cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/4324146
Comrades, we are entering into a new stage of the American Empire. There is no doubt that fascism has won over liberalism, and the contradictions of capital will grow ever sharper. In the past few days I have seen a deluge of posts outside this space, across TikTok and other social media, laying this vague claim that “Something is wrong with TikTok”. Even here, I’ve seen two highly upvoted threads swallowing this liberal narrative by the hook. Let me be clear, this notion that the ushering in of fascism flying the banner of Donald Trump, has somehow, over a 12-hour period, turned TikTok into TruthTok, is pure liberal hallucination.
Liberals are finally waking from their 4-year-long political coma. They have mourned the loss of their coconut queen and did nothing to steel themselves against the incoming reality that is a second term of Donald John Trump. Long before they began mourning, while they were still in their deep slumber, their liberal bubble, their KHive, was eroding from underneath their feet. In a moment of pure drama, TikTok went dark, only to be resurrected by the man they hate the most. When it emerged from its grave, and thanked the McLich King for his dark gift, liberals bullshit detectors were sounding at full alarm. The problem with the liberal bullshit detector, however, is that it belongs to a liberal, unable to identify fantasy from reality. As they returned to TikTok, the stench of Trump’s dark business tainted their senses, and they began to hallucinate from the fumes. These hallucinations culminated in the list below, which I’m sure you’ve seen:
Much of this list falls into a few categories: False, True but long-standing, or Unverifiable.
Donald Trump (Negative remarks removed), this is a transposition of this claim: “Tiktok censoring searches disfavorable of Donald Trump”, which is an extension of this claim: “You cannot search Donald Trump Rigged Election”, which is patently false.
If you were to open TikTok and search for “Rigged Election” and any other combination of terms, you will get nothing back. Combating misinformation on social media platforms has its roots in the 2016 elections. If you remember, Hillary Clinton and liberals at large blamed Russian Troll Farms and other forms of Russian backed disinformation campaigns, as well as direct collaboration with the Trump campaign, for losing the election. Even in 2016, the liberal bullshit detector was out in full force. We’ve long combatted this tendency from them, both with H. Clinton and with Harris, by pointing out just how flawed these two people were, and just how incompetently their campaigns were run.
From the Russiagate fallout grew a self-imposed practice of fact checking across many social media platforms. In 2016, Facebook (having been embroiled in the Cambridge Analytica scandal) began its fact checking in partnership with the AP. In 2019, YouTube began to provide fact checking on its platform, after misinformation campaigns, spread via WhatsApp in India turned deadly, hoping to avoid a similar situation on their platform. TikTok has its own Misinformation Policy, which mentions election misinformation several times, and one would think it would be enough for a burgeoning media platform to emulate the policies of its cohorts.
As we all know, in 2020, election misinformation only became of even higher focus. TikTok, like every other social media company, is doing the bare minimum in combating election misinformation, and likely has always been. This isn’t something that has been implemented overnight, and as we’ll see, the political nature of TikTok is something that has been changing for a very long time.
Many liberals, and even some leftists, claim that content about Palestine is being suppressed as of the 12-hour blackout. We had a thread here just yesterday that said comments of “Free Palestine!” were being removed. I’ve since tested that, as a US user of TikTok, and have yet to have that comment removed. In fact, the video I posted the comment on was from the Daily Mail. Except, that doesn’t mean that this isn’t happening. You have to remember, liberals have been sleeping for 4 years. They are only now learning that TikTok has been taking deliberate actions to combat “antisemitic” behavior on their platform.
In 2020, Donald Trump issued an executive order that was a failed attempt to get TikTok to divest its business dealings from ByteDance. His primary motivation was centered around right-wing censorship broadly. This was in the lead up to the 2020 Olympics, and conversation about Trans Athletes was bubbling up within the alternative media space. While his attempt to blacklist the app failed, it did succeed in other ways. One of those ways was the transition of TikTok operations and data warehousing onto American soil, named “Project Texas”. This project was a lot more than simply moving the data from wherever it was, to the US.
Project Texas coincided with a hiring spree for domestic TikTok operations. MintPress shows that this action taken by Trump led to not only the rehousing of TikTok’s data, but a staffing boom that consisted of many state aligned individuals with a history working at places like Albright Stonebridge Group, NATO Association of Canada, SecDev Foundation, and even NATO itself, some who specialized in “phycological operations”. The net result, as the article points out early on, is that:
TikTok itself has taken steps to align itself with U.S. government policy, deleting more than 320,000 Russian accounts and removing at least 41,000 videos peddling misinformation about the war. In addition to this, it has placed warning labels marked “Russia state-controlled media” on 49 accounts linked to the Russian government. Like other big social media platforms, it has not done the same to Western state-owned outlets such as the BBC, RTÉ, or the CBC.
