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Comment by gzer0 | Hacker News Reader

"The Russian invasion of Ukraine will be the first war to fully play out on social media. There will be no possibility of controlling the information."

I disagree with this statement. The Chinese government has taken a controlling stake in Bytedance [1], which is the subsidiary that owns TikTok. It could perhaps, then be possible, that China would "alter" the algorithm of TikTok users worldwide to sway public opinion? Push certain videos that fit a given narrative, and hide others that don't?

Tiktok collects and shares your data more than any other social media app, and it is unclear where it goes [2]. This could become a dangerous tool.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/08/17/chinese...

[2] https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/08/tiktok-shares-your-data-more...

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People here are focusing too much on the "TikTok" in the title. This is not about Tiktok. This is about everyone having a device in their pocket in which they can immediately record video and post it to social media. The platform is irrelevant. If TikTok manipulates content that video can go to Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, Reddit...

The point is that the Platform matters as it allows certain countries to control the narration. Do you think US BigTechs don't take orders from the US government or act for US interests? China also has such platforms. The internet is now being cartelized into corporate platforms, and this is only going to increase and become worse (from a consumers point of view).

Only if they're aware that the information was manipulated.

> The platform is irrelevant.

I understand your point, but I think the platform is relevant. There are four platforms that have a considerable number of users (TikTok, Youtube, Twitter, Facebook/Instagram), and they all have provenly effective censorship, especially optimized over the past couple of years. If it's one of those four, it does matter.

I would also claim that the platform is only irrelevant if removing that platform results in a negligible reduction in views. Removing TikTok removes 1/4 of the services, and probably the vast majority of younger eyes.

These platforms don't exist in a vacuum. Imagine we have a table with four legs. What happens when one leg is too short or too long. It becomes immediately obvious by comparing it to the other legs.

If everyone on Twitter, Facebook, and Youtube is talking about something, people will be talking about it on TikTok. If they aren't, that is noticeable and that too will be something people will talk about. That can actually lead to more attention on that platform due to the Streisand effect.

The primary concern would be if all the social networks censor the same thing, but that isn't a concern here due to the opposing political views unless your concern about censorship is just these platforms not allowing extreme violence, but that isn't what the article is discussing.

Detecting censorship/downranking in a service is quite hard to demonstrate: everyone gets a different feed; knowing what could have gone into that feed but didn't is known only to the service which generated it. Measuring the extent to which there is bias in that ranking on a given service is hard. Comparing an individual user's feeds across services won't tell you a trustworthy story, since each service has different signals about what that user likes.

Yes, it is difficult for an individual user to detect this. Collectively it is easier to notice. TikTok has already been caught multiple times biasing results in ways that many in the west generally disagree with. They can be caught again.

You are wrong here. Even if you think that "everyone" is talking about it, you may be actually in the same filter bubble as on all the other networks.

This is a really naive view. TikTok wouldn’t just have a banned message that pops up if you try to discuss it. Instead you’ll get a curated list on the topic that alters your perception of the popular opinion. Or some other “controversy” will fill up the feed to distract you.

I don't think so. Google and YouTube is completely censored for years and people don't care.

IMO this is down to two things:

1) “Wtf, why’s your dog laying on a nail??” “It doesn’t hurt enough yet” 2) YouTube is paying people enough that they make a good living and questioning the policies means potentially risking their bills not getting paid.

> There are four platforms that have a considerable number of users (TikTok, Youtube, Twitter, Facebook/Instagram), and they all have provenly effective censorship, especially optimized over the past couple of years. If it's one of those four, it does matter.

Three of those platforms are American-controlled and one is Chinese-controlled. Even if all four have "effective censorship", it seems unlikely that American-controlled and Chinese-controlled platforms will block/manipulate in the same way and to the same end.

This is not a fixed set either – every few years, a new platform pops up. Tiktok is a relatively recent example, Instagram an earlier one.

If content restriction gets too heavy-handed, people will respond by moving to new platforms which are less restrictive – at least in free(-ish) countries. I personally think that inconsistent and overly heavy-handed moderation – punishing too many users by algorithm for innocent or trivial things, even while reports against other users doing seemingly much more serious things are dismissed – is one of the factors behind Facebook's recent slide in users.

