There was a protest and the state media was reporting on it. When the reporter said, "our camera broke down and we can only show black and white pictures", my father IMMEDIATELY jumped up and angrily said, "that's bs, you don't want to show how they [the protesting students] got beaten up [by the police]!"
This was an interesting life lesson. So yeah, sure, technical difficulties..
The TikTok algorithm in South America. 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.
The most brutally honest propaganda is always the most effective propaganda.
When you're in an abusive relationship they say intentions don't matter, only impact does. Because victims often focus on the intentions of their abuser and stay in the cycle of abuse.
Let me repeat it, intentions don't matter, only impact does.
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, the only thing left when communication breaks down
Except for China, where TikTok is nothing like the TikTok for the rest of the world
The point is brainwashing.
Commentators: What are we, some kind of Asians?
The US has traditionally had at least some counterweight to the state, in the form of a free press, free speech, opposition parties, checks and balances in branches of government, and an armed populace. The effectiveness of these measures has varied over time but there has never been a point when any single institution had control over the United States to the point that the CPC has control over mainland China.
People are concerned that the US is taking an authoritarian bent under Trump, and many of the tactics being used would lead to a state far more similar to the PRC than the historical US.
Oceania has always gotten tech tips from Eastasia.
Authoritarianism has been starting to become normalized because China and Russia are increasingly able to mess with our society in the same way our leaders always messed with theirs.
An interesting thought I read a couple days ago: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/24/opinion/trump-carney-chin...:
> Finally, and most controversially, I suspect the same “if not America, then China” logic applies to political ordering as well. The United States under Trumpian conditions has allowed populism to come to power, bringing chaos and authoritarian behavior in its train. Recoil from that by all means — but recognize that it happened through democratic mechanisms, under freewheeling political conditions.
> Meanwhile, the modes through which Europe and Canada have sought to suppress populism involve harsh restrictions on speech, elite collusion and other expression of managerial illiberalism. And what is China’s dictatorship if not managerial illiberalism in full flower? When European elites talk about China as a potentially more stable partner than the whipsawing United States, when they talk admiringly about its environmental goals and technocratic capacity, they aren’t defending a liberal alternative to Trumpian populism. They are letting the magnet of Chinese power draw them away from their own democratic traditions.
As a person whose country is being threatened by China, I support the US.
If China were as developed as the US, a lot of China’s threats would have been reality.
It would be efficient for China to have Russia undermine the US while Russia also weakens itself.
China has made huge inroads in Africa, which gives it access to essential metals and other raw materials, and also puts it in a strong position diplomatically.
Taiwan and where else?
But I have a feeling your position is basically "Except for all the cases where they're threatening their neighbors, they're not threatening their neighbors at all."
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna245797
Tibet and Xinjiang already conquered and we have forgotten about them.
I suppose you could also make the argument that they already did invade Tibet and Hong Kong, though that's splitting hairs.
It used to be marketed as that by "China evil" people. Western politicians have always seen this as an arms race. They claim infinite brutal censorship and suppression in China in order to claim that not having it here is a strategic disadvantage. Meanwhile, China's "social credit" is just like a US credit score, which in most countries is an illegal thing to do.
This is completely bipartisan, both US parties take turns shitting on their two greatest enemies: the Bill of Rights and (almost completely defeated at this point) antitrust law. Those are painted as China's advantages: that they don't have to respect anyone's rights and that their government directly runs companies. 1) Neither of those things are true, and 2) they just ignore that China manufactures things and invests in infrastructure (which US politicians as individuals have no idea how to do because they are lawyers and marketers), and pretend that everything can be reduced to gamified finance and propaganda tricks.
It's the "missile gap" again. The US pretended and marketed that Russia had an enormous amount of nuclear weapons in order to fool us into allowing US politicians to dedicate the economy to producing an enormous amount of nuclear weapons.
The result, the child of the Oracle guy owns half the media, and uses it for explicitly political purposes that align with the administration (whichever it may be.)
TikTok is known for tipping the scales on political keywords everywhere. In the past they haven’t outright censored because that’s too obvious, but uploading videos on the wrong side (according to TikTok, of course) of a political topic will result in very few views.
