Celebrities say they are being censored by TikTok after speaking out against ICE
pride.com
pride.com
Altman and Thiel have long had YC connections (obv); and for the last year or so Garry Tan and PG have been full-throatedly cheerleading Musk and DOGE on their Twitter pages.
Then there's the many connections between YC and the 'defense' industry; you know, the one making billions of dollars from wars that people speak out about on social media.
It's very easy to explain why posts get flagged here. It's a lot harder to digest why they don't get unflagged. Especially when all the posts about it are quickly removed, every single one.
Followed by the usual sycophantic support: "You're doing a great job dang, we all love you so don't worry about these cranks", and "Well I'VE never noticed any censorship so it obviously doesn't exist" (Yeah dude that's how it works lol).
My view is that these are essentially the same group. "Not wanting to see politics" is itself just a partisan view in favor of whatever the Status Quo currently is. So if you're going through and flagging articles describing wrongdoing or calling for change, because they are "political," then you're just operating in the service of whoever is currently in power.
Given the consistency and speed of flags though, I don't think #2 is just "organic" flagging.
Thousands of people view these very quickly once they hit the frontpage, its enough 0.1% of those are willing to flag to see consistent near instant flagging.
But some people do that regardless who is currently in power, what do you call that? I'd call that "not wanting to see politics" and not being partisan.
Dan sold out his moral compass.
Funnily enough, these flagged topics seem to spark a lot of conversation, and the voices of the government supporters are not heard here...So they just flag and move on, not even trying to defend their position
Hard to do when your position is essentially indefensible.
First, there is no evidence that they were censored because of keywords. Crazily enough, they may have been censored by god (or simply datacenter issues).
Second, if there were such censorship features, then it shows that the US was right to buy TikTok. Imagine if National Socialists or those who are against liberty and justice had access to such features.
Third, we are in a time of great danger, thus requiring great actions. What is the danger? It cannot be explained. What is the solution? To re-use the past. In early 1000s, the Germans were both holy and roman and justly created living space in the East. Hundreds of years later, we started Manifest Destiny. Similar to 南进 of the Vietnamese, we should recognize the job has not been finished. This requires rewriting history. While China existed for 5000 years, the US has existed for 6000. The Jewish, Christian, and American spirits merged together, and people of 100s of different dialects were pulled into the area, and the wave of freedom moved back abroad. This was the formation of the American language, a true melting pot. While many Americans have genetic ties to Europe, they have one difference, a spirit that is free and mobile. Unlike the Europeans who stay in one place and look down at the wandering Roma, the Americans are inherently mobile, experiencing new ways at life. This is the Spirit and what allows for Americans to manifest the destiny of the world from East to West.
I comment a lot about these matters on Reddit, and I'm very much against all that's happening in the USA.
But the reality is that the discourse i see here in these types of political posts is the same as on Reddit and the like. (Whether For or against )
It would be great if somehow the discussion added something different. Like the post about Iran censorship and the suggestions on technology to bypass it (I learned about Snowflake) .
But the problem with US related politics is that HN people are very emotionally invested (being Americans most of them) and that makes the discussion become very visceral.
They offer a chance for awareness, which is literally step one. Americans are some of the most propagandized people on Earth, and most don't even know it.
It's crucial that the tech community develops more awareness around censorship - no small share of the responsibility is with us.
Censoring stories about censorship, on a premier tech community and investment forum, just because the discussion gets 'visceral' is simply capitulation to any entity willing to try and make a discussion toxic. We need to do a lot better than that.
He's not even what I would call MAGA, but it still seemed like a gulf that is impossible to bridge.
They're not entirely different though. The similarities are critical to understand; the parts where both parties differ wildly from reality in the exact same way.
For example: 98.15% of 2024 voters didn't hold openly arming genocide as a red line for their vote. I don't believe you can blame the 2 party system for that, not entirely - every adult human has an extremely clear moral and legal duty not to be voting for anyone arming genocide.
Speaking to Americans about this will furnish extremely consistent and predictable responses; none of which hold the smallest amount of weight. There is no rationale for genocide, ever. There is never a good reason to enable the mass slaughter of children, the bombing of an entire healthcare system, the mass targeting of journalists and their families, the poisoning of wells, etc etc etc.
Yet no matter how predictable the responses, there's still no getting through. We all know how delusional the MAGA crowd can be - but Biden repeated lies about 40 beheaded babies long after they were debunked to virtually zero pushback. That lie, and the one about mass rape, was used to 'justify' genocide. Millions of people still believe it. No one was ever held responsible for those lies, not so much as a slap on the wrist.
Biden vetoed 4 UN ceasefires against a genocide that had been already called out by virtually every relevant human rights org. And even after those vetoes, people like AOC - the supposed left wing of the supposed left wing party - told us he was "working tirelessly for a ceasefire". The entire political and media class chose to overlook this, and instead get worked up about, Idk, the 8 trans people competing in professional sports instead.
A party that can inspire such loyalty that it's members overlook participation in genocide can only be described as a cult. The blue cultists says the red cult are in a cult, and the red cultists say the blue cultists are in a cult.
