Comment by mschuster91

Comment by mschuster91 6 days ago

26 replies

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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...

inetknght 6 days ago

> 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.

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  • sosomoxie 6 days ago

    What words were China filtering? I've never seen reports of censorship like this on TikTok before Ellison bought it.

    Reply View 13 replies
    • dns_snek 5 days ago

      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".

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      • sunaookami 5 days ago

        This has been happening for 10+ years on e.g. YouTube, you can't say certain words in the video or mention them in the title or you get demonetized. Nothing to do with China.

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      • estearum 5 days ago

        Does "kill" have some type of salient political valence that I'm not aware of?

        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?

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    • netsharc 6 days ago

      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..

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    • NickC25 5 days ago

      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.

      Reply View 4 replies
      • sosomoxie 5 days ago

        But did this apply to the US version of TikTok? We now have imposed censorship in the US app, that as far as I'm aware did not exist at all when it was owned by China.

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  • mschuster91 6 days ago

    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.

    Reply View 2 replies
    • pjc50 5 days ago

      No, the forced bipartisan support TikTok sale was to suppress discussion of Palestine.

      Reply View 0 replies
    • afpx 5 days ago

      It’s so blatant, it’s more like trolling at this point.

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  • netsharc 6 days ago

    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?

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    • deaux 5 days ago

      > But this blatant move shows "We're no different to the Chinese ruling party now"

      Huh? They clearly are different - they have all the drawbacks with none of the positives.

      Reply View 1 reply
      • direwolf20 5 days ago

        Yeah, the CCP brought more people out of poverty than any other system including capitalism.

        Reply View 0 replies
    • inetknght 5 days ago

      > But this blatant move shows "We're no different to the Chinese ruling party now"

      Yup!

      Reply View 0 replies
Sugimot0 3 days ago

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.

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pjc50 5 days ago

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.

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