TikTok 'aggressively' taking down videos about Bin Laden 'Letter to America' | Hacker News Reader

TikTok 'aggressively' taking down videos about Bin Laden 'Letter to America'

theguardian.com

Usually advertising partners are pretty chill about their $320,000 branded hashtag campaigns promoting Al Qaeda content, concerning to see this.

Perhaps advertisers controlling all the information most people see is a bad thing?

That document is one of the most important things written during the Global War on Terror and it’s a primary source. It gives insight into his mindset, what made him angry, why he did this. Yet the document didn’t have a significant impact on the course of events, it has minimal propaganda value.

It’s a very important document to read because the lessons of the Global War of Terror have been forgotten in the Gaza strip.

One could almost say our former president warned us previously about the devastating Jewish control of capital and about a day that would come when it would enslave us.

Alternatively, we can recognize the blood soaked arena that is the intersection between capital, government, and political interest, letting us empathize with the team(s) of the short form video equivalent to Twitter not wanting the responsibility of distributing UGC insight into the mind behind 9/11 while running a business already under scrutiny.

The minimal propaganda value of Osama bin Laden on Israel-Palestine can always be read courtesy of the USG: https://www.dni.gov/files/documents/ubl2016/english/To%20the...

And the guardian has removed their copy of the letter, it seems. I guess the media doesn't trust the public to have any information they haven't predigested.

This is interesting because it highlights just how fast propaganda can propagate… I don’t know how we are going to fight the onslaught of disinformation we are about to get not to mention the weaponization of AI generated disinformation.

Maybe advertisers are the solution.. they won’t want to be associated with disinformation.

I hate TikTok as much as the next guy, but this feels like a manufactured controversy. You can always find a small minority of people advocating for extremism on any social media platform, and I don't see any evidence to suggest that TikTok has some major Al-Qaeda problem that the other platforms don't. A lot of this feels like The Guardian trying to cover their asses, since they were the ones that published the letter and only took it down yesterday. It would be pretty infuriating if this sparks some massive censorship campaign while mainstream companies get off scot-free.

Noam Chomsky argues the United States is a leading terrorist state. Does that mean TikTok is going to take down anything related to US foreign policy?

Are regular people not allowed to read or share content created by anyone the US government doesn’t like? Are people not allowed to form their own opinions?

What a joke. The “free” democratic west where communication is limited by a handful of large corporate interests and a murderous government that pressures them to censor content they don’t like.

TikTok may be owned by a Chinese company but there is no doubt in my mind they are being pressured by US authorities to control what is disseminated on their platform. I don’t think congress just forgot about wanting to ban TikTok, I think it’s likely they were able to rein in control of the platform.

What Osama Bin Laden did in 2001 isn’t justifiable but neither is decades of US interventionist foreign policy that has left millions of innocent people dead or living in poverty and continues to the present day.

TikTok is a private company and your use of their service is not a right.

My criticism of there being a few corporate gatekeepers of communication that are bullied by the government to censor content it doesn’t like is valid. You’re free to believe whatever neocon libertarian nonsense you wish.

I don’t support any government bullying of private companies, although I’m sure any level of consistency would be unfamiliar to people like you.

Should TikTok be allowed to control what goes onto their service? That’s a yes or no question.

The government bullying left-leaning foreign governments is chill though, right guys?

No. The US government should stay out of other countries business’. They should even stay out of NATO. But again, I’m sure you don’t have that level of consistency.

I’m an anarchist. The US government shouldn’t exist in the first place.

if not them, then you! or roving gun gangs :)

Does your anarchism extend to the aforementioned left leaning foreign governments?

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Oh this is hilarious. Not only do you confirm that you wouldn't support them doing what they choose to with their service in the absence of government intervention, you would actively support the same government intervention you pretended to be against if it meant you could force them to do something you benefit from.

If you wanted to prove that consistency wasn't exclusive to me you've done a pretty poor job. Combing through someone's account to avoid a yes or no question is especially pathetic.