And then there's the other third of the voting population - the faction who intensely dislike both parties, but can't be bothered to vote for a third option even against the most documented genocide in history. Absolutely astounding propaganda work.
And that's just regular people. Imagine how much worse it is for people in the military, where only Murdoch media is permitted and you can get jailed for reading things like Wikileaks. Imagine growing up in a 'privileged' elite bubble, where poverty is "necessary" and "deserved", where every billionaire "earned" their wealth, where some families with generational wealth are simply genetically "superior". Ugh.
So yes, many people live in wildly different realities - but the parts where the blue cult and the red cult have the exact same opinions, and so do even the "independents" (again, things like the 'necessity' of tolerating genocide from your leaders, or the socialist evils of feeding hungry children)... Wow. Truly, there is a vast, almost unimaginable gulf between America and the rest of the world.
... And they think they're free. They think the US is hated for its freedoms. It's fascinating, and terrifying - and the tech community has played no small part in every aspect of things getting this way, for decades.
This is sad to me because I really want to hear the other perspective, and there is no place that exists (that I know of) for people who disagree with each other to have a real conversation. Nothing left but echo chambers.
But I think HN falls into this trap because the down vote button is used when people disagree with the other person, which imo is a misappropriation and what prevents people from sharing unpopular opinions.
Here, and on reddit, and anywhere with voting or people caring about the number next to their username, it's the most popular opinions at the top and everything else at the bottom or flagged. I genuinely don't understand what people get out of that.
And I guess I should specify that this is also why political topics get flagged. Sure, it probably has a lot to do with people flagging stuff that goes against their beliefs. But I also think that political threads here offer absolutely nothing aside from reaffirming existing beliefs. No one is trying to change anyone's minds, everyone is just yelling at each other. Threads about actual tech stuff can be very interesting and I do learn things from them sometimes. But political threads here are worthless.
edit: I do not mean /pol/, no one should ever go there
What you see is a mirage.
The problem with 4chan is that the loudest voices are the ones that have no lives, and can flood the board with their bullshit. You could be having a conversation with someone in one thread, meanwhile they're busy posting about the same damn thing in 3-4 other threads at the same time.
And that's assuming the person on the other end is real. These days, there are bot armies of paid shills or AI to worry about, flooding the zone with their narrative to the point where your voice gets drowned out.
You cannot have a decent social space without some form of active moderation and some protection against sockpuppeting. Not every place with both of those gets it right, but without both you're guaranteed to fail, and 4chan has neither.
I guess wanting to hear the other side's perspective is not looked upon favorably here, just like everywhere else.
When you have a handful of sentences in your post, it may well be the one you're not expecting that triggered the downvotes.
But most people who talk politics aren't really interested in changing their perspective. That's why these echo chambers exist.
That's not a solution at all, the point isn't to hear unopposed, highly selective talking points, we know all that already, the media is full of it. The point is to see them defend their positions against fairly simple criticism which they block and the mainstream media doesn't address.
Why are you're assuming flagging indicates support of the government?
Maybe they're flagging because it's a topic that will generate much more heat than light. It doesn't have to be deeper than that.
Fascism and authoritarianism can come in both left, right, color, sizes, sex and age.
So I can only assume this one is flagged because the source is pride.com
Make of that what you will.
Only TikTok in the U.S., though; everywhere else it's Bytedance still.
21st century brownshirts, if you will.
Which is hilarious sentence now because this government so pro free speech!!! sarcasm*
But seriously this is something that if my main gig was to create music or some art form, I wouldn't want to be on a corp run platform. I would want to own it myself and the all that data.
Social media that actually have a large audience and that cannot be easily pressured by the US government?
So the best we can do is anecdotal examples. And it’s also obvious that Trump avoided banning TikTok for months, illegally, because he wanted to have another platform serve as a mouthpiece. He now has that by forcing a sale of TikTok to his friend, Larry Ellison.
It should be fucking table stakes for being able to run a business with that much power and influence.
But I'm leaning towards incompetence. Some US generated stuff was most likely moved to Oracle shitboxes, causing encoding issues and unreliable streaming.
...or it's malice and they're scanning the data and intentionally throttling traffic for unwanted content.
https://i.redd.it/2stz13v1bsfg1.jpeg
There are quite a few reports on Reddit of users having any dm using that word being deleted.
https://old.reddit.com/r/TikTok/comments/1qnxxgi/were_being_...
It’s really hard to say which video will work or not. What people react to and what not.
All I’m saying is that this could also potentially be explained by "The Algorithm" per se.
Also, do you mean minority of the total US population or minority of the voting population?
For one reference point I fully support ICE. And I think it's wild you have local and state politicians encouraging actions against federal agents who are enforcing federal law.
The Gestapo, too, was federal agents enforcing federal law.
https://today.yougov.com/politics/articles/53939-more-americ...
https://www.theverge.com/news/867625/tiktok-down-weekend-bro...
Anyway, considering that the purchase of the American TikTok was done with a purpose and there is documented collusion between the involved tech Billionaires and the political class behind the street executions in American cities that drive those protests, I wouldn’t be surprised that they are actually throttling this time.