Near the tail end of last year, Alan Macleod, the author of the MintPress article I cited, has another outlining TikTok’s efforts to align with the state on Gaza as well. These are part of a three part series covering the growing alignment the platform has been ongoing since the 2020 executive order. In his latest article, it’s clear that after October 7th, the hiring machine inside TikToks operation had begun to spin up yet again. This time, pulling talent from Israel’s Unit 8200. This pool of talent would find themselves within the ranks of TikTok as part of the Trust and Safety team, as well as the head of Global Product Strategy and Operations, head of Global Marketing, Client Solutions Manager, Client Solutions Lead, Account Manager.
Since 2020, TikTok has been slowly integrating itself with the national security state of America and its allies, and since October 7th, with Israel’s inelegance wing. In many ways, TikTok now has a similar composition internally to other social media companies. Reddit, Meta, and Twitter all have state agents working within their equivalent Trust and Safety teams. The net result of this staffing has led to MintPress having their TikTok account banned in July 2023 and Mondoweiss having their account suspended in October 2023. Aljazeera reported that same month that users were seeing a marked decrease in traction on videos that contained the word “Genocide”. TikTok claims that this is not a result of policing political content, and that it simply enforces its Community Guidelines on all its content.
TikTok has been on this road to realignment for the past 5 years. It is an arc that we are now seeing the tail end of. Liberals think they can smell shit in the air as if they were Jim Lahey after crushing a gallon of hard liquor. The reality is, they’ve been boiling in this pot for a long time, living in brunch land. Who knows what the future will hold for your TikTok feed, but do not be fooled into thinking something has suddenly gone horribly wrong over at the TikTok offices. If you are reading these reports from liberals on the app, and also suddenly realizing the reality that’s been true this whole time, you need to kill the liberal in your head.
Implying that every claim about TikTok suddenly being censored is a form of “liberal hallucination” isn’t a good look. As far as I can tell, (part of?) your argument is that it has already been on that path for years and if you have evidence of such, then fair, that evidence is important for understanding its behavior now. But 1) That doesn’t on its own mean it didn’t get worse after the shutdown and 2) It doesn’t make someone a liberal to get people questioning TikTok w/ regards to censorship just because they don’t know everything about its history.
It’s a known thing that the TikTok ban was in some part motivated by trying to block pro-Palestine content: https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/lawmakers-tiktok-ban-pro-palestinian-content-1235016101/ (the convo referenced in the article happened in May of 2024, if the sources are correct)
So the suggestion that TikTok was already being subsumed by fascists and imperialists for years doesn’t make a huge amount of sense in that context, unless we are to believe the lawmakers were playing 5d chess and putting on a big show while they were already suppressing a pro-Palestine narrative that has nonetheless spread to help get word out about genocide? Or would the argument be that TikTok was already being taken over silently and the lawmakers were ignorant of that process?
Maybe I don’t quite understand what you’re going for here.
I agree with you that we shouldn’t dismiss out of hand the possibility that a real qualitative change has taken place as a result of the deals that have likely been made behind the scenes in order to stop the TikTok ban. That being said i think that:
the TikTok ban was in some part motivated by trying to block pro-Palestine content
and:
TikTok was already being subsumed by fascists and imperialists for years
are not mutually exclusive statements.
I think OP presents credible evidence for the latter. If that is true then all that the attempt to ban TikTok shows us is that they were still not satisfied with the degree of control that they had managed to achieve. Too much was still slipping through, and while they had a lot of success in suppressing the pro-Russian viewpoint, the pro-Palestine movement was just too powerful to do the same to. Now we will have to wait and see whether the fact that TikTok might (this is still up in the air as far as i can tell) not be banned after all is really an indication that it has finally been completely captured, or whether this was a real defeat for the imperialist narrative control apparatus.
Good points. I was musing over similar thoughts in my latest reply to RedWizard just now; if it may be that they were unhappy with the extent to which they’d managed to capture it through covert means and so turned more overt.
Sure. I’m happy to discuss my train of thought and observations.
Context: Before the 12-hour blackout on TikTok I noticed a trend among videos appearing in my feed expressing this feeling that “The relationship with TikTok will be tainted even if it comes back.” Which, I think, is a reasonable thing to feel. What had not crossed my mind, however, was the way in which that feeling would manifest should TikTok return.
Things I noticed once I had access to the service again, was that the service was not fully functional. I even encountered a video maybe an hour or more after service was restored, from someone diligently explaining how complex turning off and then turning on a service like TikTok would be, and how that would naturally cause things to not be fully functional for some time. It mostly outlined the following:
- Your phone has a cache of videos preloaded from before service was interrupted, since TikTok preloads a portion of your TT feed to provide smooth transition from one video to the next. Those videos will appear low quality, and might not have likes or comments or profile information because those parts of the service were still coming back online regionally.
