The main reason behind the United States’ push to ban social media application TikTok is due to Israel’s image rather than fears of Chinese infiltrations, congressional insiders have revealed.
At the Munich Security Conference, US Senator Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the intelligence committee, said he wished to reveal what he called the “real story” behind the recent legislations to restrict the Chinese-owned application.
“So we had a bipartisan consensus,” Gallagher said. “We had the executive branch, but the bill was still dead until October 7th. And people started to see a bunch of antisemitic content on the platform and our bill had legs again.”
A memo produced by the State Department for its Near East Affairs diplomats, which Klippenstein obtained, describes how Israel’s deputy director general for public diplomacy at the foreign ministry, Emmanuel Nahshon, blamed the youth’s opposition to the war on Gaza on TikTok’s algorithm.
“Some wonder why there was such overwhelming support for us to shut down potentially TikTok or other entities of that nature,” he said in May. “If you look at the postings on TikTok and the number of mentions of Palestinians, relative to other social media sites - it’s overwhelmingly so among TikTok broadcasts.”
Nikki Haley, another former Republican presidential candidate who last year infamously signed an Israeli bomb meant for Gaza with “finish them”, said she believed that simply watching videos on TikTok would make a user antisemitic.
The word “antisemitic” is being misused in a disgusting way here. The victims of the Israeli genocide are also a Semitic people.
Also a fair critic of Israeli government action isn’t antisemitic just like a fair critic of Iranian governments isn’t islamophobia.
While there is an antisemitic critic of Israel, raising concerns regarding human rights isn’t antisemitic nor supporting the hamas.
There are also antisemitic supporters of Israel. The Christian Nationalists want somewhere to banish the US’s Jewish population to.
Thank you! I’ve been saying this since forever, and all I ever got was (in a shorter form) “Antisemite doesn’t include those people anymore, it’s only for the jewish people”.
Like hell it is! Israel is the biggest antisemite nation of them all.
There is no such thing as a semitic people.
It’s a language family. How the fuck did you manage to think of biology.
Race and people are different things though.
There’s no such thing as any cleanly delineated race or ethnicity, save for maybe some people who’ve been isolated on an island for a thousand years. But it is a natural response to the weaponized term “antisemitism” being used against defenders of Palestinians, to point out that both groups are described as “semitic”.
By that logic, there’s no such thing as “golden retriever” and “cocker spaniel” either, since both are canis familiaris.
Words mean things. Use them properly.
Yeah, no shit? We all saw that, when the chants for bans started coming after the anti-genocide protests…
The implication here seems to be that Chinese state interests are promoting content related to Palestinian liberation. Is there actual evidence for this or is it just conjecture? Is it even true that there is more Palestinian content on TikTok than other platforms? Has anyone measured this?
I don’t really trust anyone involved in this fight to speak truthfully.
My guess was that it wasn’t boosting Palestinian content but wasn’t suppressing it like a lot of other American platforms and news outlets tended to do.
I use tiktok quite a bit and anecdotally tiktok definitely promoted Palestinian content. Especially as a lot of it was quite vile and tiktok censor is super sensitive for example Ukraine content never became as big even when it’s a much bigger geopolitical issue. Seeing more Gaza watermelons than Ukraine flags while living in Eastern Europe was such a proof for me thag tiktok is manipulating this.
I feel like we shouldn’t accept or trust any closed source algorithm that can’t be audited. Period. It’s all manipulation because why wouldn’t it be? Who on earth could resist such power? Especially when there’s basically zero risks. Literally no one ever got in trouble for it. Ever.
I think that has more to do with what’s popular. When the Ukraine war first started TikTok had a ton of pro Ukraine content.
I agree with you regarding platforms that lack transparency. However a lot of these algorithms are so complex that it’s not clear to me how easily they can be manipulated. I’d like to see actual evidence of this before jumping to conclusions, especially since the people making these claims are very untrustworthy.
I’m a software developer and that’s really not true. Theres an entire industry based on algorithm manipulation by people who never see the actual algorithm code - its called SEO.
Even the most complex algorithm that was sent from the future by aliens would be possible to manipulate given local control.
I don’t think SEO is comparable to these content recommendation algorithms. Maybe it is easy and I’m wrong but everyone seems to just be speculating wildly at this point and it doesn’t seem too useful. How can we get to the bottom of what’s really happening in a way that can be verified with evidence?
Nah man I run a couple of seo’d technical websites that are getting thousands of views every day mostly through SEO. Its a bit more simple today cause Google is just giving up as all you need domain authority, keywords, backlinks and good content to do well but without those you will never get front page, period.
There are also incredible amount of SEO utilities that drive content creation like keyword difficulty and trend following so it is very much the same algorithm manipulation but through prediction and reverse engineering.