You may have gone onto the platform and seen nothing but the same sort of vapid memes as anywhere else, but you see that's just how insidious and clever those Chinese are.
We're not exerting control over the narrative, we're protecting the truth from foreign influence.
There is no genocide in ba sing se.
They raise alarms because they have low TikTok view counters. But mass killings of Iranian protesters is Iran's own business.
This is the problem with any kind of censoring media. The initial intentions of those policies might have been good, but these kind of policies can so easily be abused for malign intentions.
No one can know what TikTok censors or penalizes in its algorithms. All other social media platforms are equally intransparent, what is new is that TikTok is not American.
https://www.theverge.com/news/867625/tiktok-down-weekend-bro...
https://www.npr.org/2026/01/27/nx-s1-5689104/tiktok-epstein-...
incredible beyond words that this was a unanimous decision by the supreme court. letting the us government set up whatever arraigned marriage it felt like for buying a social network is some wild meddling with businesses. and here we are, with the ultra capitalists doing exactly what they want to with one of the most popular social networks.
excellent write up for this absolute madness of a court decision, TikTok v. Garland and the First Amendment Anticanon by Evelyn Douek, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6118706
[1] https://www.milwaukeeindependent.com/featured/calling-commun...
I've heard people say housing policy has failed because it's too neoliberal meaning too free market, and then other people say it's failed because it's too neoliberal i.e. too much government intervention.
Neoliberalism is basically just markets-by-default and evidence-based alternatives when they fail.
That's not though. I think the name is from the 'New classical school', oppose Keynesian economics. I think the meaning drifted to mean supply-side economics (direct inheritor from the Chicago school and the new classical school).
Neoliberalism can't be 'evidence-based' when it rejects basic observation (like those from MMT. You can reject MMT 'solutions', that's fine, I do too. Don't reject evidence though).
I think your criticism of it as not being 'evidence based' because it 'rejects basic observation' is emotive but fundamentally it's still a technical criticism, not a moral one. Neocon criticisms of neoliberalism (even if they misidentify what that means) revolve around the decay of traditional values, for example. Socdems around inequality (which to them is ipso facto bad).
But that's true that a lot of socdems don't really understand economic theory and so some criticism seems empty, because they repeat a criticism they did not understood. And that's ok, because macroeconomics is the less scientific of all social science field (for good reason), and who would want to bother with it (unless you're an idiot who took that in college because it seemed to pair well with math :/)
Whatever the rules are, people end up adapting to and gaming them to entrench and grow their own position, typically at the expense of everyone else.
That’s a contradiction.
It's a contradiction only if you understand democracy as a theoretical ideal. Practical democracies, as implemented in western countries, in recent decades proven themselves to be completely controllable by capital, both the democratic elites and democratic masses.
I think we should rather go with practical outcome not the stated theoretical ideas. It's also a good way of evaluating communism and probably other systems.
"You mean, it comes from a world of lizards?"
"No," said Ford, who by this time was a little more rational and coherent than he had been, having finally had the coffee forced down him, "nothing so simple. Nothing anything like so straightforward. On its world, the people are people. The leaders are lizards. The people hate the lizards and the lizards rule the people."
"Odd," said Arthur, "I thought you said it was a democracy."
"I did," said Ford. "It is."
"So," said Arthur, hoping he wasn't sounding ridiculously obtuse, "why don't people get rid of the lizards?"
"It honestly doesn't occur to them," said Ford. "They've all got the vote, so they all pretty much assume that the government they've voted in more or less approximates to the government they want."
"You mean they actually vote for the lizards?"
"Oh yes," said Ford with a shrug, "of course."
"But," said Arthur, going for the big one again, "why?"
"Because if they didn't vote for a lizard," said Ford, "the wrong lizard might get in. Got any gin?"
- Douglas Adams, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Although re your actual point: the current admin only gifts things like this to a chosen few; a small subset of those with extreme capital. So it seems much more appropriate to call it cronyism, or some such thing, rather than capitalism in the sense of merely controlling capital.
And if they wouldn’t, they would be blocked or prevented of doing business in the US.
Wasn't there something about an amendment to their constitution? I believe it might've even been the first? Something about freedom of speech?
Maybe I'm just misremembering, but I could've sworn conservatives kept harping on about it.
https://judiciary.house.gov/media/press-releases/google-admi...
It only restricts the Federal government (later extended to state governments IIRC?)
This is one of many reasons Federal government is now partnered with private business.
They got Paramount and CBS and TikTok, are allied with Twitter, and still have a chance of grabbing Warner.
I don’t think American billionaires ever particularly liked Murdoch, an Australian, controlling so much of the media environment in their country. Maybe they’ll make an offer for Fox News that the Murdoch heirs can’t refuse.
This probably means everyone else is also getting their reach crippled.
Remember that even with clear video evidence, the administration lies about the events and tries to spin it as domestic terrorism.
So imagine what they are doing, and will do, without video evidence.
This is probably one of the darkest times in America... You have an administration that normalizes lying and violence, and a tens of millions of Americans that are choosing to close their eyes and suspend their morals because they're scared and confused.