sosomoxie 6 days ago

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

  • 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".

    • 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.

      • dns_snek 5 days ago

        >> All the tech was already put in place by China. All that the U.S. had to do was change the filtered words.

        > I've never seen reports of censorship like this on TikTok before Ellison bought it.

      • inetknght 5 days ago

        > you can't say certain words in the video or mention them in the title or you get demonetized

        That's not censorship problems.

        That's advertisement problems. That's conflicts of interest problems. That's incentives problems. That's people-who-post-videos-just-to-make-money problems.

        Well, okay, it can easily be turned into censorship problems: instead of just demonetizing the video, don't show it to anyone. It's quite a fine line, but the line is indeed there.

      • direwolf20 5 days ago

        The Chinese one is to do with China, the American one is to do with America.

    • 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?

  • 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..

  • [removed] 6 days ago
    [deleted]
  • 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.

    • 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.

      • inetknght 5 days ago

        > did this this apply to the US version of TikTok?

        Yup. China doesn't want you to know about Chinese problems or history, like Tianenmen Square.

        > as far as I'm aware did not exist at all when it was owned by China.

        Then either you weren't paying attention or the filters were working against you as intended.

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.

  • pjc50 5 days ago

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

  • afpx 5 days ago

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

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?

  • 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.

    • direwolf20 5 days ago

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

  • inetknght 5 days ago

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

    Yup!