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Comment by throw0101a | Hacker News Reader

A paper out of Rutger's:

> For pop-culture hashtags, the ratio between platforms is consistently range-bound:

> Conversely, the ratios we found for topics sensitive to the Chinese Government were completely out-of-bounds.

> The data below illustrates that across topics directly sensitive to the Chinese Government, relevant hashtags are dramatically underrepresented on TikTok vs. Instagram.

> Given the unanimity of anomalies, we expanded our research to topics relevant to the Chinese Government’s geopolitical interests: 1) Ukraine-Russia War; 2) Kashmir Secessionism; 3) Israel-Hamas War. There too, we found relevant hashtags are dramatically underrepresented on TikTok vs. Instagram.

* https://networkcontagion.us/wp-content/uploads/A-Tik-Tok-ing...

* Via: https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/tiktok-is-just-the-beginning

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Instagram is hardly a reliable benchmark given that it has been widely criticised for its suppression of Palestinian content. [1]

[1] https://www.hrw.org/report/2023/12/21/metas-broken-promises/...

Why is this not reliable for other topics than Palestine?

If one topic is being provably artificially suppressed, how is any data reliable? Instagram is not a good baseline -perhaps no large social is.

That's a really weak argument. Let's clarify:

1. An anti-free-speech government that arrests people for discussing certain topics that controls a company that seems not to show certain topics much.

2. The company doesn't make any claim it's not filtering out anti-china topics.

3. We find strong evidence that platforms don't match.

4. You want to throw out all evidence and blindly presume complete innocence because you think 1 of 10 topics on instagram isn't easy to explain?

Feels hard to believe you could come to that conclusion in good faith.

So what does that say when they’re even more underrepresented on TikTok as GP showed?

That's not what the paper is saying. Hashtags like #PrayForIsrael or #IsraelUnderAttack are way lower on Tiktok than on Instagram[1]. They aren't talking about anti-genocide or pro-Palestinian hashtags.

Basically, Instagram is way more pro-Israel than Tiktok.

Many people think that that is why Tiktok is coming under fire. Because China is ambivalent towards the Israel/Hamas conflict whereas many power structures in the U.S. are very pro-Israel.

[1] https://networkcontagion.us/wp-content/uploads/A-Tik-Tok-ing... page 14

This feels pretty convincing to me.

It also feels to me like we shouldn't have to reverse-engineer platforms to deduce whether they are pushing an agenda... If they aren't doing any interfering then they should simply put out an official statement clarifying that.

Are you saying that if they just assert they're not doing any interfering, we should uncritically take them at their word?

No, I'm saying that if they aren't even willing to assert innocence of manipulating what trends then we certainly shouldn't presume innocence.

I'd like for them to testify under oath about how they alter what is trending, then I'd like for us to independently verify those those results to the best of our ability.

That I agree with, but the way your first post was worded, it sounded like the opposite.

Or they found Instagram is censoring things, and boosting others, as demanded by the US government

Which we know to be true for Covid or Palestine/Israel

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