I wouldn’t be surprised if as part of the transition they’re struggling with the previous methods of simply burying topics, so the obvious ban was their intermediate step.
The comments claiming this is specific to the US are simply wrong. TikTok has always done this everywhere.
All social media does this. Even HN (through its users flagging articles). This article will be flagged by users and removed from the front page very soon, just as a similar one[1] was already.
They got the same version of the app that people in China got. I haven't seen any formal studies but my impression, at the time, was that Chinese people were far better informed about the US than Americans were about China.
(reminded of ex-tech influencer Naomi Wu, who basically went dark with a post along the lines of "the police have told me to stop posting")
We all know that advertising and marketing is manipulation, yet even the most contrarian among us are still influenced it.
What are the opinions of illegal immigration over there? How do they police it? (If at all).
Does this look like normal government activity? Or are they appalled at the lack of “freedoms” in America?
I am truly naive on their culture or politics around this and how they would use it to show the US as boogeymen government and how their government is better. Is it a grass isn’t always greener type thing for them or is it a way to actually think we’re evil and should be stopped.
As well as racial profiling. There's not that much immigration to China in the first place, legal or otherwise.
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 changing of the guard ceremony.
As near as I can tell, China only allows immigration if they think that will benefit China. They've been pushing hard on academic scholarships and, in recent years, they've managed to shift net visits from the US to China.
They also seem to be pushing really hard on increasing the number of visiting African scholars. That's likely straight out of the US playbook; they see China as a rising power and want to make sure that their emerging leaders were educated in China and have ties to China.
Of course not, but other stuff is.
Interestingly, my understanding is government pressure forces Douyin to be more "positive" and "encouraging" than Tiktok (i.e. outrage is an easy way drive engagement with obvious negative externalities, and that path is blocked).
"The forced US hosted tik-tok sale is all about hiding information from the US public that most people in the rest of the world have easy access to."
In the most point-missing, technical kind of way.
I don't think the original intent of the tiktok sale was about censorship as much as it was about the chinese not allowing american platforms in china. Doesn't change that they're trying to use it to its 'fullest'.
Without antitrust regulation, TikTok would have been sold to Meta, and that would be it. We'd have an even worse monopoly (which is not a good thing), but at least we wouldn't have this. With such regulations present, the US government both forced a sale and disallowed a sale to anybody who they didn't like, basically forcing TikTok to choose a government-approved partner. What did that partner do to become government approved? We'll never know.
Antitrust in the US (and GDPR in Europe) give regulators wide latitude over who to prosecute and for what. This makes it much easier to do under-the-table deals to achieve objectives that you can't or don't want to achieve by regulation, like restricting free speech.
Subjecting companies to such regulation was ok when it was about transporting cattle or selling bricks, but giving governments the ability to regulate companies that have a wide impact on speech, even if the regulations don't seem to have anything to do with speech, is just asking for trouble.
I think you might have forgotten recent moves from Meta about removal of moderation, relaxing rules on hate speech, settling lawsuits with Trump and similar moves that imply they wouldn't really fight hard against what this administration wants.
If you haven't noticed a sweeping attack on free speech in US media, then I just don't think you're paying attention, and playing it off as if it's "just" Tiktok is at best disingenuous.
Alternate explanation: they are paying intense attention... to the palms that are pressed desperately against their eye sockets as they attempt to See No Evil.
Zhang Youxia Arrested After Failed Coup; Gunfight Allegedly Occurred at Jingxi Hotel in Western Beijing (https://www.peoplenewstoday.com/news/en/2026/01/25/1130776.h...)
The spectator is allegedly a reliable media source, I am not personally familiar.
(by contrast, while the Daily Mail is absolutely terrible at opinion and domestic news, they seem to have some capacity left for doing overseas reporting that isn't just wire service, so if they report on overseas events you can be reasonably sure that something like that happened)
(I really don’t know, but it does seem that this info at least is coming from multiple places?)
Gordon Chang has been making this prediction for almost a quarter century. Will it happen before or after the Mayan calendar predicts the end of the world??
both are bad, I liked when tiktok was supposed to be just "banned". it's always been a tool for repressive governments
[1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-11-28/tiktok-huawei-surveil...
No, at least during the Biden administration when the law was passed, it wasn't.
This shit is a lot more complicated that a hot take based on today's news.
