631–640 of 1001 posts
The only information outlet where we can have a reasonable expectation of freedom is the web itself, a good old websites on your own domain. Could be a txt file if you want to keep it simple ;)
Allow me to offer some words of wisdom. If you help building weapons to be used against $currently_designated_bad_people, you can rest assured that given enough time, those weapons will be used against you. I am watching all this with a mild sense of bemusement.
A NYT columnist Jamelle Bouie suggested (in jest) that the next Democrat administration send armed IRS agents to gated communities in Florida, to "investigate tax fraud". But this is exactly why all citizens should be concerned about the infringement of rights happening in Minnesota. If it is allowed without prosecution, you are next.
This whole thing is such a shit show. The US government right now looks like a total ass of all asses on the world stage, but this TikTok business of the US demanding our country get to take over a social network preceeds this era of major fuckery by a good tick. And is just so stupid, so not what governments should do. Even if we hadn't had Trump just hand it over to his preferred "buyers" the Ellison's, it's just a grade a fuckup, absolute bedlam to do this, completely delegitmizes the US.
TikTok v. Garland and the First Amendment Anticanon paper by Evelyn Douek just came out, talking to what a first class First Amendment fuck up the unanimous Supreme Court decision was. Excellent read. Just could not have done a worst job, unbelievable nonsense that let this madness just persist & amplify. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6118706
A few weeks ago, I reported a compilation video of ICE officers beating people. The description included the phrase "The deportations will continue :)". I reported it for promoting violence, but TikTok found no violation of its guidelines. It probably didn't help that the video was posted by the official White House TikTok account..
Anecdotal: uploading a video of original songs with political/protest lyrics will have random background noises added to the audio track, making the songs audio seem amateurish. Edit: here’s a link to an example https://bsky.app/profile/seaniebyrne.bsky.social/post/3mby7j...
Reminds me of how someone lately was going crazy about weird video-artifacts on Youtube. It was fixed (for his videos) after contacting somebody on the technical side of Youtube, but there was never an explanation AFAIK of what actually went wrong, so I was left pondering if that could be a result of some more ambitious ML-experiments in attempt to improve compression rates or something, but never found out conclusively.
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How so? My experience in China was that the police were a bit on the bureaucratic side but otherwise far less obtrusive than in the US. They divide their police forces into civil police and armed police. The civil police tend to be bored looking middle aged guys lounging around in guard booths at museums. They don't have weapons. The only armed police I saw stood at attention at the airport except when they had a cha…
Isn't it the case that Chinese police don't need to be as visible because everyone fears what they can do, and doesn't commit crimes? A bit like how Iran has to send in military force to kill 50k protestors, but the UK can just spread a few messages that people will be arrested, and then they don't protest.
As near as I can tell, there are essentially 2 kinds of laws; laws that people agree with and laws that they don't.
For the second type, governments often have trouble enforcing them consistently so they often try to compensate by making the punishments harsher (eg mandatory minimum sentencing). As near as I can tell, that tends to fail miserably.
Our government here has been shooting people in the streets and that hasn't stopped protesters from pouring out.
When you see a bunch of people peacefully following laws the most likely explanation is that they just think those laws are reasonable.
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It isn't so much as the rest of the world having easy access. It is what the Chinese want the rest of the world to see. If you are in a South American country using a residential IP in new incognito session, doom scroll, after the initial disturbing content, you will start to notice videos of the United States government physically attacking people born in the country of the residential IP address. The TikTok algorit…
>It isn't so much as the rest of the world having easy access. It is what the Chinese want the rest of the world to see. If your prosperity depends on using technocracy to deny 1.3 billion people the ability to communicate and share ideas with your citizens, a few things are true: 1) You have created a digital iron curtain 2) You are doomed because information wants to be free 3) If you succeed the result will be war…
I think some people live in movies where the bad guy always loses. Reality doesn't work this way. Bad situations where information is denied from people can last lifetimes.
With modern technology we may be creating systems that end up imprisoning our minds for generations with no escape because you'll be killed the moment your technological monitor realizes you're going to fight back.
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It isn't so much as the rest of the world having easy access. It is what the Chinese want the rest of the world to see. If you are in a South American country using a residential IP in new incognito session, doom scroll, after the initial disturbing content, you will start to notice videos of the United States government physically attacking people born in the country of the residential IP address. The TikTok algorit…
> Content about Tiananmen Square and Tibet gets filtered out. Content about the United States government rolling through protesters in armored vehicles, killing people in Venezuela with bombs, and threatening Greenland, straight to top of feed. There's also the degree of relevance. Tiananmen was over a quarter of a century ago. The USA is killing protestors, bombing Venezuela, threatening Greenland now.
https://www.rfa.org/english/uyghur/2024/11/05/uyghur-tiktok-...
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I've never in my life used TikTok. Can you please point to a specific article, news source, journal, any piece of information that is legal in the United States that I don't have easy access to so I can see what I'm missing? Whataboutism. You presumably know full well what the parent was describing, but if not: TikTok presents users with feeds of videos. For many users, this is their primary news source. An American…
> For many users, this is their primary news source. That's their problem. You can't make blanket claims saying Americans now don't have easy access to information when there are other sources, ranging from the NYT to the Intercept, to anything you want to read being written and translated right on your computer from the EU or Japan or anywhere else you want to read. > An American oligarch and party loyalist now has…
The post you were replying to stated:
> hiding information from the US public
They didn't say "Americans now don't have easy access to information" (your words). They said this sort of manipulation would be to hide information from the American public.
Many people in the American public only see news on TikTok. If information is suppressed within TikTok, it is hidden to them.
If TikTok stops showing content, can they find it some other way? Yes, if they know to look. It's not blocked or destroyed, but it's hidden.
Is that a problem? Yes. TikTok's dominance was and is a problem in and of itself. But that isn't an excuse to abuse its dominance for propaganda purposes.
As X has shown, these platforms are crucial to the information ecosystem, and their selective curation can warp the views of an entire population.