TikTok says it’s not the algorithm, teens are just pro-Palestine — The company denied allegations that it has been promoting pro-Palestine content in an effort to sway American opinion::In a blog post, the company denied allegations that it has been promoting pro-Palestine content in an effort to sway American opinion.
It’s almost like teens see something like a genocide being committed, think it’s wrong and say something about it.
Yeah I don’t think teens are particularly pro-Palestine or anti-Israel.
Teens throughout history have just been anti-war and anti-killing-children.
Imagine being a teenager and being against teenagers getting killed. What is this world coming to?
The sheer audacity
Obviously the teenagers are being mind-controlled
I don’t understand why so many stop doing so.
As you get older you learn that things are never black or white, and everything is grey. Global politics are complicated. The world is a giant chess board and Gaza is a pawn.
I’ve heard arguments that Israel should have essentially done nothing if they were good guys, but not retaliating sends a message to those funding Hamas that they should do it again.
Making matters worse, they are surrounded by people that constantly advocate for their eradication, they’ve already experienced such an event in their history, so to say they are more sensitive to it than other groups may be an understatement.
This was their 9/11. And back then the vast majority of Americans wanted to retaliate against Al Qaeda.
And to clarify further there is no “peace” between Israel and would be Palestine. You’re talking about 1 piece of land that three different religions have ancient ties to, with little desire to coexist on it. Chalk it up to just another failure of western powers dividing up the Middle East after WWII.
Short of some scenario where they can emigrate to Egypt or something, I don’t know what the answer is. They’re all bad options.
I am 29 and i only seem to become more radical of a pacifistic absolutists. Sure the world is grey, twisted dark sometimes even. But global politics are much more off a chaotic mess then they are complicated, and they are indeed complicated. There is no excuse to murder innocent people left and right for neither party or country.
It is naive to believe that we can just get rid of borders and become tolerant enough to let people live where they want without some issues but i much rather see us attempt that then maintain whatever we are doing right now.
I don’t think it’s healthy to be an absolutist about just about anything. The unattended consequences start to outnumber your ideals. If Israel hadn’t done after Hamas, Hamas would be empowered to keep doing it. The net effect would be more Israelis killed. Who knows, they may have been invaded by one of the several neighboring countries that would like nothing more than to destroy the country.
I think Ukraine is a better example though. I can’t fathom telling them they should try to get along with Russia. There’s the idea of being anti-war in general, and then there’s allowing a foreign aggressor to come in and take your country.
I think that you really did a good job summing up an incredibly complex issue in a fairly neutral way. No matter how smart you are as a kid/teen, there’s only so much you’re ever going to see play out, and it takes some time to get all the “data points” to start seeing the bigger picture.
As for Israel/Palestine, it’s literally one of the single most complex issues in geopolitics, and while it’s easy for someone reading articles and watching TikToks to just say “if Israel just gave them their land back and everything would be good!”, it’s ignorant of a much, much, MUCH bigger picture.
This is not saying I support any of what’s going on. I don’t think it’s particularly controversial to say that conflicts of any sort are fucking awful, but the reality is that if Israel just did pull out of the West Bank and ceded all the claims, there would be so many knock-on effects that are effectively impossible to predict, with none of them being particularly good.
Realistically, the only way you could ever hope to come to a “simple” solution that doesn’t result in a massive loss of life would be with a time machine.
Exactly. I think you’d have to go back to pre-Hitler to get any sort of major change, but then the butterfly effect comes into play heavily. What does Europe look like if Germany never escapes the grasps of their quite terrible post-WWI restrictions? Maybe all we do is flip the script and Jews are treated like the Palestinians but still in Germany? There’s no way of knowing.
I agree that it’s all awful. I don’t think there is a solution that leaves everyone happy and safe and that’s just the reality of life.
I don’t think there is a solution that leaves everyone happy and safe and that’s just the reality of life.
Sometimes a horrible outcome might be the best one. Germany and Japan were completely humiliated in WW2. Both turned out fine. Perhaps Palestine needs to properly lose this war. I mean, Palestine has lost wars several times against Israel before but they didn’t go through similar learning process that Germany and Japan did after WW2.
IDK, both can be true. Teens might be right in saying something and tiktok might be amplifying that kind of content because it helps China geopolitically. A highly upvoted post on Lemmy literally yesterday was this - https://www.cnn.com/2023/11/13/us/china-online-disinformation-invs/index.html
There’s a ton of support for the Palestinian people out there. It would strongly appear to be suppressed on commercial social media sites. I can’t say that Tiktok isn’t amplifying it, but as you poke around on open social platforms that tend to censor less, you see a lot more Pro-Palestine news and content. If you go through twitter or facebook and find specific regional bloggers, the content is out there but if doesn’t seem to pass the algorithm
The issue is not censorship, it’s disinformation and Hamas is all over it when allowed.