Note that there have been multiple instances over the past two years of high level ex/current officials repeating the same general point.
The information is everywhere. Visit any news site, open any general social media feed, turn on any TV. We’re discussing it right now in the front page of HN!
Everyone in the US has easy access to the same information. Acting like only the rest of the world has easy access to this information is ridiculous.
I’m saying it’s silly hyperbole to make the leap to implying that only people in other countries have easy access to information.
These absurd claims always turn into a game of motte and bailey when they’re called out, with retreats to safer claims. I’m talking about the original claim, that “people in other countries” have easy access to this information which we, in the US, see everywhere all the time right now (except TikTok apparently).
For those who know to look for it, sure.
For those who do not already know it, discovery is increasingly challenged by the deliberately obscurant curators of the information space, who are oddly tightly and uniformly aligned with special interest groups openly declaring their intent to hide that information and punish dissemination thereof.
Censorship of TikTok is inevitable given the owners, and it will inevitably lead to a new news bubble.
TikTok users are also known for being experts at evading filters and censors. Remember the rising popularity of “unalived” when talk of suicide was filtered out on the platform?
I’m not saying this ICE censorship is good, because it’s not! I’m saying it’s ridiculous to claim that only people in other countries have easy access to information.
I hope not because it’s bad and that’s really all that matters in this conversation. And nitpicking whether or not there are other avenues for information is completely besides the point. I don’t even really understand what point you’re trying to make. If you think this is bad, then say it’s bad and we shouldn’t be ok with it. Saying “I’m not saying it’s good” then muddying the waters reads like you’re trying to defend the action.
That was literally the argument I was responding to and talking about.
Given the downvotes and angry responses I think a lot of people misinterpreted it as something else. I should learn to avoid comment sections about politics.
If you’re looking for feedback, “I’m not saying…” without saying what you are saying generally comes off as obfuscating or at best wishy washy.
When it comes to the _younger generation_, I don't think it's an over-estimation; they don't read news sites at all.
It is literally on the front page of news papers....
Also, you can see it on Instagram, X, etc.
Even a cursory search on TikTok reveals anti-ICE content...
https://www.npr.org/2024/03/26/1240737627/meta-limit-politic...
https://www.reddit.com/r/OptimistsUnite/comments/1i9zf5u/rco...
This is why the administration has gone out of its way to try to get Kimmel and Colbert off the air, why it has commandeered CBS and tried to kill 60 minutes pieces critical of the administration, why it violated the law in order to keep TikTok (already fervently pro-Trump) up and running, and why allies of the administration have been put in charge of TikTok after the transition. It's why Bezos is slowly strangling the Washington Post, why Patrick Soon-Shiong is doing the same to the LA Times, and why the administration is putting their thumb on the scale for Paramount, rather than Netflix, to buy Warner Brothers Discovery (which owns CNN). It's why Musk bought Twitter. It's why they blatantly lie in their press conferences and statements to the media about how the ICE killings happened.
If you walked into a Turning-Point USA meeting in a high school, do you think the kids attending that meeting could accurately tell you what ICE has been doing? I don't.
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.
That said, I was thinking more about people all of us building tools that got us into the situation we are in now.
Then they came for the Socialists And I did not speak out Because I was not a Socialist
Then they came for the trade unionists And I did not speak out Because I was not a trade unionist
Then they came for the Jews And I did not speak out Because I was not a Jew
Then they came for me And there was no one left To speak out for me
In any case it’s also historically illiterate, the IRS has long been used as a political weapon, infamously against “Tea Party” activists.
That isn't the issue being discussed. This is illustrating that armed, masked goons as a political weapon is a pandora's box that will get turned against everyone, regardless of status. Some people just don't care about the violence in Minnesota because it isn't happening to them.
Obama even gave Tom Homan a medal for his work.
That and the fact Biden let 8 million illegal migrants into the country.
And ICE says they only go after illegals.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRS_targeting_controversy
> Conservatives claimed that they were specifically targeted by the IRS, but an exhaustive report released by the Treasury Department's Inspector General in 2017 found that from 2004 to 2013, the IRS used both conservative and liberal keywords to choose targets for further scrutiny.
