TikTok users can't upload anti-ICE videos. The company blames tech issues
(cnn.com)1490 points by kotaKat 5 days ago
1490 points by kotaKat 5 days ago
Isn't Reels content more right-wing, while TikTok has lots of both left-leaning and right-leaning content.
TikTok historically has, but if this is truly the new owners trying to block content then that can change rapidly.
Sample of one, but I scroll Reels at least 30 mins a day and I've never seen any right-wing content on my feed.
Do not expect your rights to be honored on large platforms. They are fenced gardens regularly weeded, using algorithms with very specific preferences.
The only information outlet where we can have a reasonable expectation of freedom is the web itself, a good old websites on your own domain. Could be a txt file if you want to keep it simple ;)
Turns out, all you needed to do was say "jumping out of boiling water is woke" and frogs will turn up the heat themselves.
My bet is that too many frogs are gonna leap, that this is far too shitty a situation right now. They are gonna work extra overtime to cool it down some for now, collect & put some frogs back in the pot. And then slowly turn up the heat again.
I also do believe this is an incredibly hard technical moment. Elli-Tok has nearly no chance of suceeding in building their own algorithm, from square 1, since they don't have access to the ByteDance algorithms. I don't know what access they have to international content and internstional viewing habits, don't know if US content flows to TikTok actual and if they get any algorithmic help from that. This feels like a suicidal business, buying a brand name but lacking any and all of the means to maintain product quality.
There probably are real technical problems here. And feed preferences are probably just gone, while Elli-Tok rebuilds its own perhaps isolated perhaps loosely connected fork, while as said above probably lacking the content and viewer data to work from.
But just as Ellison's bought CBS then let it be overrun & destroyed by the hollow Free Press propogandists (pretending to be neutral, I say as my eyes roll out of my head), I also tend to think they thought they could get away with doing what they want. Maybe they will get away with this project. Maybe it is all isolated US only content, maybe it is swamped with right wing agitprop from here on out. Maybe half those viewers here keep scrolling forever and that's good enough to make the incredibly fantastically rich happy with their US government facilitated acquisition, that sundering an interesting diverse well tuned network is maybe or maybe not a delight but a necessary thing to claw under for this desired class propoganda. But I tend to think they're alas probably smart enough to learn quickly this is not how you boil a frog, and tend to think Elli-Tok is going to (suck for a long while either way, but work to) dial down the right wingism & divisionism a lot, then slowly work it back up.
(But man, watching these buffons mishandle CBS, watching ridiculous bald faced "salute to Mark Rubio" sure makes it hard to believe they have any competence at all.)
Different topic but the extremely critical TikTok v. Garland and the First Amendment Anticanon by Evelyn Douek skewering the unanimous Supreme Court decision that ok'ed this absurd international media property theft is amazing to read. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6118706
This is building an interesting case for those that say that the rest of the world can not build successful competitors to US entities: they can, but then they get taken away. I wouldn't use TikTok, but I find the whole situation a bit strange, ostensibly the rest of the world has a capability problem, but then when they are successful that can't left to stand.
“Oracle admits it broke TikTok.Without explaining why its cloud status page doesn’t list any outages” https://www.theverge.com/news/869037/oracle-admits-it-broke-...
So this was uploaded only 6 hours ago and has over 1,000 points and is at the very bottom of the front page (#28 right now).
Comments like this appear on every single post like this. Hacker New's algorithm lowers posts that have too much engagement too fast as a way to prevent flame wars. Is it perfect? No. But I highly doubt this is HN demoting this on purpose.
From the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
> The basic algorithm divides points by a power of the time since a story was submitted. Comments in threads are ranked the same way.
> Other factors affecting rank include user flags, anti-abuse software, software which demotes overheated discussions, account or site weighting, and moderator action.
This could very well be marked as an overheated discussion.
This comes up on HN constantly. The reason I feel confident that this is actually the case and not selective moderating is that these same exact comments pop up across posts from the entire political spectrum.
I believe the reasons for this system where initially good - don't want too many political discussions, keep it on tech only.
The issue is, that the tech is not a niche thing anymore - the biggest companies on earth are all tech now, and they played a very major role in installing the current US government. This topic is a great example too. Any current or future authoritarian state will be a very heavy user of technology, so it may very well be worth it debating these things here on HN.
> keep it on tech only.
I don't think that was ever completely true - it was always "things hackers found interesting". But what was "interesting" then was a product of the much calmer times back then – talking about Blub and build-your-own Lisps, hikes across Japan, etc.