And conversely the Israeli government is known for its commitment to accuracy and preventing misinformation right?
I agree disinformation is an issue, but it’s an issue across the board on both sides of any issue
Maybe the U.S. upvoted that to discredit China /j
China gains nothing by Mideast conflict.
Israel - clearly does not care about things like democracy and human rights.
I can see them drawing closer to China.
Russia arguably gains via ties with Iran and decrease of U.S. influence in the region. But, as far as news, reporting, information are concerned, it’s pretty irrelevant, if there’s actual propaganda then let it be shown and debunked, and even Iranian RT right now is barely saying anything surprising to anyone who’s been watching what’s happening on the ground.
Israel has already killed 10-20x as many people as died in the Hamas attack, and they’re just getting started.
The amount of pro Palestinian support is overwhelming everywhere. Only newspapers and Reddit bots and paid shills are still spreading IDF propaganda. The rest of the world sees israel for the Nazi’s they are.
Which is encouraging. It’s been a relatively silent genocide for decades, and while it’s good to see people waking up, it’s almost too late. Kinda like climate change.
Pretty shitty genocide if the population keeps growing…
It’s grotesque to me people that keep repeating this. The accusations of genocide almost universally relate to after Oct. 7. And population growth over a 60 year stretch does not discredit incitement to genocide or actions taken to attempt genocide.
A broken tiktok is right twice a day…
As far as I can tell, neither government here has the moral high ground…and I chose the word “government” there for a reason.
It is my understanding from very far away only able to see through Lie-O-Vision that two governments that hate each other because religion are basically taking it out on civilians who just want to live their lives. It’s a tragedy that has basically nothing to do with me yet it does cast my eyes toward my own capitol city with a bit of a suspicious squint.
I’m convinced this whole tiktok is manipulating the algorithm thing is actually US propaganda.
Here’s how you actually “manipulate the algorithm.”
1: take up residency in the comments, and at the same time start a few basic accts that don’t say anything too controversial (day in the life kinda stuff, thirst traps, etc). Establish a basic presence
2: once you amass a following, you start with pretty basic stuff lots of young people agree with - housing/healthcare reform, work reform, etc
3: an important part a lot of people miss - have your own team troll your comments. Stir up shit. The goal is to get people riled up, not move the needle in any specific direction
4: throw out something big (it’s been confirmed that Russia is behind distribution on TikTok of OBL’s “Letter to America” recently). Fight on both sides, tagging in as much of the greater sphere of commenters as you can.
That’s it. That’s all anyone’s doing. Just do this over and over and you eventually drive people crazy.
They did the exact same thing in 2016, they did it in 2020 with BLM, they did it with Ukraine. It’s nothing new
US propaganda is so, so bad. Russia and China are awful, but US is no better in this regard.
A little from column A, a little from column B?
Have you seen Chinese TikTok vs America TikTok? It’s wild. The Chinese TikTok has videos of scientists and musicians and engineers all tackling major problems. It’s inspirational. The American TikTok is absolutely fucked. There’s clearly heavy algorithm manipulation. At the very least, we know China could make American TikTok not terrible and they choose not to.
The Chinese TikTok has videos of scientists and musicians and engineers all tackling major problems. It’s inspirational
My TikTok FYP is various scientists/science commenters, stand up comedians, chubby goth girls dancing, Magic The Gathering card reviews, and swinger shit.
If you engage only with things you like, you’ll only see things you like.
Stupid lizard brains are too easily tricked with tribalism and anger though. It takes a real conscious effort to curate your feed like that.
Any nuanced opinion on Gaza gets trashed because both “teams” view you as the enemy. You’re always pushed towards absolutism.
I agree with the latter, but I don’t think it takes a lot of effort to curate a TikTok FYP.
Yeah you literally just like videos and hit not interested on shit you don’t like
TikTok is banned in India so there’s way less anti-muslim sentiment on the platform.
Yes, let’s combat racism with more racism, way to go.
How is this racist? Behavior of BJP mob on Reddit was observable by how r/worldnews looked like depending on time of the day.
Oh so it wasn’t just me who felt that was feeling off in r/worldnews. The comments are horrific at times.
r/worldnews is some of the most diverse hivemind of -isms and -phobias I’ve seen concentrated in one subreddit. The flavour just depends on the time of day.