Similarly, you can think it would be good to catch tax fraud, but think that it should be handled without executing folks.
that claim was disproved by the way
but, it is famously how the feds managed to get Al Capone
This was spun as "targeting conservatives".
If it helps, I appreciate going meta after me, but there is not much to dissect here. I stand by my bemused. You may think it is some soft of grand struggle and kudos for you for finding something to believe in, but don't project onto others.
On the matter of social media "moderation," this is the phase you're actually in, right now.
Seems unlikely.
If the implication is that the tools won't exist if I don't build them, that's beyond a pipe dream. We'll never get a globe of 8 billion people to agree unanimously on anything. Let alone agreeing not to build something that gives them power over their adversaries.
As simple as the project was, the employee had the presence of mind to ask his seniors some thoughtful questions of what makes sense, what is too intrusive, what is acceptable. He felt uncomfortable and that was with something that corps build on a daily basis.
Now.. not everyone wakes up thinking they are building database intended to enslave humanity as a whole, but I would like to think that one person simply questioning it can make a difference.
[Edit]: I shouldn't have made the "touch grass" comment. Sorry.
Sloppy analogy time: Imagine you came in and said your vacuum cleaner broke and someone said "Yeah, that brand loses suction after six months, it's obnoxious." They're telling you it's normal for that type of vacuum, but they're not calling you wrong, they're trying to agree with you. If your problem is different, go ahead and correct them, but they're not denying your lived experience!
(And don't say they should have inferred you knew about that behavior and known you meant this was different. That's too close to expecting someone to read your mind. Especially when your original post didn't mention you were a long time user with enough dedication to notice that.)
Yes.
But the guy you're talking to had no way to know that, and you shouldn't have taken insult at what he said.
> wild conspiracy theories
What?
There are polarizing events getting more coverage right now, by far, than anything else in the USA, and HN user infecto is subscribing to the idea that the algorithm isn't going to try to check if these important ongoing events interest them.
It's very unlikely that "this time might be different"; the far more likely answer is that this is run-of-the-mill algorithm exploration injection.
Infecto replied me I said "you are wrong". I didn't. My original comment was assuring, in good faith, made to let them know that TikTok changing theit FYP feed is normal. They hadn't yet mentioned they already knew about algo resets and that they were leaning in to the conspiracies. Their reply to me was not in good faith, and did not respond to the strongest possible interpretation of what I originally commented.
No conspiracy theory here. Long time user of TikTok. The sometimes part is that I am not hooked on it but I do use its regularly. I started using it after being a user on Douyin.
Like I already said I have no input on the censorship but just anecdotally to me something’s dis change that was out of the norm for my usage that I never experienced before. If you want to say that’s normal ok but I am suggesting it was out of the norm as a long long time user.
Not sure why you are lumping me with a conspiracy theory just sharing a datapoint that something did change weather on purpose or not.
Sorry to offend you but please don’t misread and lump me into a conspiracy! I explicitly said I had no opinion or datapoint on the censorship but there was a massive change in the feed. Wild how many hoops you are jumping through here. You continue to call out my own experience as wrong and now pump me into a conspiracy theorist. Nutty.
Something definitely broke.
I no longer use TikTok, but I was pretty hooked for a while, and I felt those “waves” every now and then.
It was pretty noticeable because each time I started getting extreme right political content from my country, and I neither consume anything local nor right wing content.
Edit: here’s a link to an example https://bsky.app/profile/seaniebyrne.bsky.social/post/3mby7j...
Welp, guess I didn't want to learn about that anyway
If AI removes any technical limitations, and automates content management, what's stopping a content creator from owning what they create and distributing it themselves?
How can centralization continue to survive?
The web started off as a pretty peer to peer system, but almost immediately people built directories and link farms as means to find things. You can make a system as distributed as you want, but that only works for content which people know to find. Which is great for piracy, as e.g. movies and TV shows are advertised everywhere else and can be found by title.
For social media, the recommendation engine is a critical part of the appeal to users.
Ranking posts/comments by the exponential of inverse IPAddress-post-frequency would solve bad actors posting behind VPNs/proxies like evil bot farms / state actors and marketers.
Real users have their own IP address, and IP addresses are expensive like $20-50 a month which would make mocking traffic an extremely expensive proposition.