Unfortunately, "interesting" is polarizing – and that is by design by the politicians iin power instigating this.
I think there's value in the homepage placing these things less prominently, while making more prominent the other things we want the culture here to be about - despite those things being less generally engaging and obviously popular.
For when someone is a new person here, they'll then first get mildly introduced and familiar with the expectations and aspirations of space through more neutral discussions. After their initial impression they're always free to seek out these hotter discussions on /active once they realize they happen here.
This was quick, it was never about the money, who needs Truth Social and Twitter when you have tiktok. Best of luck America
I wonder when Americans will wake up and see their system for what it is. It is almost too late to fix it. What comes next is going to change the rest of our lives (everyone, the whole world).
A large number of people don’t want the existing system.
They want Jesus on the throne, enforcing morality and making sure the poor people to work instead of being lazy grifters that take good people’s hard-earned money.
This isn’t a hot take. I’m a Christian who grew up that community. :(
It’s everywhere. And I hate what they are doing to my LGBTQ friends.
[Let's simulate the discussion for old times sake.]
Every large social network has fairly advanced mass screening setups for advertiser-sensitive topics. They just need to change the configs. On YouTube for example they will transcribe audio and run OCR on text to flag sensitive topics using MLP in order to flag certain topics (ex: Palestine/Israel), and prevent most ads from being shown (and demonetize and down rank).
Basically every large advertiser requires this so it's pretty trivial to turn on.
The only thing I could come up with, assuming this isn’t a technical glitch, is that TikTok already had the infra to silence anything they want on the platform and as soon as the keys were handed over they turned that filter up to 100%
Social media platforms have been doing that for years to keep advertisers happy, so yes.
Surely they do that to filter out Tiannamen Square content already…. Now they’re good to go for any authoritarian gov who wants to restrict what their citizens can see their own government doing.
for what it's worth many solopreneurs on the X/twitter solopreneur committee were reporting their uploads to TikTok were failing, and I saw at least one conservative complaining that their (conservative political) videos were not uploading to TikTok either
They are in transition, so for the moment I believe them to have technical problems, because it also matches my experience. Yesterday I encountered problems with several videos, which are working today. And not all of them were political.
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.
I am also skeptical (despite having 0 faith in the new owners). However, I am a bit confused: why would new ownership alone cause technical issues? It seems like they set new requirements that required new software. Even if the reqs are content-agnostic, I am curious what they are and how they differ from the previous tiktok.
Data migrations, new staff permissions and policies, merging AWS or other cloud accounts and their complex IAM policies, enrolling devices into new corporate networks, Okta setup, corporate firewalls. There are hundreds of reasons that moving to a new corporate ownership can cause technical problems.
which of these do you think is most likely? I thought they were already using usa-based cloud infrastructure
All of these will be happening as well as hundreds of other moving pieces (domain name transfers, DNS changes, adjusting compute resources to maximise existing contracts with providers, migrating metrics systems impacting alerts and infra scaling etc etc etc). It's impossible to say from the outside which of these are causing issues.
> I thought they were already using usa-based cloud infrastructure
Unless they were already using the same provider on the same account with the same IAM policies as their new owner (they were not, obviously) this is irrelevant.
Just technical problems in their “banned topic” identification models. No need to be concerned.
The point is that people are more aware of problems happening with that topic, but ignore whether it also happens with other topics. So at the moment it's a very skewed view.
The presumption of good faith has been justifiably obliterated when it comes to Topics Such As These with our right-wing extremist political and media leadership.
Especially with extremists, you should have a solid foundation of argumentation, because they will not ignore even little fails and weaponize everything against you if necessary.
Especially with extremists, a solid foundation of argumentation will do you no good because the facts are beside the point.
It's not about the extremists, it's about everyone else. Extremists usually have to convince people to give them power, to follow their BS. And by experience, even extremists sometimes can change their mind.
It's unnecessary: extremists usually aren't seeking to change their mind, and they'd sooner fabricate evidence of a fail than acknowledge The Perfect Argument That Totally Changed My Mind
even setting aside the particulars of a US-controlled tik-tok, that our entire view of the world is through these narrow balistraria controlled by a few platforms is extremely detrimental to a free society, especially one so dependent on the flow of information.
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
On Twitter, there's a bunch of reports that TikTok suddenly prevents people from sending the word "Epstein" in DMs [1].
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...