55% of Islamophobic tweets originated in India: https://apo.org.au/node/318935
Racism is when you don’t want muslim people to be oppressed and murdered? 🤔
I’m pro-human beings and opposed to killing and maiming people who are trying to enjoy their life.
They’re just trying to survive. We’ve already made it impossible for them to enjoy life
Yet we’re not seeing calls for Hamas to step down and let innocent Palestinians live in some version of peace that can never be known under Islamic jihad…
Which I find very weird. The lack of conversation surrounding the admitted goals of the leaders of the Palestinian people is something that needs to be part of any conversation.
It’s a false dichotomy to condition ceasing the extermination of a whole innocent population to protests towards a terrorist organization. Israel does not need to bomb several hospitals to stop Hamas. There are other ways to go about stopping terrorists.
Maybe you don’t see many calls at Hamas because people are catching up with how wholesale persecution and extermination of people is often justified by pointing to a few malicious individuals that are part of that population.
Israel does not need to bomb several hospitals to stop Hamas. There are other ways to go about stopping terrorists.
How do you know this? Are you an expert in counter-terrorism or warfare?
I am not stupid and I’m capable of empathy. Really, do you need a reason to understand that bombing hospitals full of innocent civilians is a horrible thing?
I also know enough recent history to have some inkling that widespread bombing might not be that effective at stopping a terrorist movement. Say, like US wars against Afghanistan and Iraq.
Really, do you need a reason to understand that bombing hospitals full of innocent civilians is a horrible thing?
I don’t understand how being a horrible thing relates to this discussion. Things can be horrible and necessary at the same time. Things might even be horrible and the best course of action at the same time.
Consistently groups that do horrible, entirely excessive atrocities insist that they are necessary and vital. It does not mean that they are, and it’s definitely something you should not assume blindly, or at all.
There needs a lot more than “might” to even begin to justify it. Then again, might alone is often used to get away with it.
There’s no extermination. Quit getting your talking points from Tiktok and Twitter.
Do you have anything but dismissive snark or are you going to pretend continuous bombing of civilian buildings is some sort of surgical targeted action.
There’s a pretty big difference between stupid declarations about things that simply aren’t true, and trying to start a conversation. I just assumed with an axiom like that there was no conversation to be had.
Clearly there’s no conversation to be had, but because you want to pretend whatever you don’t like to hear is false and stupid, without even trying to offer any reason for it.
They can fuck off to any other 20 Arab/Muslim countries. How many other Jewish countries are there?
Oh yeah, somebody goes to you and tells you to move to diffent country or they’ll drop a bomb on you and your family, I’m sure you’ll happy to comply. Whatever religion and ethnicity you are, I’m sure you can just go anywhere vaguely similar and know everyone on a first-name basis.
This is neither a matter of handing the whole region exclusively to palestinians or to israelis. Justifying it because “there are other arab/muslim countries” is such a frankly childish way to justify a conflict as serious as this. Needing to say this is almost ridiculous, but a region doesn’t need to be populated by only a single kind of people.
Because they’re not going to do that. You can’t call them terrorists and expect logical reasonable action or reaction.
The Palestinian people by in large did not vote Hamas in, over 50% of the people in Gaza were not alive during the last election.
Excuse the tangent but you made me look it up. >50% of Americans weren’t eligible to vote in 2000 but apparently I need to answer for the Iraq War for the rest of my friggin’ life like that was my personal decision.
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Hamas is a jihadist organization though…
If they don’t represent the majority maybe they should hold elections and let a party that represents the majority take the lead?
Sure, and Israel is a Zionist nation what’s your point.
Yes the terrorist organization is going to relinquish control… Yeah.
I don’t see why this matters at all when Hamas wont allow elections and is an authoritarian government.
That’s quite literally the point.
It doesn’t matter that they didn’t vote for Hamas because it was not possible and will never be possible. Why is that the point?
To me, this seems exactly like the other guys point.
Are you paying attention to the conversation or a single comment you’ve chosen to take issue with?
Ah, there’s the answer, you aren’t paying attention.
Theres only 2 other comments in this thread.
Because they’re not going to do that. You can’t call them terrorists and expect logical reasonable action or reaction.
So we shouldn’t call them terrorists and hope they stop killing people? I’m sorry that doesn’t make any sense. Israel isn’t about to stop their war on Hamas, yet it doesn’t stop the world criticising them.
The Palestinian people by and large did not vote Hamas in, over 50% of the people in Gaza were not alive during the last election.
