by luke_value »

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…

Imagine believing there is freedom of speech in liberal democracies in 2022...

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

#159

Post by qaq »

bduerst wrote: post #150
aaaaaaaaata wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tool of the Chinese government, and secondary tool of other governments because they want to remain dominant to push their own agenda(s).

TikTok doesn't even exist in China. The parent Bytedance does, and their Chinese equivalent is Taiotao. Even the TikTok data servers exist in South Korea. This is an important distinction because there has been zero proof that TikTok is spying or is a tool for China, despite clickbait articles, memes, and accusations existing. This is the first time TikTok is being used observed to be used for government political ce…

China has being pushing Russian narratives on the war internally in state media. So I think you might be disproving the "is not a tool for China" part.

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

#160

Post by alex-ant »

cabirum wrote: post #152

Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter are blocked in Russia because they only allow pro-Ukraine narrative. The social platforms became weapons in this war. Anyone noticed they blocked accounts of most Russian media companies and news sources? Or users with "wrong" opinions are being shadow banned? Or Google deprioritised or excluded some Russian gov services (even non news)? Sorry, but unbiased sources do not exist. Free…

Currently Russia doesn't have a singe reliable news source. We all have seen the pro-Russian narrative - there's no war, we're not murdering the civilians, all Ukrainians are nazis developing bioweapons targeting "slav DNA" and to be delivered across the border by birds, etc. Those are not news. Needless to say that this propaganda also targets people in other countries with large ethnical Russian population, specifically the Baltic states and incites those people to riot and hate the land they live on creating a bridgehead for possible Russian invasion.
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