Mocking 1% of reddit's 120M daily active user would cost 58M and you wouldn't want to share/sell these addresses with other actors since it would ruin your credibility
Doesn't this just incentivize posting a bunch of comments from your residential proxy IP addresses to launder them? This smells like a poor strategy that's likely to lead to more spam than not. Also, everyone has to start somewhere so your legit IP addresses are also going to seem spammy at first.
First, the obvious: if federation was clearly superior, it would've won. No medium since email has been federated and even that's dominated by a handful of players. Running your own email server is... nontrivial.
Second, users don't care abou tthis. Like at all.
Third, supposedly tech-savvy people don't seem willing or able to merely scratch the surface of what that looks like and how it would work.
Fourth, there's a lot of infrastructure you need such as moderation and safety that would need to be replicated for each federated provider.
Lastly, zero consideration is given to the problems this actually creates. Look at POTS. We have spam and providers that are bad actors and effectively launder spam calls and texts. You need some way to manage that.
Federated networks are theoretically and systematically superior to centralized, that's why people push it.
Humanity and social media isn't about technological superiority. Current platforms have inertia. Why would people fragment when all they care about is basic actions, and their network is already built?
Federated networks have been burdened by an onboarding tax, but this, along with moderation, can all be abstracted away by AI.
Let's see the current reality: social media platforms are currently American-dominated. A serious geopolitical problem, especially considering the amount of time younger generations spend on it.
There is more and more reason for governments to get involved and force the fragmentation of these platforms.
Everyone has a stake in getting accurate information, and therefore they have an interest in owning part of that system.
Why wouldn't this also apply to social media? Why is it better for 5 players to exist rather than 1000s?
If TikTok falls TikTokers will just use another centralized app.
Content creators don't have peertube instances for a reason.
I remember when everyone migrated from MySpace to Facebook and I assumed everyone was going to just keep moving over to the next big thing every few years but that actually didn't happen. Facebook became an institution.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huddles_(app)
TikTok showed that the platform lives and dies by the algorithm and ease of use. I'm not even a huge fan of TikTok's recommendations these days with too much slop slipping through the cracks. And their comment moderation is some of the worst.
If another platform ever gets popular enough, I'm sure the same people will find another way to neutralize it.
You could leave tik-tok but that's where folks are at and the average tik-tok viewer is unlikely to leave their dank maymays just because of some "alleged" (and I use that term lightly) censorship
Then I will ask: what about TikTok US owned by US companies censoring anti-ICE and anti-Israel narrative, do they have freedom of speech?
At this stage it's the kettle calling the pot black.
Perhaps on the tiktok Blind?
If there was some "mask off" moment I don't know what it was, and I've been in this industry for a while. Perhaps you're just projecting out from Elon? It's a popular thing to do nowadays.
I wonder if it is widespread knowledge internally or if just the select few know.
Meta and Google (including Youtube) kowtow to the administration in what speech they promote and suppress in the exact way the administration (both parties) says China might theoretically do in the future.
[1]: https://theintercept.com/2024/10/21/instagram-israel-palesti...
[2]: https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/metas-israel-policy-chief...
[3]: https://www.972mag.com/social-media-ukraine-palestinians-met...
[4]: https://www.hrw.org/report/2023/12/21/metas-broken-promises/...
Going by the comments, people on TikTok seem very fast in seeing conspiracies, when many problems can be simply explained with normal problems or human failings. And it's good to be critical and aware of dangers, but I fear if they are so easy to call out problems, it will wear of fast, and people will start to ignore real problems again, like they used to be.
it's just retaliation
and obviously, trump will play into this
Note: They also are having "technical difficulties" transmitting DMs with the string "epstein" in them.
At least on the surface level, I could believe this is just a full algorithm reset and they are having problems with it. But even after other algorithm resets that I believe I've experienced, Tiktok figured it out extremely quickly. If this continues, I will believe in the heavyhanded censorship theory.
Since 2020, when the first Trump administration attempted to ban TikTok, work has been ongoing to separate out the TikTok US business in all aspects from the parent company Bytedance. Setting up dedicated infrastructure for US users was already accomplished by 2023 for the most part, and this included the restriction that US user data couldn’t be used to train or otherwise influence non-US user operations.