> but not that fast
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.
What words were China filtering? I've never seen reports of censorship like this on TikTok before Ellison bought it.
Enough of them to give rise to the term "algospeak" which means using words like "unalive" in place of "kill" to avoid automated censorship.
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".
On WeChat lots of things are censored, almost keyword based. E.g. a building collapses, you want to talk about it to your friends, your message can't be sent because it'll be deemed to be trying to cause social unrest..
Duoyin (Chinese version of TikTok) would definitely not be different..
On WeChat and Douyin (chinese tiktok), good luck mentioning things like:
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.
I had expected a longer "cooldown" time so that people don't immediately jump to the conclusion that the forced TikTok sale was to suppress discussion of the Epstein files.
But this blatant move shows "We're no different to the Chinese ruling party now"... If it's a slow descent, people might accept the madness (imagine if a bombshell report showed Biden had links to Epstein, sexually assaulted 20+ women, and was moaning about the Nobel Peace Prize to the prime minister of Norway)...
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?
Yeah, the CCP brought more people out of poverty than any other system including capitalism.
Funny how all the people contesting other adjacent comments are noticeably absent here. It's silly in the first place, given the US government and Israeli officials were very clear in their bluntly stated aims with the tiktok take over, what we're seeing now is just the execution of clearly stated intentions, too many ideologues are in denial.
The Epstein situation is .. weird. On the one hand, it's a massive nexus of corruption and abuse. On the other hand, it's just .. evidence. Nobody cares about evidence, they've already decided they want to protect the Trump administration no matter what. Rather like ICE shooting legal gun owner US civilians.
So, US has their own Tiananmen Square. How the turntables.
TikTok easily bends over backwards authoritarian government. In Nepal, during the GenZ protest, TikTok disabled the search for "NepoBabies" which is the term people used for the affluent lifestyle of leaders' children and which was why the GenZ protest happened. Every other social media was banned but not TikTok because they happily censor whatever the government tells them to
https://www.forbes.com/sites/conormurray/2026/01/26/tiktok-c...
Upscrolled looks like a promising alternative.
Heh, no [1][2][3][4].
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/...
It's really nice that I can still post here anonymously.
I really only come here for tech news, but I doubt ICE cares.
TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC is only within the US (controlled by Larry Ellison). You still get ByteDance.
I’m guessing this is related to and corroborates this early flagged article? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46777652
Just throwing these out there for people looking for options: Check out Piefed for a Reddit-like, and lobste.rs for an HN-like.
The fediverse might not be booming with activity to the same degree as the big names, but there’s plenty out there and it has a pleasant small-forum vibe that went extinct on the bigger sites a long time ago.
Can't mention "Epstein", either.[1]
It was better when TikTok reported to the Third Department of the People's Liberation Army. They don't censor outside China.
[1] https://www.npr.org/2026/01/27/nx-s1-5689104/tiktok-epstein-...
Honestly I've noticed this with political content on Instagram. Random bugs occur where I can't post, or can't comment or repost, and it's usually posts that aren't in line with US foreign policy on Gaza, Lebanon, Venezuela, etc. I'll go about fine looking at normal stuff, memes, etc but whenever some big geopolitical event occurs is usually when I hit those bugs on IG. I probably experienced more bugs post 10/7 then my entire history using the app prior. Also had lots of posts removed that I contested and won later but it doesn't matter if the moments already passed and that wave of information was repressed on the algorithm.
The Blind community is one of the most toxic communities out there. It made me sick even before the tech industry had its mask off moment 1+ year ago. Since then they’ve only amped up the racism and hate. I wouldn’t expect to find any serious discussion there.
Blind is the 4chan of tech, so in some way you're right. I guess some kind of people might find that "fine". Not me.
Perhaps you're one of those pro-Gestapo people? It's a popular thing nowadays.
Why would you think that engineers have stronger ethics than the population at large? Following this logically, some profession would have to have lower than average ethics or perhaps only the unemployed do?
I don't think that one's personal moral compass and one's profession have much correlation at all. Otherwise, moral philosophy professors would be near saints. Moreover the moral philosophers at Harvard would be more ethical than those at Ohio State.
> I used to think that most engineers had strong ethics
Civil engineers maybe. Software "engineers" were never known for their strong sense of ethics.
You need remarkably few engineers in the loop to actually pull a thing like this off (if it is/was true).
Honestly I'm surprised people don't jump ship more often with social media platforms. With TikTok this is kind of new news, but there have been related problems with it that have been pretty obvious for some time.