While technically true, almost 70% of Gazans support armed attacks on Israeli civilians.](https://pcpsr.org/sites/default/files/Poll 89 English Full Text September 2023.pdf) I know it doesn’t fit the oppressor/oppressed narrative, but the vast majority of people in Gaza support what Hamas is doing. If elections were held today, according to that same poll, they would vote Hamas back in.
It doesn’t make sense no, it’s also not at all what I said but neat projection.
That’s an opinion poll for a population that generally do not answer and those that do answer have to think about how that might get out and what extremists might do about that.
Ed sample population sub 2000… Jesus dude did you vet this at all lol.
Everyone’s pro-palestine. They’re just fucking people caught in the middle of some retarded bullshit. Every time someone gets killed, that entire family is probably radicalized, and they’re right to be.
Israel has unrelentingly taken the worst possible approach to the problem, having learned nothing from their own experience. They’ve made the worst possible mess of it, which is no surprise considering it was made by a bunch of people trying to make the Bible come true like dipshits.
IMO there are big risks consuming news & opinion from any single source.
Whether it’s the CCP manipulating the TikTok algorithm, Russia buying ad space on Facebook, or American conglomerates pushing narratives on western mainstream media, there will be implicit biases everywhere.
The only real answer is to get news from multiple sources with diverging perspectives, try to find where facts overlap, challenge your own implicit biases, and form a perspective in line w/ your values.
Seeing America blame TikTok for pushing propaganda is the pot calling the kettle black – and honestly more of a distraction than anything else.
The real important issue is that people are dying, and the existing power structures are doing jack shit to stop it.
Maybe it’s not so much they’re “pro-Palestine” but anti-genocide.
I think you’d be surprised how many people are pro-Palestinian liberation struggle. And for a good reason. Sometimes the liberation fight may result in war crimes which we are all against, but that doesn’t discredit the liberation struggle itself. If anything, maybe the colonisers should stop oppressing and mass murdering the people if they don’t want them to react so violently.
I wouldn’t trust TikTok
no one with a functioning brain does. at the corporate or content level.
Which is why so many americans are obsessed with it, since the overwhelming bulk of americans are fucking idiots.
Thanks A_Random_Idiot
I may be a random idiot, but I dont have tiktok on my phone, or social media accounts.
Which makes me a cut above the rest.
when the majority content type dominates the platform
surprise
pikachualgorithmI don’t think an algorithm is responsible for the fact that most sane people are generally against genocide. People being pro-Palestine in this specific situation is a humanitarian response and should not be causing any amount of concern because it is the morally correct position here.
HOWEVER, the fact that we just witnessed the fucking letter to america go viral on tiktok, wherein a soul crushing amount of people publicly stated they agree with a fucking jihadist manifesto, is cause for a massive amount of concern. Tiktok definitely needs to face consequences for letting that happen. We also can’t excuse the audience for that type of behaviour. Whether it came from a deliberate propaganda campaign, or a sketchy algorithm, or just mass stupidity, audience members need to be better. If you read the letter to america and you think bin laden was right, you’re a moron, and you’re contributing to the problem.
I wholeheartedly agree with you. However, I can tell you from my experience as an antitheist that TikTok is heavily PRO-religion. It is ABUNDANTLY CLEAR that much of the problems in the world stem from religiosity, and this long-standing war between Israel and Palestine is the best example of this.
However, TikTok works tirelessly to suppress ANY criticism of theism of any kind. Thus, those jihadists you mention are allowed to promote their extremist ideology, yet if someone like me analyzes and critiques their baseless claims while using logic, reason, fact-based evidence, and the scientific method, I get cited for bullying and hate speech. This is one of the biggest problems facing humanity today…
I think you should pay less attention to mainstream media which propped that issue up disproportionately. It wasn’t as big of a deal as many made it out to be.
But regardless of that, I don’t think one should be concerned about opinions of people and I certainly don’t think it is an issue at all if young people hate the US. It has done some of the most fucked up things in the world since the start of the last century to say the least. This may be expressed in stupid ways like sympathising for Bin Laden, but the broader sentiment of hate towards the US isn’t wrong.
TikToc is a site that people use to share information, and at the end of the day, this is their main complaint. Their golden idea is for one or two major corporations to control the message and decide who to support.
The entire point of an app like TikTok is to stir stories and headlines so they get more clicks. Everything is for the algorithm.
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It might be a surprise to Americans that many people think that Israelis are evil bastards.
It might be a surprise to non-Americans how many of us think so, too, despite the narratives that Zionist organizations like AIPAC and ADL spend a lot of money to push.