However, there were a few major caveats. First, all the actual videos, at least if they’re public, were considered to be Bytedance data, even those created by US users (although the actual user intent signals - likes, watch behavior, and the like, were considered to be US user data). This allowed them to be used to train the main Bytedance-owned algorithm. Second, the Bytedance-trained algorithm continued to form the basis of the algorithm to serve US users. At least when I was there, US user data was used to tune the algorithm for US users, but the algorithm was not necessarily trained from scratch only on US user data in practice.
One of Bytedance’s main conditions for the TikTok US sale has always been that they own the algorithm (both the code and the models) and would not transfer it to the US, so this was definitely a foreseeable issue. With the chaos of the TikTok Us divestment between the Biden and Trump administrations, though, I suspect that it was hard to hire and retain ML engineers that could build a proper replacement for the algorithm in time for the divestment, let alone build one that matches the behavior of the previous algorithm.
If the algorithm is separated between US and non-US as strictly as the TikTok US Data Services mission always aimed for, then TikTok for US users is in many respects a new service entirely that shares the same UI and features. I also don’t know how US users get trained on non-US content, or if they’re even exposed, nor if any other countries use the US algorithm. So this change in content may last at least into the medium term, if not permanently. The question will be if you start seeing more left-wing anti-ICE content in the coming weeks or months.
The same with X and, before that, Facebook.
TikTok has never worked for me though so maybe there's no real equivalent alternative. Maybe time to make one if not?
To me it says something about the public, but I'm not sure what. I'm tempted to attribute it to indifference or complacency but I'm aware of network effects and the reality of alternatives.
Sometimes I feel like education and theory about security practices needs to extend beyond micro-level phenomena like passwords, to things like administrative conflicts of interest and strength in decentralization and competition. Private monopolies and quasi-monopolies aren't just economically bad, they're bad for privacy and security, and make the public vulnerable through lack of choice. In important ways it doesn't matter if it's the government or a private company; whenever power concentrates it is easier to align and abuse.
Most people don’t pick one social media platform and use it for 100% of everything.
They’ll switch between TikTok, Reddit, Instagram, and others during the day.
It’s not hard to see when one of those platforms is missing discussion of current events.
They ALL do incredibly corrupt things
That government forces the platform to be sold to a billionaire ally.
Platform’s new owner immediately bans criticism of said government.
“Not a first amendment issue, it’s a private company”
Ah you mean an app that the US forced to be sold to a private company that certainly agreed behind the scenes to certain terms of the government?
Yeah.. completely independent private company...
A weak analogy (I know analogy are never allowed here because "they're not the same") is that you can fire someone at will. Unless it turns out you fired them because they are black (yes I know being black is much different than expressing an opinion). It didn't mean you can't fire them at will, just that you couldn't for that specific protected reason.
Although at this point we're well well past the goalpost of "Freedom of speech has literally never prevented a private company from controlling the content on its platform" and down into the weeds of how it happened. The case clearly prevented the company from fully controlling the content of its sidewalk platform.
https://gothamist.com/news/ai-videos-of-fake-nypdice-clashes...
I suspect these are some of those that have been banned from TikTok, and there's probably heightened moderation around this content at the moment since people are sharing AI-generated propaganda and riling others into violent confrontation with ICE.
So I guess HN was just ahead of the curve.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
This has not changed in over ten years https://web.archive.org/web/20140702092610/https://news.ycom...
https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/tiktok-epstein-trump-cens...
Interesting times…
My mother was born just after WWII—died a few years ago. As sad as I have been (still am) when I watch the world fall apart around me I am thankful that she at least lived through perhaps the best stretch American history—does not have to see the shit I am seeing daily (she was the type that would have been unconsolably anxious about it).
I feel badly, so far, for my daughters born roughly in the period around September 11, 2001. Still, I'm hopeful they might yet see even a brighter future than I had growing up in the 70's…
I think the Vietnam War was much worse than what you are seeing daily...
I was born in Canada in 1970 to loving and extraordinarily supportive parents and moved to the US in the mid 90's. I can't imagine a better time or place to have been born. I have kids around the same age as yours and their lives are so much more difficult even though they are smarter and harder working than I ever was.