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.
Are you really surprised? I find the interest entirely unrelatable, but I'm not surprised. They tune these platforms for addiction. I mean, I don't even use them but I still immediately recognize their branding video-end sounds just from random exposure here or there. (I hate it)
I'm surprised in the sense that it seems a few times we've been exposed to various problems arising from social media manipulation or censorship — of the right and left variety actually — so I'd think people might be more sensitive to it at this point.
Part of it too I guess is my personal experience with people I know who will complain about a platform repeatedly (in terms of algorithmic political manipulation) and then turn around and continue to use it voluminously, sending links to stuff on the platform over and over again, etc. (not speaking just about TikTok in particular, with a few sites). It has this feeling similar to if they complained about how awful a food item tastes, and expressed concerns about it being poison, but then continued to binge eat it daily.
Maybe they figure it's just inevitable or something, or maybe you're right about reinforcement contingencies. Maybe it's as simple as that.
> Honestly I'm surprised people don't jump ship more often with social media platforms.
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.
There have been a number of fake AI-generated videos of police confronting ICE officers lately:
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.
It's kind of amazing that all the companies act in lockstep. Apple, Google, TikTok remove anti-ICE stuff, rightly or wrongly (I'll go with 'wrongly' because of freedom of speech/freedom of app choice, among other things)
They ALL do incredibly corrupt things
While I can TOTALLY believe that TikTok might be doing classification and censoring of uploads - tech issues that happen during notable events will INEVITABLY be interpreted as partisan censorship.
A personal brush with this was with Scientology Protests around 2008 if I recall - I was at YouTube and there was a great kerfuffle among many of the top personalities who uploaded videos siding against Scientology. Their videos were not making it into the top rankings or getting the expected visibility. To them the obvious answer is that they were being deliberately suppressed - after all Scientology was a paying advertiser and brand on YT.
The reality was that the entire viewcount pipeline, and downstream aggregations were busted for about a day. Nobody was getting their full views counted in a timely way for that time.
no suprise at all... isn't this the whole point for USA to control Tiktok? 'free world' or `democracy` countries love to control the media
A riff on "The Revolution Won't Be Televised"...
the revolution won't be televised because the bastards who own the networks won't let you see it and you probably wouldn't watch it anyway— you're too busy with your beer and your phone and your comfortable numbness.
the revolution won't be televised because it's not entertainment, not something you can half-watch while you're scratching your ass and wondering what to eat for dinner.
you can't consume revolution like you consume everything else— passive, bored, already thinking about the next thing.
the revolution won't be televised because it happens in the place you're most afraid to look: inside your own goddamn skull.
it starts when you stop lying to yourself, stop swallowing their garbage, stop pretending this is fine. it's not on TV. it's not coming to save you. it's just you and the choice to keep sleeping or finally wake the hell up. nobody's going to film that.
Under the current administration, the US is in the process of throttling long term economic growth, cutting itself off from its traditional allies, and pulling back as a global power. China's Communist Party has the most to gain from the end of American greatness.
Where is that HN thread where everyone was saying how bad it would be for Biden to ban Tiktok? Let's see how it can be used to manipulate the upcoming elections in the US this year. Except now they can't be banned, they're American!
It’s crazy to me how people on the left react hysterically to what people on the right dealt with for years.
Remember when the story about Hunter Biden’s Laptop got banned from all major media? A story that could have been confirmed true by just emailing the subjects and asking them if the emails were real?
Remember when Google admitted to being pressured (and caving into said pressure) to censor conservative voices?
When we learned that Twitter allowed the US Military to run influence campaigns at people in the Middle East?
This isn’t new, we just don’t like when our weapon gets turned on us.
Free speech absolutism is the only sensible option.
I ran an experiment this morning. N=1 but:
I created two videos that contained nearly the same content. I recorded both by hand in one take, so they're not identical, obviously. Each talked about this issue. One used the term "Frozen Water," the other used "ICE". After eight hours:
The "ICE" video has 5 views
The "Frozen Water" video has 419 views
FWIW
Not just anti ICE videos - you can’t even mention Epstein
https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/tiktok-epstein-trump-cens...
Thankfully, I learned from our leaders that was just a hoax!
It's also blocking the word "test": https://www.theverge.com/news/868362/tiktok-epstein-ban-hoax... Looks like it's just a bug.
