this post was submitted on 18 Mar 2024
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For starters, TikTok algorithms are made to downweight any topics relating to subjects censored in China. HERE is a link to a study on the subject from Rutger's University and nonprofit NCRI. Since NCRI also directly advises Congress, it's a big part of the information available to legislators making this decision to force TikTok's sale.
Like this video?: https://www.tiktok.com/@cancelthisclothingco/video/7345905852164918570
I'm not going to click that, but idk probably. That's the point, downweighing can't be easily observed without a large dataset.
It's a video covering all sorts of forbidden topics in China and tagged with hashtags like #uyghur and #tiananmensquare but the video showed up on people's "for you" page and engagement/views was in line with most of his other videos. On the other hand, his videos where he brings up other topics like the CIA get outright censored. He uploaded a video about Palestine and tagged one with tags like #freepalestine and then uploaded the same video again without those hashtags and the one with the hashtags has <70k views versus the >930k views of the video without the hashtags.
So you're big "Gotcha" moment was to illustrate you didn't understand the concepts after they were explained to you. That science is wrong because you found a video with views on it?
That "sCiENcE" being:
So they work off the assumption that tiktok and instagram would have similar amounts of usage for the same hashtags. Fucking why? Did they not think different platforms would have different audiences?
Meanwhile I posted a clear example that demonstrates that not only do they not suppress content critical of China, they actually suppress content of certain sensitive topics for the US. You'd know that if you clicked the link, but you can't even be bothered to read your own link, so I guess my expectations of you were too high.
That difference amounts to nothing past hundreds of millions of users, much less constrained to US Based statistics. Basically the demographics would average out at that sample size.
People don't go to tiktok for the same reasons as instagram. It's not just a function of number of people. There are a lot of people on facebook but it's got a reputation as boomerville for a reason.