Added to that, many people on the political right (30-40% of the population) view these platforms as politically biased against them, and are keen to find new places without that perceived bias. Attempts at establishing more conservative-friendly platforms generally come unstuck by being overrun by extremists (neo-Nazis, antisemites, etc) who push mainstream right-wing users away, and also through pure incompetence (both technical and business). But I think it is likely that sooner or later someone is going to come up with the right balance to succeed in that space.

Let's be real, all 4 are American controlled. Douyin which is Chinese TikTok has no global currency.

At this scale, if the platform was censoring or pushing a narrative and it was exposed, people would simply upload those same videos to a different platform.

The common idea is to assume that “the masses” move slowly, but the reality is that when properly motivated everyone wakes up early and changes technology in a matter of hours. Many of them bringing their followers with them with only the last of the followers being the ones moving slowly.

But they can’t go to LiveLeak. The videos on the platforms you listed will be mostly talk. Nothing too graphic, nothing deemed hateful.

The question is whether there is enough ambient knowledge throughout the general citizenry to defeat the censorship, and I would argue the answer is yes. Everybody and their mother has a cell phone and bandwidth is cheap: If Reddit, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, and YT all censored in the same way, the immediate response would be for a ton of forums, email lists, Telegram groups, etc. to pop up. All the censorship would do is decentralize the spread of both information and misinformation, and that's not in anybody's interest. You can't wage an information war in the dark.

Much like when communications go down and the amateur radio enthusiasts come out. Or how when the roads are impassable in the UP by car, you'll see people out on snowmobiles. There are enough people with reserve tech skills that I genuinely don't think it would matter if the big platforms attempted to suppress all information.

What's far more likely is that things are going to be selectively suppressed in a way that's invisible to the average person in order to control their feelings and support for whatever is occurring.

> If Reddit, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, and YT all censored in the same way, the immediate response would be for a ton of forums, email lists, Telegram groups, etc. to pop up.

In theory and in reality, they will and have had no idea it's manipulated because they have no basis for comparison. Social media manipulation is hardly new; Russia itself has been doing it for many years. And most people say they don't care and still use Facebook, Twitter, etc., and many buy into and spread the disinformation.

> whether there is enough ambient knowledge

That 'knowledge' has to come from someplace. In fact, I would say that 'ambient knowledge', and the belief in it as some source of truth, is the medium of disinformation.

> The platform is irrelevant.

This is about trusting the source, sure it could weaken traditional media outlets, but some of them are driven by social media, you will often see stuff first on Reddit and then a day or two later its a DailyMail story.

That tiktok footage of the two jets fighting was shown on a UK tv news channel, but watching it, I couldnt tell you the date time or location, I dont recognise the location so cant say where it was, and its like watching the mainstream media, their reuse of library shots sometimes labelled as library shots and other times not, makes anything hard to trust.

Another technique I saw on the news, was one studio news reporter asking a military base commander some questions, the interview was shown again later on but 2nd time around, the studio news reporter was a different person asking the same questions.

Anything which doesnt include two people in the same shot is questionable.

In todays age, where CGI makes the past come aline, you can get software from Adobe which can instantly change the colour of clothes in video clips with minimal effort, and photoshopping, makes this a distraction.

If anything its a psychological measure of fear, to work out how people react to different situations, which the internet is very good at doing.

I also find it interesting talking to people to see what they bring up thats been on the news and not, I sometimes think in todays digital age with digital transmissions and digital tv and settop boxes we get a personal form of news. Why do I say this, well we are given an idea of how the news studios work, but what about the other studio presenters, are they doing the same in a different studio, have the news anchors recorded a variety of piece to camera's and they get edited and digitally delivered to different people.

Question everything, but unless you see it with your own eyes, dont rate it too highly and even if you saw something with your own eyes, have you been surreptitiously drugged, or are you just seeing some live performance with actors?

Obedience to authority experiments are always ongoing.

Introducing doubt into an argument is a valid debating technique.

Edit: I saw this as someone who witnessed some people winning the UK National Lottery in dubious circumstances.

> Question everything, but unless you see it with your own eyes, dont rate it too highly and even if you saw something with your own eyes, have you been surreptitiously drugged, or are you just seeing some live performance with actors?