If there's a flash of light and a town in North Korea suddenly vanishes and becomes a giant crater, and the North Korean government claims it was a natural disaster, I'm going to guess they accidentally nuked themselves.
If TikTok suddenly blocks videos on a topic, and they say it was "technical issues", I'm going to guess the new US overlords accidentally pressed the wrong button.
Wonder how long before that button comes for HN. If Dang starts talking like ChatGPT we'll all know.
Classic big. You just have to set the MANIPULATE env var to false in the container. It's true by default.
At this rate the US will soon have its own Tank Man image censored from mainstream social media.
Biden Admin pressured social media companies to remove otherwise legal content that was critical of Covid response.
It was a direct 1A violation. And cowards here pretend like it didn’t happen “for the greater good” or something.
You mean https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_Files
These twitter files:
"After the first set of files was published, various technology and media journalists said that the reported evidence demonstrated little more than Twitter's policy team struggling with difficult decisions, but resolving such matters swiftly. Some conservatives said that the documents demonstrated what they called Twitter's liberal bias...
In June 2023, lawyers working for Twitter contested many of the claims made in the Twitter Files in court. According to CNN, 'the filing by Musk's own corporate lawyers represents a step-by-step refutation of some of the most explosive claims to come out of the Twitter Files and that in some cases have been promoted by Musk himself.'
"
The nothingburger Twitter Files?
I'm not seeing this. I uploaded a video earlier today comparing sending in Tom Homan to replace Greg Bongino to sending in Ghostface to replace Jason Voorhees -- both still murderers. Unless they're lying to me about the view count and fabricating comments, something like 400 people have seen it and a dozen have commented -- most calling me an idiot, but whatever.
Freedom of speech has literally never prevented a private company from controlling the content on its platform.
"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...
You mean https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_Files
These twitter files:
"After the first set of files was published, various technology and media journalists said that the reported evidence demonstrated little more than Twitter's policy team struggling with difficult decisions, but resolving such matters swiftly. Some conservatives said that the documents demonstrated what they called Twitter's liberal bias...
In June 2023, lawyers working for Twitter contested many of the claims made in the Twitter Files in court. According to CNN, 'the filing by Musk's own corporate lawyers represents a step-by-step refutation of some of the most explosive claims to come out of the Twitter Files and that in some cases have been promoted by Musk himself.'
"
The nothingburger Twitter Files?
It did before the internet. See Marsh v. Alabama where publicly accessible ( private sidewalk) on private property was ruled the people there still could exercise 1A rights and could not be trespassed for doing so even if the owners forbid it.
How does freedom of speech allow you to walk somewhere you have been forbidden from walking? Does that mean you can just go into any building you want and use your 1A rights to not be arrested?
You can read the case. Basically it was a privately owned public space that they could have been otherwise trespassed from, but not for the reason of their speech. Since the reason for the trespass was their speech, it was prohibited. They were not otherwise "forbidden" from walking there were it not they expressed something that was disapproved of.
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.
And HN users can’t upload anti-ICE articles or discuss politics without getting flagged and downvoted.
So I guess HN was just ahead of the curve.
>Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.[0]
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
This has not changed in over ten years https://web.archive.org/web/20140702092610/https://news.ycom...
What's disappointing is that this precise thing was happening during people trying to report on Gaza issues, and were encountering ghost "technical issues" and shadow bannings/outright bannings, but any such discussion about it here seemed to be getting flagged.
I hope for the good of mankind, all sides of politics unite against deplatforming and oppressing opposing viewpoints.
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.
But the thing is people aren’t having “their say”. Social media companies are amplifying voices and viewpoints. They are not acting as “common carriers” letting quality sift to the top. It is curated and crafted.
“Letting quality sift to the top” implies that there is a way for this to happen without curation.
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 sure why this was flagged but I don’t think it’s wrong. I am not sure if it’s a uniquely American thing but the internet has caused an unfortunate case of brigading for almost anything. I like to think I sit fairly middle in a lot of American topics I lean left on some items, taxes, healthcare, free school lunches and right on others but I remember how easy it was a number of years ago to be labeled a racist. You really cannot have an opinion about much these days without someone labeling you something unfavorably. It’s unfortunate.
I don’t think it’s ironic and my point was not the act of labeling itself but more of how America has become a brigading culture. Free speech should be protected, even for things that we know are wrong but we have this decay of the internet and culture where you are either with someone or against them.
> You really cannot have an opinion about much these days without someone labeling you something unfavorably. It’s unfortunate.