Never I though that I would still see the return to such politics in my lifetime, even in Europe it is getting harder to push back on them.
I had expected an Orbanisation (aka, what happened to the media sphere in Hungary after Orban took over and his cronies bought up almost all media) of Tiktok, but not that fast, it's like less than a week after the deal [2].
Scary shit if you ask me, and it's made scarier by the fact that Tiktok has already been changing the way our youth speaks due to evading censorship (e.g. "graped" instead of "raped", "unalived" instead of kill/murder/execute/suicide).
[1] https://x.com/krassenstein/status/2015911471507530219
[2] https://techcrunch.com/2026/01/23/heres-whats-you-should-kno...
Why not? All the tech was already put in place by China. All that the U.S. had to do was change the filtered words.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algospeak
Meanwhile you can report a bot who's posted 20+ comments under a video to advertise illegal drugs and all of the reports and subsequent appeals will consistently come back as "No violation found".
This seems like a fairly blunt attempt at quality-of-life improvement for the general platform vibes, no? Put some friction on the (legitimate) nutjobs who just want to say "Kill X, kill Y" all the time and are so insane they can't figure out euphemisms?
Duoyin (Chinese version of TikTok) would definitely not be different..
the cultural revolution famine the great leap forward Taiwanese independence Hong Kong self governance democracy human rights Falun Gong Uyghur people free speech KMT party Chiang Kai-shek
and that's just off the top of my head. there are likely hundreds of others.
Somehow I'm optimistic that this means the Trump Regime is on its last legs. But well, what's the quote about underestimating the stupidity of the American public?
The general principle of Section 230 is that a platform provider isn't generally liable for user generated content. This was a key piece of legislation that enabled forums, Reddit and ultimately social media. The platform provider does have responsibilities like moderating illegal content and responding to legal takedowns, etc.
Alternatively if you produce and publish your own content you are legally liable. You can be sued for defamation, etc in a way that you can't if you simply host user generated content (unless you fail to adequately moderate).
REcommendation algorithms (including news feeds) effectively allow a platform provider to select what content gets distributed and what doesn't. All algorithms express biases and goals of humans who create those algorithms. It's not a black box. It is a reflection of the company's goals.
So if you wanted to produce content that's, for example, only flattering to the administration even if you outright lie, you can be sued. But what if your users produce any content you want but you only distribute content that is favorable to the administration? At the same time, you suppress anti-administration content and content creators. It's the same end result but the latter has Section 230 protections. And it really shouldn't.
This isn't hypothetical. The Biden administration revived the dead Trump 1 Tiktok ban to suppress anti-Israel content [1][2][3].
What I find most funny about all this is that the American administration--both parties--are doing the exact thing they accuse China is possibly doing in the future.
[1]: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/11/10/tiktok-faces-renew...
[2]: https://www.internetgovernance.org/2024/03/18/yes-its-a-ban-...
It's sad that certain topics (anti-ICE, Epstein) neutered on a social media platform, but this went on for years when the politics were reversed.
Let everyone have their say, I say.
Pure user vote driven things like Reddit are a failure (echo chambers, emotional appeals, bot rings, etc). So I’m curious what you think would let that happen?
Even HN is heavily moderated to maintain topics.
I am not objecting to people expressing disagreement or labeling as an abstract exercise of free speech. I am pointing to a pattern that has become common online where disagreement quickly turns into coordinated pile-ons, identity assignment, and social signaling rather than substantive engagement with the argument itself.
Free speech protects the right to do that, but it does not mean the behavior is healthy or productive. When discourse collapses into binary alignment where nuance is treated as hostility, it discourages honest participation and pushes people toward silence or extremes.
So yes, others are exercising free speech. My concern is about the cultural outcome of how that speech is increasingly used, not whether it is permitted.
Increasingly society in America is either you are with us or not and at least for me my view of the world is more nuanced and day to day.
It's easy to fall prey to the fallacy that disagreement with you means the disagreers are failing to engage substantively to the topic, and are simply "social signaling".
It's easy to dismiss many people disagreeing with you as a "coordinated pile on".
In my experience, these accusations are usually a result of the "piled on"'s failure to understand and consider the others' perspective, and their unwillingness to change their mind.