It’s good to be skeptical of all media these days, just as long as you aren’t too skeptical or contrarian just for the sake of it. That line of thinking has led to fantastical conspiracy theory thinking. One side refused to admit that COVID vaccines can potentially be harmful and have a nontrivial amount of risk. The other refused to admit any benefit and didn’t get vaccinated at all. If instead we were presented the full story, instead of 4 minute sound bites, I suspect the pandemic would have been over a long time ago. Same with the anxieties of WW3 in this case.

Is the media culpable if it makes a normal, rational person go insane?

Define insanity? Copper can make you insane so can any number of other chemicals.

The current vaccines would have never "stopped" the pandemic as is anyway, regardless of mandates or swaying the public opinion.

Also, it seems that since two days ago, pandemic is no more, at least in the media.

Yeah and I havent seen anyone wearing a mask, its like its slipped out of the public consciousness already. Covid? Whats Covid?

Controlling the information is unimportant. Controlling the narrative is everything. People really did see a bicycle thrown under the legs of the police horse in Ottawa, because that's what the press said was there.

TikTok can definitely sway the narrative. It’s the equivalent to being retargeted by ads and perceiving something to be top of mind. TikTok can sway the public mood of its users.

People on TikTok aren’t reading twittter. They’re doomscrolling on TikTok and sponging information for better or for worse.

Lets not forget that people can post deep-fakes as well. Perhaps we will see Ukrainian deep-fake politicians capitulating on Tik-Tok.

If not deep-fakes than at least propaganda, like this one of Chomsky stating that US promised no NATO expansion which is not true: https://v16-webapp.tiktok.com/c7fe2cbc57cb276832f49e2542fe4f...

> If TikTok manipulates content that video can go to Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, Reddit...

That works only if people know it's manipulated and then are motivated to act. It's hard to know if query results (broadly: search results, timelines, etc.) are manipulated because you have no basis for comparison. And IME most people don't care about social media manipulation - the disinformation campaigns have been well researched and documented for a long time.

social media has been around for quite some time now, why suddenly this is the first war on social media and everyone is talking about? There was three wars last year, as far as I know, a few still going on now.

I won't believe people will use anything but the big (and censorship ready) social networks until I get the real news in Imgur or 9gag.

While I think you're right that China has the power to shift the information dominance through TikTok I don't think it changes the author's main thesis about OSINT. There are other platforms. If information starts getting censored then people will jump to other platforms to share it.

There is definitely a dangerous tool here too because there already has been a lot of fake images and videos appearing. It's unclear who is posting these but it certainty generates a lot of noise for OSINT. While the former situations had low noise but high bias in the current situation we may just have so much noise that it is impossible to figure out what is real or not. Though I think it still changes things since military analysts have better tools and know corroborating information to sort through this noise more easily. But fake news travels faster than truth.

Sure, but real time info about military conflicts has been shared on the internet since the 1991 Gulf War, and perhaps earlier. TikTok is just the latest in a long series of platforms where such info has been shared, and as you say there's nothing really special about it, it's just the most popular right now.

The difference is photo and video.

Sure, we've been discussing war online since the Web started (I sure did; I was online after I got out of school on 9/11), but that was all or mostly text. All the photos and video we were provided were still carefully controlled.

It's not TikTok. It's the smart phone. In the Gulf War, if the one guy with a camcorder agreed not to show you committing a war atrocity, that was it. It was done. Now? Good luck.

And medium matters. The outrage generated by the Vietnam War is partially due to it being the first major US conflict after a substantial portion of the population had access to TV.

> If information starts getting censored then people will jump to other platforms to share it.

I imagine these hypothetical "other platforms" (could you name one?) will be deemed as "that bad place that platforms <insert scary thing here>", omitted from search engine results/feeds, advertisers blasted on twitter/pull out, and payment systems cancelled, with direct sharing being the only real way to propagate the videos. We've clearly seen effective censorship like this over the last few years, with other unfavorable topics (right or wrong). I don't see how it's possible to consider the internet as some free place where unfavorable ideas can be exchanged, at a public/viral level.

> could you name one?

Reddit, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, WhatsApp, PeerTube, Signal, Telegram, Matrix. Need I go on?

> We've clearly seen effective censorship

I'd beg to differ.

The percentage of the population that uses Matrix, PeerTube, etc, is absolutely negligible, and news can't propagate nearly as far with peer to peer sharing.

It has already happened [1].