That is free speech. And the violence you see is direct consequence of a culture that tuts tuts "this is rude" when someone says "these right wing people are fascists" rather then look at what those right wing people openly talk about.
I don't know.
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.
To me, the media is/are nothing more than drug sellers at this point. They have their weapon "of truth" sold to the very people you listed above. I do my absolute best to not consume any media because I know it is twisted and often wrong (eg. AI generated content). The best I can do is simply not participate in their war. Reddit, TikTok, X, etc are definitely supplying heavy drugs to anyone who wants to be hooked.
At some point, we definitely need a cooling-off period where people from both sides refrain from inciting anger from the masses.
the twitter files, what a laugh. Can you point to a particular part of the twitter files that was not obviously overblown, wrong, or subsequently thoroughly discredited that supports your claim of conspiratorial right wing suppression? Here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_Files
More nuanced laws can prevent such behaviour without impacting free expression. For example, Public Nuisance laws. That way the content itself isn't legislated again, just the appropriateness of the time and place, and the society isn't prevented from having fictional works, history texts, art containing the banned topic.
Godwin's law is not a useful heuristic, and Godwin himself regrets it. Every universal principle should have its extreme cases tested. If you claim it should be fine to say anything at all, then you have to test that against the limits like HH, or North Korean propaganda, or death threats, etc.
Yes. Now you don't know who to watch. Forcing conversations under ground just requires a larger intelligence network. Let them say things on Reddit and the like to simply keep track using simple tools.
Even better than tracking them, reason with them (à la Daryl Davis [0]), even if only a few minds are changed, it's a big win for society.
The purchase of TikTok is interesting. Ellison is first and foremost pro Trump, and pro-Israel. TikTok was one of the few companies that allowed videos against the status quo (the propaganda our media pushes), which has only grown more biased now that Bari Weiss (again, a Pro Trump, pro Israel shill) is heading a large media organization. Censorship and controlling the media is one of the first tenets of bad actors. By controlling the flow of information, the truth can be obfuscated (that is why for instance, Israel has a total ban on covering Ghaza for western media. So that war crimes can go unnoticed, and thereby, it is as if they never occured). If we do not share anti-Ice videos, then they simply do not occur. For is the truth really factual, if it is left in darkness. A war on facts is concerning. I see videos of Mr Preti in drag on my feeds, clearly generated by AI, and shared by boomers. Disparaging the dead and the war on facts is highly concerning. That is why Noem does not release body cam footage of the ICE execution of Good and Preti. The only comfort I can find is that Noem and Ellison, and the Trump admin and Israel, are just plain bad at their job. Many years ago, Ellison was well known in SV circles to badly desire to be called like Jobs, in an almost comical way, like a kid asking his parents whether he is like that wrestler he saw on TV when he imitated one of his moves (he used to dress like him, and ask anyone around at his parties about the similarities between the two). They still miserably fail at controlling public sentiment, which is only growing against them day by day, as it rightfully should. Whether or not that leads to a tangible action against these bad actors is to be waited for. Rarely does anything happen though. The war criminals that lied and killed civilians in Vietnam and Iraq enjoyed their ranches. Netanyahu and trump will someday retire and enjoy their old days, after wrecking havoc on the innocent.
Hopefully people will start seeing social media as what it is: a cheap, shitty, and extremely addictive drug. I am confident that in time, the opposite opinion will be viewed as insane.
As much as I dislike TikTok, I dislike this dangerous mischaracterization even more. If you start propagating the meme that screens are like chemically addictive drugs the governments of the world will feel emboldened to use violence force to 'regulate' them. Screens are not drugs. They do not directly manipulate the biochemistry of incentive salience regardless of valence of perceived stimuli. They just provide enjoyable stimuli. It is VASTLY different. Conflating them is playing in to the hands of the authoritarians.
Gambling doesn't directly manipulate biochemistry either. Neither does porn. Both are recognized as addictive. If you think reading Dostoevsky is in the same realm as doom scrolling algorithmically tailored Instagram reels because they're both "enjoyable stimuli," there's not much of a conversation to be had.
This is a thread about government-aligned owners censoring content on a platform the government forced a sale of. The authoritarians already have the thing.
We are not disagreeing. Definitely do not use TikTok for those and many other reasons. But calling an audio visual stimuli an addictive drug is just as wrong and dangerous. That will lead to those same authoritarians controlling screens with use of force justified by the false metaphor.