Not to say that they must understand and consider others' perspectives, or that they must be willing to change their mind either! But engaging with a society means facing social pressure to conform with social norms. There's always not engaging with society in any meaningful way, as an option.
Where I differ is that I do not think this is only an individual perception problem. There are structural incentives online that reward signaling, amplification, and rapid norm enforcement over slower, substantive engagement. That does not require explicit coordination to function like a pile on, and it does not require bad intent from participants.
Social pressure and norm enforcement are inevitable in any society, as you note. My concern is about degree and speed. When the dominant response to a nonconforming view is immediate identity assignment or moral framing rather than argument, the space for persuasion narrows quickly. At that point, engagement becomes less about exchanging ideas and more about sorting people.
Opting out is always an option, but that feels like conceding that meaningful public discourse online is no longer worth defending. I am not convinced that is a good outcome either.
Those same structural incentives reward people organizing around a topic about which they're genuinely both passionate and informed. So how are you determining the difference?
> and rapid norm enforcement over slower, substantive engagement
Different people have different opinions over whether violation of norms should be tolerated, and how quickly. Note that this is different from tolerating disagreement, but some disagreement is so heinous as to violate norms in and of itself (e.g. a nazi salute).
> That does not require explicit coordination to function like a pile on, and it does not require bad intent from participants.
Sure, but a "pile on", which we'll refer to by the more impartial term "many people disagreeing with a person or their take", is totally okay. It's a valid form of norm enforcement in a society. The speed and degree of that enforcement is itself a social norm, and if most people prefer a high speed and high degree, then that is the norm.
I could speculate why that has become the norm, but I'll just generalize that there is a lot of hurt going around, and a lot of callousness to it, and a lot of failures of the traditional ways of addressing it.
On norms, I agree there are cases where the content itself is the violation, not merely a disagreement. Extreme examples make that clear. Where it becomes tricky is that the boundary of what counts as norm violating has expanded and become more fluid, while the enforcement mechanisms have become faster and more punitive. That combination raises the risk of false positives and discourages exploratory or imperfect reasoning, even when the underlying intent is not malicious.
I also agree that many people disagreeing is not inherently a problem. What I am pushing back on is the framing that this is always just neutral preference aggregation. When enforcement becomes immediate, public, and identity focused, it changes the cost structure of participation. The fact that a norm exists does not automatically mean it is optimal for discourse, only that it is currently dominant.
Your last point about hurt and callousness is important. I suspect that is part of the explanation. But if widespread hurt leads us to default to faster and harsher sorting rather than engagement, it seems reasonable to ask whether that tradeoff is actually helping us understand each other better, or just making the lines more rigid.
Centrist my ass
Proclaiming oneself a centrist might seem like a noble, moderate position. But in 2026, with the Overton window basically being shifted outside the frame?
The point still stands brigading is a massive problem in America.
Maybe it’s not obvious but you compared the thread to an argument. I see no argument. Just a boneheaded reply from someone which was a great example of exactly what I was describing.
Your follow up is pretty on point too, somehow we go from the topic of brigading to maybe me being ok with the current state of things. This is a really great example of the problem I was describing. Thank you.
I think that over the years, bad faith actors in the world of geopolitics have taken advantage of this in a very nefarious way in order to sow chaos, bad-faith/purposefully-inaccurate "talking points" and capture the hearts and minds of the ignorant, the stupid, and the willfully delusional masses who are desperate to cling to a conspiracy if it fits their worldview which is in turn reinforced by said bad actors.
Is it a potentially unconstitutional slippery slope? yes, absolutely. Is it something we need to tackle as adults and citizens? yes, absolutely. Should the desires of SV tech bro billionaires have any input in those discussions? no, absolutely not.
At some point, we definitely need a cooling-off period where people from both sides refrain from inciting anger from the masses.
There isn't an all-sides argument here; there's one side in almost total control of the entire discourse, whining about being victims, and promotingly increasingly insane viewpoints.
there is no left-wing media machine that even comes within a billion light years of the strength of the right-wing machine. Effectively, the entire spectrum is owned by hard-right billionaires.
Media has fallen victim to the need for continuous profits (because they have been targeted over and over by bad faith right wing actors) and the journalistic integrity of the 4th estate has effectively been weaponized by the people who need to be named and shamed.
