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TikTok told moderators to suppress posts by “ugly” people and the poor

theintercept.com

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Re: TikTok told moderators to suppress posts by “ugly” people and the poor

#181

Post by heartbeats »

bjourne wrote: post #173
microcolonel wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who does not frequent nightclubs, I don't really see the problem with a self-selecting group of people with standards? Some people don't want to see you, and that's their business.

About a decade ago there was a huge controversy where I live about many nightclubs limiting the number of immigrant male patrons per night. I guess you don't see a problem with that either? "Protected class" is a cop out because the question isn't about what the law says but what is moral.

Well, you want to have an exclusive clientele. If you get people who live in the ghetto going there, it's not exclusive. It just causes a poor vibe.

I mean, some nightclubs have immigrants, but nobody goes there because there are too many immigrants.

It's sort of the same thing here with TikTok: on one hand we say that it's bad to ethnically discriminate in nightclubs, on the other hand we don't go to the 'urban' nightclubs, and take it as a good signal when we read the immigrant patrons online complaining about ethnic discrimination.

Re: TikTok told moderators to suppress posts by “ugly” people and the poor

#182

Post by _jal »

catalogia wrote: post #26
im3w1l wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The documents reveal that it's about curating appealing content to get user retention, and that the talk of stopping bullying is just talk.

> The documents reveal that it's about curating appealing content to get user retention Seems kind of similar to what supermarket magazines do. Obviously a social media app is not a supermarket magazine, but the premise of cynically using pretty people to drive up engagement is nothing new.

Magazines are not communication platforms their 'users' expect to use in anything remotely the same way.

A better comparison might be bottle-service bars where looks or money buys your way in. Which I personally don't mind - if that's your thing, I guess, go for it. Not every place has to be somewhere I want to go, and they're pretty up-front that you need to meet whatever standards or pay crazy money.

Tik Tok, from observed behavior, is weaselly about it.

Combine with the fact that it is obviously part of the Silk Road strategy and likely an intelligence tool, and I'm going to continue to treat is as the radioactive garbage it is.

Re: TikTok told moderators to suppress posts by “ugly” people and the poor

#184

Post by lotsofpulp »

mattnewton wrote: post #52
pbhjpbhj wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To play devil's advocate, presumably they work for some people, people that want to go to a club in which they attendees are selected by looks. Sounds just like a lifestyle magazine, or a catwalk, or a million other situations that have been normalised in which people are chosen for how they look (just about every prospectus appears to choose people to present their idea of the right type of diversity, for example).…

Just because it is normalized in some other parts of society doesn’t mean this isn’t a new front to fight this kind of discrimination on. Especially since this platform is gaining a lot of popularity with younger generations, an order of magnitude more than the nightclub scene’s impacted users https://www.oberlo.com/blog/tiktok-statistics

The biological platform of humans discriminates. There seems to be a greater amount of pleasing chemical reactions happening when people see good looking people, so they seek them out themselves. I don't know how or if one can fight that, it's seems to be one of the fundamental mechanisms of mating.

Re: TikTok told moderators to suppress posts by “ugly” people and the poor

#185

Post by VWWHFSfQ »

wayoutthere wrote: post #161
pulisse wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is what happens when you mix utilitarian morality with a desire to stop online bullying. What in TFA indicates that these policies were intended to stop online bullying? Just as plausible to think that they were intended to create a saccharine user experience in order to promote growth.

The Chinese solution to "disharmony" is to simply erase anyone who is different. LGBT people are allowed to exist so long as they don't draw attention to themselves. Also the ethnic cleansing in Xinjiang. I don't think these were intended to stop online bullying as much as they are just another bullying tactic themselves.

Exactly. The Chinese government's vision of a clean, sterile, society and citizenship.

Re: TikTok told moderators to suppress posts by “ugly” people and the poor

#186

Post by searchableguy »

Here's my 2 cents -

A. [0] Familiarity breeds attractiveness.

This isn't a new concept. You can find many advocate groups who want "diversity" in workplaces and higher positions to stop systematic or perceived racism due to non familiarity. How is that different from above? Do you have a choice to be ugly or not? Do you have a choice on whether your body is deformed or disabled? Do you have a choice on being poor?

To little extent, maybe but most can't be helped beyond a certain level.

B. Scale

Night club doing it doesn't affect society as much as a platform with 1.5+ billion users. Of those who are going to vote new policies and may get to a high position of authority later,

do you really want your judge who uses tiktok to sentence you for longer?

You can already find people living in echo chambers online and as more of it is moved online, will you be okay if your child is excluded from something more than a billion people use because she is a bit shorter than normal?

How many of you have LinkedIn, twitter or social media crap that you despise but have to use due to others using them? What will happen then?

C. Awareness

Do you think users are aware that they are being censored constantly compared to real life where you can't avoid meeting different people? If you go to a bar, you will see different people in your way - few "ugly" and others pretty.

I propose we stop ugly people from having kids so everyone remains pretty and similarly symmetrical. Who wouldn't wanna live in a world with everyone pretty and same? It's not like we will seek more exoticism after that happens. The problem will remain solved forever.

0] http://faculty.wcas.northwestern.edu/~efi614/documents/InPre...

Re: TikTok told moderators to suppress posts by “ugly” people and the poor

#187

Post by rickety-gherkin »

I think the club analogy here is spot-on. From what I've seen of TikTok, if you're classically attractive then you're famous on there, and it drives the wants and trends of TikTok. A userbase that is infatuated with crushes. It's no different than any teen magazine from the 90s. I have an ignore-worthy conspiracy about this app, stop reading here if are you have a distaste for this.

I think it's used as a staging environment to test mass human interactions with computer generated videos of people in a setting where there isn't pre-loaded skepticism and where the sample sets are extremely good. Mass amounts of people doing the same dance is a pretty good data set, and the information in this article makes me believe this even more. They are effectively "cleaning" the data so the sample set is attractive people in clean and presentable homes or areas with good lighting, all confined to the "For your page" stream. Might not be true, but it's a fun thought.

Re: TikTok told moderators to suppress posts by “ugly” people and the poor

#188

Post by tomrod »

Not a TikTok user.

I mean, to me, this is how things just work, ethical or not. What would we expect from "featured" things? Typically people in television (shows and commercials) or otherwise "featured" fall into more attractive territory.

Is it shallow? Absolutely.

Is there anything to be done about it? I mean, maybe, but is there some monetary harm coming to TikTok users?

Re: TikTok told moderators to suppress posts by “ugly” people and the poor

#189

Post by saltedonion »

How is this any different than having an algorithm do it for you? If human moderators use these rules, it probably means the content it lets through is correlated with high engagement. What’s the material difference to an algorithm that just favors high engagement as well?
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