Anecdotally my feed dramatically shifted. My politics are very leftwing, and prior to the transfer virtually every video was discourse on ICE. Following the transfer, I get content that is all over the place. At one point, I got 8-9 tiktoks in a row of obviously bot-created rightwing text.
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.
As a former employee in TikTok US Data Services, the division that was stated working to separate the US TikTok service and infrastructure, I wouldn’t be so quick to dismiss the algorithm reset theory, because the reset this time is qualitatively unlike the others.
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.
Will US folks still get other nation's video's? Will other nations get US videos?
From the divestiture announcement, the answer appears to be yes to both: https://newsroom.tiktok.com/announcement-from-the-new-tiktok...
Dupe of another post that was mysteriously flagged: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46777652
well… i submitted it as https://lite.cnn.com/2026/01/26/tech/tiktok-ice-censorship-g... but i guess HN drops the lite off of it? le sigh, here’s hoping someone can frontpage one of these tiktok censorship stories today…?
Looks like this one made it to the front page.
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…
Based on this comment, I think we are around the same age. I'm 55 and have two kids born in the early 2000's.
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.
I am the first generation after the fall of Salazar's dictorship, so naturally I belong to those that had the opportunity to grow in freedom while hearing the stories from everyone that suffered from it, the dead and crippled from colonial wars, many sent as punishment for their political views and so on.
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.
Meta note: it would be awesome to collate a list of 'better ways to view populate sites'. For example, I only learned recently that replacing www with old in a reddit url takes you to a less cluttered version of the site. And I only recently bookmarked a couple of 'archiving' sites (important for reading content that's paywalled). TIL your cnn 'lite' technique.
I believe everyone here realizes there are several highly used media platforms (some bigger than TikTok, like Instagram), that are posting the videos without any issues. You also realize that there are US TV stations playing those videos almost non-stop, right?
People laugh at MAGA conspiration theories backed by Fox News, but their conpiration theories - backed by CNN - sound just as insane for anyone that didn't buy into any of the 2 extremes...
I really want to know which directions data is flowing. How much of an island is Elli-Tok? Do videos from the US appear internationally? International to US? ByteDance famously isn't giving up the algorithm, but what user data does Elli-Tok get and what do they send, or does Elli-Tok have to totally rebuild the algorithm from scratch using only US viewers?
This whole thing is such a shit show. The US government right now looks like a total ass of all asses on the world stage, but this TikTok business of the US demanding our country get to take over a social network preceeds this era of major fuckery by a good tick. And is just so stupid, so not what governments should do. Even if we hadn't had Trump just hand it over to his preferred "buyers" the Ellison's, it's just a grade a fuckup, absolute bedlam to do this, completely delegitmizes the US.
TikTok v. Garland and the First Amendment Anticanon paper by Evelyn Douek just came out, talking to what a first class First Amendment fuck up the unanimous Supreme Court decision was. Excellent read. Just could not have done a worst job, unbelievable nonsense that let this madness just persist & amplify. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6118706
See also re: censorship of messages containing the word Epstein: https://xcancel.com/krassenstein/status/2015911471507530219
Per https://www.npr.org/2026/01/27/nx-s1-5689104/tiktok-epstein-... :
> "We don't have rules against sharing the name 'Epstein' in direct messages and are investigating why some users are experiencing issues," a spokesman for TikTok's U.S. operation told NPR in a statement.
But the evidence in that Twitter thread should be weighed against the spokesperson's statement.
I predict a future showdown over Section 230 because "algorithms" are used to cheat on the safe harbor protections. Let me explain.
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-...
Meta comment: it seems like you can only voice a particular direction on the politic topic of immigration enforcement on this thread without getting downvoted. The opinion is obvious because everyone automatically jumps to malice as opposed to incompetence as the prevailing theory for the article's claim.
I had a condescending response from a HN mod the other day telling me that HN isn't all that left wing, just a 'slight skew'. Well OK buddy, exhibit A, read through the diversity of opinions that aren't flagged in this thread. I'd go as far to say that HN is basically like Reddit, except more of you happen to have computer science degrees.
And that's fine, it is what it is, but let's not pretend this website doesn't have a heavy bias in a particular direction.
immigration enforcement has existed for as long as HN has existed, yet there was never this much attention paid to it. Even under the same president during the previous term.
