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Comment by janalsncm | Hacker News Reader

> I know for a fact you get propaganda videos shoved in between your feed of 'good stuff' that you enjoy watching

No idea how you could know this. I have never seen any concrete evidence that there are propaganda videos interlaced into people’s feeds. Everything I have heard is hypothetical. “China could” do this or that. If there were anything more than conjecture it would be huge news.

Casey Newton said on Hard Fork that he started a new account recently as an experiment and didn’t mention anything about China propaganda videos.

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Here in my country, Chinese propaganda is vast in TikTok because of the disputes in the South China Sea, Scarborough Shoal and others. Maybe your feed is different since you aren't neighbors with China.

Fascinating, could you share an example link?

I don't use the app personally but I have friends who use TikTok and sometimes they would just casually tell me "oh yeah sometimes it shows me weird stuff like nazi videos, I just scroll past them"

The app's design is to get you to mindlessly doomscroll and not really think too hard about what it's showing you. If it shows you something insane occasionally it's no big deal, it's just the algorithm trying something new right?

It's very difficult to show any concrete evidence for how a secretive algorithm controlled by an adversary behaves. In an ideal world the burden should be on the platforms to prove that their algorithms are fair and not biasing towards certain viewpoints, but that might never happen.

I mean, if that's the standard, I've also unfortunately been exposed to more Nazi content than I'd like on Twitter/Reddit/etc. Should they be banned as well?

I've been using TikTok for four years and never once seen anything resembling Nazi content.

I opened a new account in Canada last night due to the ban. I saw a lot of Canadian memes, and a ton of wildly incomprehensible foreign material from every corner of the globe as the algo tried to figure me out. But none of it looked remotely political or ideological in any way.

If there is propaganda it is very covert. Compared with X where my feed is maybe 80% overt propaganda, including from the owner of the platform himself.

"The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist"

You don’t need to know how the algorithm works you just need to demonstrate an effect it has. As of yet I have not seen that, and I am sure many journalists would love to prove it does.

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