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

nrk.no

171–180 of 371 posts

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

#171
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…

> Controlling the narrative is only a problem for existing democracies with press freedom.

Doesn't explain why both democratic and non-democratic countries ban press. It's amazing how quickly people forget that democratic countries have banned russian, iranian, chinese, etc government/press/etc.

It's like the same people saying only "autocratic" countries russia ( which is actually a democracy ) is a threat to other nations. When in actuality, 90% of all invasions in the past few decades have been by democracies.

Maybe democraticizing forces is the evil we all should be fighting against because democraticizing forces have done so much damage worldwide. Even though we pretend to be the saints.

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

#172
post #161

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…

Given russian media is legally only allowed to spout government-approved propaganda, it really makes sense to ban them from social media. This does not equal to only allowing pro-Ukrainian media.

Why don't you call pro-Ukrainian media "propaganda"? They did recently ban all but a few pro-gov political parties, and all their media is equally under total government control

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

#173

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…

> Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter are blocked in Russia because they only allow pro-Ukraine narrative.

This is demonstrably not true and easily disproved. All the official Russian accounts are on twitter and keep posting lies after lies, lately main topic is denial of massacre in Bucha. For example: https://twitter.com/mod_russia/status/1510649349482635265

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

#174
post #7
post #4

This article is well made and uncovers very interesting thing. I love how it was technically put together, browsing it on mobile was a great experience, chapeaux bas, i love how great new formats are available to publishers in the digital era outside of serving autoplaying ads. On thing that caught my attention was the supposed USCentric approach since it counted a distance in miles. I also wonder whether it was tran…

> outside of serving autoplaying ads NRK is Norway’s equivalent to the BBC. I’m not sure about the BBC, but NRK is not allowed to run ads. More importantly, they have a number of great in-house developers that churn out quality content and a great video streaming service (tv.nrk.no).

> NRK is Norway’s equivalent to the BBC.

Which is britain's equivalent to RT?

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

#175
post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Humans are not geared for our "village" to be this big. The expansion of our sphere of "care" flies directly in the faces of thousands of years human evolution.

The "bubbles" we create, consume, and participate in are a subconscious attempt to slim down our giant "tribe" into something that our brains can manage. Of course these bubbles are readily aligned to people like ourselves - language, interest, appearance, culture, etc.

Expanding your bubble is hard. It takes work. As a result, most people don't.

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

#176
post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given russian media is legally only allowed to spout government-approved propaganda, it really makes sense to ban them from social media. This does not equal to only allowing pro-Ukrainian media.

Why don't you call pro-Ukrainian media "propaganda"? They did recently ban all but a few pro-gov political parties, and all their media is equally under total government control

What do you consider pro-Ukrainian media? The BBC?

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

#177
post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm pretty happy that i havent had to read celebrity news sites because i have an algorthmically light diet, especially in the last few weeks with Will Smith etc. Do you really think this nichemaking is bad inherently bad? The natural course is that good niches fill and grow until they become the mainstream and the folks who are nudged out go make new niches. this even happens with Big Media... It even happened here.

What are you suggesting is better, though? really, that we all just publish one of 10000 articles to dev.to and hope their search and popularity algorithm puts your article in front of peoples' eyes? That everyone should upload video to a single time-ordered feed that you have to scroll through until you find something you like without algorithmic involvement? Im seriously confused, how do you do content selection or personal curation in a world without niches

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

#178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does inability to explicitly find and watch Ukrainian videos from the Russian IP (see closer to the end of the article) sound like a normal Tiktok?

Why do you think they will watch Ukrainian videos? In Telegram there's plenty of Russian war videos. Probably, hundreds of channels with tens-hundreds of thousands subscribers. It's just TikTok does not want to be part of this.

The point being, those who "will watch" won't be able to, because TikTok actively suppresses those videos even in direct searches, as article alleges.

If Ukrainian side being awash with war videos is "propaganda" and is "not normal for TikTok" (GP's claim), then is this normal?

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

#179
post #129
post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Truth is that people largely place trust in institutions and people they are used to and identify with, often for irrational reasons. People are prone to FUD. Theyre lazy and passive. I think to a degree, this is a misunderstanding. The Russian approach to disinformation in particular does not sell the message "trust us!" - at least, not in the West. Instead, they push the message "trust nobody!" In fact, RT's slog…

You're effectively saying the same thing as me...? Russian FUD propaganda resonates in the west because of the lack of trust in western media. That's them successfully exploiting a hole our media dug for themselves. The fact that we've responded by banning RT highlights that that hole goes deep enough that we're responding by, as a matter of imminent practicality, violating a core value of our civilization. That both…

> them successfully exploiting a hole our media dug for themselves

You're arguing that RT exploits a hole the West dug itself into. The comment you're responding to argues the hole is besides the point. The exploit would work with or without it. (The fact that all media is lumped into a single category, a fallacy, seems to prove the point.)

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

#180

>Ukrainian Nykolai gets to see men in military attire singing patriotic songs about loving Ukraine. Or talking about it being a man's duty to sign up for battle. >Russian Alexei sees a man tripping over in the water, a puppy patting a duckling on the head and some funny, homemade costumes. Is it just me or does the first one sound like propaganda and the second one sound like normal TikTok?

The number of people unwilling to accept and be critical of Ukrainian propaganda has been eye-opening to me. The people that were just railing against “misinformation“ by their political opponents, have been happy to jump all over snake Island, ghost of Kyiv, Z dressed in uniform last year, higher Russian death rate than frontlines of World War II, and going out of their way to ignore neo-Nazi groups there. No one ha…

>The people that were just railing against “misinformation“ by their political opponents, have been happy to jump all over [...]

source? while I don't doubt there's a many people for both groups, I haven't seen concrete examples of what you're describing.

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