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Comment by hetman | Hacker News Reader

Anyone who's used TikTok knows the platform is heavily moderated and not at all an "anything goes" paradise for the exchange of free ideas. So, if, as you suggested, the moderation does not favour the US government's mandate, then the obvious question one should be asking is: whose mandate does it favour?

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False dichotomy. It doesn't need to favor anyone else's mandate. We are observing a lack of favor to any one mandate. The US mandate is to suppress "anti-US views" (in quotations because what the American populace thinks is anti-US/pro-US and what the American government thinks is anti-US/pro-US is oftentimes drastically different).

What people really mean (without even knowing it) when they say tiktok pushes propaganda is that it isn't suppressing the propaganda they don't like. They mean that after the "funniest Trump moments" video with 10 million views, there shouldn't be a video about the evils of Black Rock, it should instead be one of the "US military is EPIC" phonk edits.

Again, this would only be true if the platform had a laissez-faire attitude toward content, which it clearly does not. What can and can not be shown on the platform is heavily moderated, therefore there is _some_ mandate being fulfilled.

Now we've already agreed that it's not the US's mandate, and I suppose you could argue that it is not the mandate of any of the US's opponents ether. Whether there are any geopolitical entities who don't seem to have the same balance of criticism vs. praise as the others, I'll leave as an exercise for the reader.

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