Comment by graeme

Switzerland has just 8 million people, which are divided into two big language groups. And most people speak (or at least understand) English. So, it's natural for the algorithm to converge to content in English.

It depends what you interact with. I tried it fresh today and it quickly decided I'm a Berliner muslim who likes Nigerian food because I lingered for a minute on something. That interest graph is very fast and volatile.

Uhh... that's kind of how these algorithms work. I presume you interact (i.e. don't scroll past) with a lot of the English posts. It's going to index on that and show you more English content. When I'm abroad, I might see a few posts in their native language but the algorithm will revert to showing English posts about the city/country once it realizes I'm not really jiving with Portuguese posts, for example.

i mean, we all have the algorithm tailored to what we want to see, so the parent comment here is kind of a moot point, right?

I've never used tiktok... Do you mean 12AM (midnight)? Or are people commonly in the habit of mid-afternoon naps?

12PM is Noon. Did you mean Midnight?

I would believe if someone said it was completely organic. It's just how Internet is and how social graphs build up. The typical American notion that the Internet is nearly 100% dominated by American English socio-cultural platform and English is the foundational language of the world's all cognitive processing is just an annoying megalomaniac hallucination.

English is used as a lot as a fallback language for inter-cultural exchanges. In that sense it's kind of dominating, but that's it. Intra-cultural communications happens in local languages, and even if that preferred language happened to be one of en-* locales, that only means everyone is functionally bilingual, and it doesn't mean cultural informational borders don't exist. Data still only goes through bridging connections.

Considering the algorithm did not crawl out of the primordial ooze unbidden by man I am going to guess the former.

The algo learned "by itself", but humans set a objetive to optimize and then implemented it to do so as well as it they could.

So essentially both I guess?

Why is that the question? If it learned to do it by itself it still is being allowed to do it by humans.

You don't deserve the downvotes from the immature peeps around here. Your question is 100% valid.

I would lean for the latter, the simple explanation may be that people just prefer local content.

Might not be available in Canada that much longer https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/tiktok-ban-canada-operation...

The vidoes that I see are pretty much spread across the world, not a huge US influence, doubting any shock will happen.

in Morocco most of the adults speak French and Arabic, so when they need to speak to an Englisher they get some kids over to help because they all speak English from TikTok

I think it really depends on the size of the population speaking a language.

For instance my partner sees almost only spanish content, and a huge majority is from latin america.

We are living in Europe.

The algo bends to your interests. But it's trivial to test the default reach if you ever post a video. They show stats for viewer location.

You can even find guides by people trying to make their phone seem american so they can reach us audiences.

Do you think it would be possible to show this programmatically? As in scrape n posts from TikTok and Reels and show the first displays CCP tendencies?

Or is this like a general US freedom China dictator logic

You are conflating strong Chinese Communist control of the business with how the content behaves. TikTok is full of content that would put a Chinese person in prison.

See this 2019 article outlining Chinese Communist moderation policies that (obviously) were attached to the app when TikTok was new, but were removed for non-Chinese user communities.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/sep/25/revealed-...

Your link doesn't appear to work

I actually had to check if TikTok was subject to the French protection laws on localized media quotas. I see it applies to Netflix et al, but not directly to TikTok.