I’d love for SEO to not be real and just make stuff but reality is SEO and even technical SEO (like semantic html) is required for any form of success in publishing content.
Huh? I never said SEO isn’t real it’s just a totally different process from the one we’re discussing.
In your OP you said that “it’s unclear how
<complex>algorithms could be manipulated” and I’ve pointed out that we’re literally doing that right now with one of the most complex algorithms ever made without having any clue of the source code basically.If the owner of the algorithm wants to manipulate it then it’s absolute piece of cake of a job even if it’s a million times more complex than Googles ranking or the current tiktoks algo. The complexity of the algorithm in no way prevents manipulation if you own the source.
… The people that made the algorithms can’t make changes to the algorithm?
However a lot of these algorithms are so complex that it’s not clear to me how easily they can be manipulated.
… Really? That’s funny. It’s not clear to us because we aren’t professionals. It’s one thing to question if they are, but they absolutely can. That has been proven many times over
It really doesn’t matter if the Chinese were pushing more Palestine content. News is news. Just like MAGAts want to live in an echo chamber on Faux News, others want to have a more liberal news source.
There are suggestions that that the algorithm is imbalanced on the subject, though ‘why’ it is is pure conjecture.
https://cybersecurityfordemocracy.org/getting-to-know-the-tiktok-research-api
Can you explain a bit more what you mean by this? This article in my understanding of it does not suggest the algorithm is favoring pro-Palestinian narratives. If anything, the extreme imbalance of post count between the two sides suggests a preexisting pro-Palestinian viewpoint among the userbase rather than one that was artificially boosted.
Combining posting activity and views per posts yields us with this perspective of total views. Different rates of amplification mean that the already big differences in posting activity are magnified. So this is what happened. We can easily see how we get to TikTok, as an environment, having much more Pro-Palestinian content than Pro-Israel content. We can also see that for much of October 2023, General content was by far the most dominant. But these data alone cannot tell us why there were such meaningful differences in views per post. There is at least one thing we can rule out, however. This effect doesn’t appear to be tied to user engagement.
Well when they say user engagement they seem to be talking about users taking actions to engage with content. But they say elsewhere that the TikTok algorithm doesn’t seem to respond to these actions in general, so it’s unsurprising that this is not the cause. Instead, it seems to optimize for viewing time which doesn’t seem to be part of the available data here, unfortunately.
However, if we start with a very pro-Palestinian user-base (as suggested by the initial post count) then it’s not surprising that these users would be more inclined to watch content that shares their political views and therefore the algorithm would boost these more popular videos to more people. So these numbers really don’t show anything unusual that I can identify.
Maybe that’s all you were saying initially but I was more wondering whether there is evidence that TikTok is boosting certain content above and beyond what is of interest to its users in an attempt to influence them. Given the lack of key data, this analysis cannot directly answer this question, but the patterns here strike me as fairly organic looking.
It was obvious to everyone and their cat.
The internet is a massive US PSYOP for which it’s going to fight with all its might to not lose control over.
Shocking no one but the most dense apologists of the move.
Its probably one of the factors, but its not like that was the sole reason.
trump already tried that in his first term, way before the gaza genocide. The goal is to force them to bend the knee and become a right wing propaganda machine. Suppressing info on israeli warcrimes is just an added bonus
Most big bills have multiple factions profiting from it. But what pushed the TikTok ban over the bipartisan bill was definitely their stance of (non) censorship on Palestine.
What was also telling is that right after Trumps election TikTok was allowed to stay but it started banning the phrase “free Palestine”
Israeli interests control US policy. See also: grass is green.
Further reading: puppet state
Which state is the puppet? Because it seems like it’s America at this point.
America, a wholly owned subsidiary of Israel, Inc. since 1947
Both.
“We had a bipartisan consensus that this needed to be done, but there wasn’t enough enthusiasm until Israel was threatened”
Not going to say I told you so but…ah fuck it I told you so.
Makes perfect sense. Unfortunately.
Why not both?
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Yeah, I’m sure all the other countries that banned it also banned it for the same reason. Absolutely nothing to do with the Chinese commies trying to take over the world. /s
I’ll believe it wasn’t being “banned” because of China when Felon Musk removes his Tesla Swatstikar giga factory out of China. I have an easier time seeing this as a greed driven distraction run by the multi billion dollar disinformation campaign China has been putting on for decades.
Though it wouldn’t surprise me if Palestine was an afterthought considering Israel is an ally of the US considering we were one of, if not, the first to recognize it.
AOC made a video revealing some of the backroom talks they had during floor discussions. It’s 100% Palestine driven. The Chinese claims have zero proof and are just conjecture. Like the article says it wasn’t until the pro Palestine rhetoric starting increasing around October/November that this bill really started getting steam.