>"In the summer of 2019, as pro-democracy protests raged throughout Hong Kong, U.S. employees of TikTok were horrified to discover that content moderators on the global team, who reported to TikTok managers in China, were taking down videos of the demonstrations, according to a person involved in the discussions.

[1] https://www.theinformation.com/articles/tiktok-wants-to-avoi...

I hope someone keeps stats on the number of russian propaganda videos that hit tiktok vs more honest takes from Ukrainian citizens on the ground. I suspect russia will either dwarf them or simply firewall/block off tiktok. It's really sad to see 40 million innocent Ukrainians fall to a white supremacist dictatorship.

This comment is exactly why everyone should want free speech. Should push for companies to want free speech as well... Instead we've been losing for companies to silence people who we don't like. But this is why free speech is important

This war is absolutely televised, there was some disgusting scenes on r/ukraine, i was pretty amazed about following it all in real time..

haha ya, look how easy it was for the Canadian Government to control the narrative on the Freedom Convoy.

I take your point, but I bet they wish it was a little more consistent now

Do you have evidence? What was the true narrative? How do you know it was true?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQb-6yXKBlE

They are still pushing this "nazi" narrative weeks later, when social media and many of the millions of people that attended the protests are like, what are you talking about?

It's been truly eye opening to see blatant lies by the government.

I was at the protests for 3 weekends. I guess that's my "source". I think that's as close as you can get to a true source (your own experience). And I say that as someone that leans left, previously voted liberal, is vaxxed, and was also against "anti vaxxers" previously to attending the protests.

I'd say the actual narrative is it's a group of diverse people all affected by mandates, lockdowns and other government responses to covid. I don't agree with what they all want, but I can understand their pain. And I think we can figure out a solution that would make life better for them while also protecting our hospitals and vulnerable.

I haven't followed it closely, but that's the first time I heard the word "Nazi" associated with the protests.

Imgur has large amounts of curated propaganda on its front page nowadays despite claiming to be social & voted etc. No republican is mentioned except to condemn them or agree with Democrat orthodoxy. Nothing criticising any mainstream democrat appears ever on the front page. You won't see something funny by a Sanders supporter criticising Hilary in any circumstances, for example. As long as there is no criticism of a Democrat there's a reasonable amount of very left wing supporting posts. eg "People deserve healthcare, rich don't pay tax, middle america has been robbed etc." The only exceptions are for the pariahs Sinema & Manchin - who opposed the mainstream. Plenty of vitriol there, which even if you think it's entirely justified underscores how there is none, zero, elsewhere.

Imgur used to show currently viral images and was all about entertainment and filled a fairly similar niche to Tik Tok. Nowadays it has gone down the outrage engagement path(?) Politics seems like most of the content and it's so curated that it's feels like Pravda levels of blatant propaganda - even reading takes that seem to agree with what you were already thinking gives you pause that you must have missed something. I'm predicting there will be zero "anti-war" posts advocating that the US stay out of the Russia-Ukraine disaster. None. Such a position, right or wrong, is likely to be held by a signficant fraction of Imgur users and indeed Democrats.

Imgur is so extreme as to be obvious especially in the light of how dramatically it changed, which is instructive for us as an example. How would we know if facebook and twitter were playing with their algorithms with just a little more subtlety than that? (And maybe in an utterly different, unpredictable and unexpected direction?)

It's not the Pravda, it's just a bunch of left-leaning kids doing the meme version of political discourse. Same energy as my high school in the mid 2000's, just the names have changed. It's grating and immature, but it does plausibly reflect an actual demographic.

Obiviously it isn't the Pravda.

Maybe it's all organic and a totally fair reflection? How do you explain the change from an almost equal amount of eye-rollingly bad pro-trump stuff as there is pro-biden stuff now to zero. There was vast amounts of pro-sanders, anti-democratic establishment stuff ranging from fair to pretty silly that all suddenly vanished too. I also have trouble with the sheer consistency of the viewpoint. It's one voice, there's no variation to speak of at all. I've never seen any realistic crowd chatter that works that way. Have you?

But sure, I guess it's possible. How would you know that's what it is? How would you know if Facebook and Twitter were tweaking their algorithms to drive public opinion? It's the whole point of this. How would you find that out?

And on the other side we have US BigTech, who will act under the orders of the US. Apart from that, the social media propagandist of the intelligence division of every country will also be involved to sway opinions.

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