Alt Text:
An edited meme image featuring two stills from MegaMind. The top still shows Titan speaking to a the mayor, who is labelled “TikTokers getting censored by China” and saying “You have freed us!” overlaid. Titan has a US flag as a label, and is saying “Oh, I wouldn’t say freed, more like under new management.”
How dare the US ban my favorite psyops platform run by a hostile authoritarian government!
Shhh. The Republicans might want it now.
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I’d honestly like to know why (for real, no judging, just curious)
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Jokes on you, our propaganda is also anti-US interests.
I never thought about it that way. Basically any algorithm that sorts posts could be argued to be censorship. But you can’t sort based on straight vote either because of fake accounts and bots. I guess we are just doomed to be manipulated.
I think they’re referring to US talk about possibly banning tiktok.
Platform censorship is different than state censorship, and content curation is different than censorship.
It’s “I think you’ll like this” vs “I don’t want you to see this”.
Platforms can still participate in the “I don’t want you to see this”/“I want you to see this” game. Governments aren’t the only parties that benefit from looking to control public sentiment.
I never said otherwise, I just said that there’s a difference between the three things. 😊
A curation algorithm isn’t censorship, but a a biased one would be.
They are all biased, often deliberately so. Whether you think the US forcing ByteDance to sell TikTok to a US company will have a positive outcome or not, the reason the US is doing it is so they have control over the information being shared on TikTok instead of China. The method the US uses to control information is different from China but no less effective. It’s arguably more effective because the passive manipulation of information the US carries out is less transparent, making it harder to determine exactly how the narrative is being manipulated.
Okay?
Literally none of that has anything to do with there being three different things.
Showing someone videos related to ones they like is different from suppressing or promoting videos with content your company has reason to want suppressed or promoted, which is different from the government doing or compelling others to do the same.
The point I’m trying to make is that this:
Showing someone videos related to ones they like
Is most often a trojan horse for this:
suppressing or promoting videos with content your company has reason to want suppressed or promoted
Which is basically the same as this:
the government doing or compelling others to do the same.
But more passive and less transparent.
Alright. I understand your point. I don’t believe there’s as much coordination as you do, but that’s fine.
Do you understand what I’m saying, which is that there are three different things? And that a person saying “as long as there’s an algorithm there’s censorship” might be conflating some of those categories? Lemmy sorts and tries to present relevant data, but I have no reason to believe that it’s engaged in explicit or implicit state level censorship or propaganda.
How is bias not inherent to curation? Preference for one thing over another is bias. Curation is literally showing you things it thinks you’re biased to like. These groups aren’t revealing their secret sauce for curation algorithms so we’d never know anyway.
There’s prioritizing the viewers preferences, and then there’s prioritizing the platforms preferences.
If I don’t show you a video because I don’t think you’d enjoy it, that’s different from not showing it to you because I don’t want you to see it.
User preference is a type of bias, but you wouldn’t typically call a platform “biased” unless it was putting it or some third parties preferences ahead of the users.
If I don’t show you a video because I don’t think you’d enjoy it, that’s different from not showing it to you because I don’t want you to see it.
I wouldn’t disagree those are different reasons for not wanting to show a video but both are curations based on biases.
I guess I just have a more neutral connotation for bias than “biased against you for others’ own interests” and so I didn’t find bias to be a useful term here to distinguish the reasons behind curation choices.
Nothing really in disagreement here, just fiddling with common usage.
To me bias from a service or platform would be a bias that’s contrary to what was expected or requested.
It’s when they put their finger on the scale.Bias, as a term, has heavy connotations of being unfair, or to have distorted results, which is why I kinda shy away from using it to describe “everything working as expected and no one would complain if they knew the details”.
If the grocer tampers with the scale so you take home less carrots than you wanted, that’s not fair, and so we would they they biased the scales.
Sounds like we agree, but I also like talking wording sometimes. :)
So, you think it’s a protected right to speak freely on a privately owned platform? Tiktok, Xitter, etc., don’t need to make allowances for anyone. They exist to make money off of their users.
It astounds me to this day that people don’t understand the basic tenets of social media: if it’s free, YOU are the product.
Legally permissable censorship is still censorship. Just because you’re allowed to do something doesn’t mean that it isn’t that thing, and it’s silly to argue that because someone is allowed to do something means that people can’t complain about it.
Maybe, but the expectation that your can also speak freely on the platform is protected by the almighty capitalism compact we implicitly embrace as Americans and other (not all) 1st world citizens.
Just because you think you have a right doesn’t mean you do.
That’s valid if someone was talking about the first amendment, but that wasn’t mentioned.
Fun fact, “show whatever has the most votes” and “show whatever was published most recently” and even “show something completely at random” are all also algorithms.
They can use yt shorts to deliver the same messages they were delivering.
Chinese propaganda masquerading as a meme.
Sense, or Ship