So simply supporting or opposing "immigration enforcement" must not be it. Something must be different about this situation. I encourage you to dig deeper, or actually ask those who disagree with you, what that difference might be. And beware of falling victim to the easy dismissal of 'more people are less rational and/or less informed than before', a variant of 'this person who doesn't agree with me must be less rational and/or less informed than me'.
Here's what's actually different:
- This admin is deporting less than Obama was during his first year in office despite promises to the contrary,
- There is now organized harassment and resistance stopping federal agents from removing illegals that are also criminals from our country.
Ironically, you need to take your own advice.
One side is crazier, and it's not mine.
Why do you think people are opposing ice now, and not before?
Because we live in the most politicized time in history, enabled by social media. We also have the largest proportion ever of mentally ill and under/unemployed people in America with nothing better to do, no real career and/or family prospects, so they must latch onto trying to further their feel-good ideologies to give their lives meaning.
It's incredibly ironic that the left, originally the party of labor, is so strongly protecting illegal immigration. When you let in 20 million low skilled workers from different cultures into your country, who do you think suffers: capital or labor? Who feels the pressure in rising housing prices, job prospects, rising crime in cities, etc?
The other ironic part to this whole situation is that the current administration goes so hard on their rhetoric and marketing but ultimately are deporting less people than ever before. Everyone is losing here, and the American Empire is fading away, eroding from the inside out.
When you force the sale of a company in order to control the political messages that its users post, the wailing and gnashing of teeth that comes when that power is exercised is entirely performative.
Weren't anti-ICE people just calling it "freeze peach" a minute ago? This is what that looks like. This is the group that repeated "nothingburger" over and over again when you said that government directly and publicly threatening private businesses if they didn't censor individuals was bad.
This is political. The Democrats began their open hatred of the left in the 90s when the Democrats cracked down on free speech during the anti-globalization protests (the introduction of fenced-in "free speech zones"), the party went all in on Iraq against the wishes of all people who were paying attention, Hillary Clinton mocked the left for objecting to a wall between Mexico and the United States, and Rahm Emanuel described people who wanted single-payer as "fucking retards."
Now the bizarre group of media-addicted partisans that now calls themselves the "left" fight for free trade and imported slave labor. They remind you that there are jobs that are too awful for Americans that are totally appropriate for Mexicans. That manufacturing is actually worthless, and we should import everything because as a reserve currency there's no need to produce anything. Trade deficits can be infinite, and America is meant to be a black hole, sucking in the worlds production and handing it to the rich. But the rich are bad, although we're giving them every single thing they want. Their politics judged on policy are to the right of Nixon. The only illegal immigrants they know are their employees. They've left behind Floyd, Illegal is the new Black.
Now, on HN, this isn't politics. This is something else. Only black people and women are politics. The creation of a masked, militarized federal police force filled with morons to enforce federal immigration law because Democratic cities and states are refusing to enforce it themselves? Not politics. The performance of Trump's street roundups to rally his base (and the working people in this country that are undercut by illegal labor, and the racists who think every Mexican is a rapist) while ignoring and writing exceptions for the corporations that employ illegal labor? Not politics.
Sorry, I meant something something something Russia, China, Iran, Nazis. And some specious, offensive comparison of people who just got here in order to make money to Black Americans enslaved and segregated over centuries.
I became entralled and hypnotised by 90s liberalism. Convinced that their ‘change’ would actually happen, I backed their candidates and media for 30 years waiting for a solution to even the lowest hanging fruit. Instead of getting any solution at all, I watched them rope in more rubes for ‘bigger and better issues’. The self-righteous, like the younger me, are so easily redirected.
Sure, 'technical issues'. Just like the filtering around epstein, mussad, etc. Right-wing billionaires like to ensure the speech matches their preferences.
A lot of HN users flag any stories about politics.
Given the low quality of a lot of comments under this story and the hyperbolic fighting going on, I don’t exactly blame them. Stories like this are very important and interesting but 75% of the comment section is a dumpster fire.
Comment sections that attract certain comment and downvote patterns can trigger the flame war filter which drops their rank.
It’s not a moderator coming in and hiding things. It’s the users flagging it and/or triggering the flame war filter.
Even with that, there are anti-ICE stories all over the front page every day.
I summarized all comments using LLM for better reading: https://hn-discussions.top/tiktok-ice-censorship/
It’s crazy to think that Instagram Reels, owned by Meta, is preferable to TikTok now. At least Reels now is at least competitive in terms of content - unlike two years ago when people were worried about TikTok being banned and Reels was not a good alternative.