Wow the world has nuances. Who would’ve thought?

Expecting people on this site to thing is a little much, tbf.

We've banned this account for repeatedly breaking the site guidelines.

Please don't create accounts to break HN's rules with. It will eventually get your main account banned as well.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

We've banned this account for using HN exclusively for ideological battle. Regardless of your ideology, that's not what HN is for, and it destroys what is for.

Normally I'd warn someone before banning, but (a) I couldn't find a single comment in your account history that wasn't like this, and (b) you've been breaking other site guidelines regularly as well, such as the ones against snark, name-calling, and so on.

If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

Since we recently asked you to stop repeatedly breaking the site guidelines and you've since done it many times, I've banned this account.

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I believe that in a free democratic society people should be allowed to read a letter written by an Islamic fundamentalist who orchestrated the largest terrorist attack against the United States.

I believe people should be allowed to form their own opinions about his motives beyond what US government propagandists want the US public to believe.

Contrary to public belief, I don’t think they did it because they hate our freedom. And I think if you do believe that and you also see no problem with platform after platform trying to scrub the document from public view then you’ve got your head on backwards.

People aren’t allowed to read something because it isn’t on TikTok is certainly not a take I’d expect to hear from someone rallying against America.

Typically that’s a right wing conservative argument that Trump and Fox News parrot about Alex Jones and what not.

I think most would agree that writing shouldn't get banned like 1984 style, but tiktok picks and chooses random videos to shove in people's faces to watch, so it's not like users would have looked up this letter and were prevented from reading it, it sounds like they're trying to prevent videos about it from being shoved in people's faces who weren't looking for it, it's a bit different don't you think?

And what if the corporate gatekeepers censor themselves due to market forces instead? Like advertisers threatening to pull funding because they don’t think it’s a good look for them.

Outside of coercion from government, self-censorship is just an expression of personal liberty and freedom of association, isn't it?

You can't believe in free speech and also believe platforms should be forced to publish speech they don't want, or advertisers to associate themselves with it.

Similarly, the airspeed of a European swallow is roughly 20.1 miles per hour.

Chomsky argues many things but the only things you should take from him without a whole tablespoon of salt has to do with linguistics. Certainly not geopolitics.

Except for the incredibly inconvenient and annoying coincidence that he happens to be right in his critiques of US foreign policy most of the time.

I first read Chomsky in the '80s for his work on grammer, I'm not sold (nor are others) on his ideas of universal grammer or innate syntactic knowledge.

Contrariwise his book later that decade Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media seems to be pretty much bang on the money outlining propaganda as an emergent behaviour that doesn't require an excess of particular directed pressure to come about.

ITT: humans who agree with their own opinions. Wow, how rare!

The idea that China is hoping for some Islamist radical campaign against the USA is misplaced. China fundamentally wants order within its borders (defined as China defines them), and terrorism against any major state actor doesn't align with its goals. Its vision of a new world order is a collection of states dividing the world into spheres of influence, without individualistic activism, violent or otherwise, disrupting state power within those spheres. More likely than not, the US didn't even need to request anything of TikTok to get this censorship: it arose organically.

> China fundamentally wants order within its borders

Aside, I have a pet theory involving how the game Battlefield 4 (2013) was banned in China. The plot does not depict China as some inherently Anti-Freedom Giant Evil Empire, but I think that--in the eyes of Chinese censors--it did something even worse: It suggested that there were cracks in the empire, that it was even possible for a rogue Chinese admiral to (in the then-future year 2020) stage a credible coup against the Chinese establishment.

I didn't follow that at all, but it seems plausible to me. "China is an evil empire hellbent on world domination" can reasonably be written off as shallow propaganda by a foreign adversary; "China is a fragile coalition of different groups that could easily shatter under stress" is far more dangerous to the CCP's ideology of a unified state, people, and most importantly party to lead them. The former seems like nonsense to anyone who has lived in China, while the latter resonates. The latter also has the shadow of history cast over it: the greatest threats to China have usually been internal division and discord, not external threats.

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