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Comment by CharlesW | Hacker News Reader

While playing with it for a short this morning, TikTok threw the CEO speaking at the hearing into my "For You" 3 times. Nothing else in my "For You" was tech related, and I didn't linger on them or provide other signals demonstrating interest.

Maybe it was complete chance, or maybe it wasn't. It made me consider the potential danger of a direct propaganda spigot from the Chinese government to today's youth.

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It's not complete chance, but it also is how their live algorithm tends to work. After watching a live for a couple minutes, it seems to come back into the for you feed after some scrolling, even multiple times. Probably because its shown most people in that scenario are in fact still interested in the live feed, but got bored with the immediate proceedings and may get drawn back in after some time has passed.

In terms of showing the live feed initially, there is obviously a lot of interest and anger on Tiktok about the potential ban, thus broadening the reach of that content.

I noticed this too, but it sincerely just seems like self preservation. Should the US government come after me after being lobbied by Meta and other conglomerates I surely would be "loud" about it too.

> It made me consider the potential danger of a direct propaganda spigot from the Chinese government to today's youth.

What does everyone here think will happen on TikTok when the PRC invades Taiwan? TikTok will be a flood of "don't get involved", "The West caused this", and other PRC state propaganda immediately.

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