- “Lives” will be down, and likely down for some time after the return of service, this ended up being true and was one of the circulated claims of information suppression by people on the app.
- Aspects of your account will appear “Missing” or aspects of accounts you follow will appear to be missing.
- Some people will have more access than others for some time, some people will be able to access the service early than others, this is due to regional servers needing to spin back up.
- Search might be broken for some time before the service was fully operational.
Observations: As the hours passed, I began to notice videos making the following claims:
- Shou removed “CEO” from his profile!
- This was not true, people simply thought it was there, and it actually never was.
- Facebook just created a TikTok Page!
- This also wasn’t true, Facebook has had a page since 2022
- Facebook just released an “Add your Facebook Friends on TikTok” tool!
- Again, something that has been around for some time.
- Meta must be buying TikTok!
- The amount of paperwork this would require, would mean this would be very publicly known.
- The 12-hour blackout was to move TikTok to Meta servers!
- This was also debunked based on the IP addresses of the servers TikTok was connecting to. The Facebook IP Range is well known, same with Google. These two networks are effectively the backbone of the internet for most of the world.
This was punctuated by videos that had the general sentiment of “Something seems off with TikTok…” which is mostly rooted in the technical issues above, coupled with this growing panic that Meta had bought Facebook and that the 12-hour blackout was to change control over to them. The two “Thank You, President Trump” messages sent out by TikTok before shutting down and when the service was restored, clearly left an impression on the people returning to the app. They had become incredibly suspicious of everything they were witnessing. It was clear, to me, that a much broader group of people were now testing the censorship limits of the app in ways they very likely had not been testing before. I knew, in some capacity, that this had always been the case.
I spent time on and off testing some of these claims as I would see them, and finding pretty reasonable explanations for them, or that many of them were not real at all. I began to see threads here on the side of LemmyNet that were reflecting the same sentiment. This sentiment of “Something has changed…” I was seeing on LemmyNet was aligned pretty strongly with the same sentiment I was seeing on TikTok. In commenting through a few threads, a comrade directed me to a series published by MintPress News:
- The NATO to TikTok Pipeline: Why is TikTok Employing So Many National Security Agents?
- TikTok: Chinese “Trojan Horse” Is Run by State Department Officials
- TikTok isn’t anti-Israel: It’s Hired Unit 8200 Agents to Run its Affairs
Aside, Regarding State Actors inside of TikTok and the Ban: I’m of the firm belief that many of the elected officials involved with the TikTok ban process have eaten the worm, so to speak. They genuinely believe that China has ill intentions with the app, they were actually not aware of what was happening internally to the makeup of the teams shaping the content on the platform, they were narrowly honing in on the reaction post October 7th and assumed the content had not changed, they actually thought bitedance would blink and sell, they actually did not forsee what would happen when they had to follow through with the ban. I do not think they understand that former NATO, State Department, Alphabet goons effectively control all the levers of social media already, acting on those platforms with all the bias and worldview that comes from years working for the empire. For many of them, they are children of the Cold War, lost in the lies told by the architects of the Cold War, and fully believe the reality that was spun around them, and have no concenpt of the actual motivations masked by Cold War propaganda.
This was new information for me, admittedly. Part of this writing was the act of killing the liberal in my own head. It was foolish of me to believe that, at least on the subject of Gaza, that TikTok was somehow different, considering I was aware this is something that happens at Meta, Reddit, and Twitter already. After reading through these articles, and processing this information, it only strengthened my perspective on what was happening on TikTok. Which was the following as I see it:
- People were returning to TikTok with their perspective tainted by the direct “Thank You” message from the app.
- They had been primed to search for or perceive anything “unusual” or “different” and view it as direct manipulation by Donald Trump’s administration.
- The leak of the new community guidelines from Facebook were also still fresh on peoples minds, which was coupling with the rumor that Meta had migrated TikTok to their servers.
- This “information” as discovered by this group began circulating uncritically, strengthening the narrative that TikTok had suddenly “Turned Heel”.
- This uncritical information was spilling out of TikTok, and being accepted uncritically.
- The conclusion broadly by those accepting this information was, “TikTok is [now] cooked!”
The reality, however, is that TikTok had been boiling since 2020. They have been shaping the content feed to depress the reach of information on Gaza, and banning very critical voices from the service. They are doing the same kind of content shaping that Instagram and YouTube do. It had not suddenly changed, but instead people were primed to search for and encounter changes that had been there for a long time. The large majority of them I would categorize as “Liberals”, the kind of political sleep walkers who do not activate until someone like Donald Trump is in office, and suddenly, its “resist” this and “rise-up” that, its “let’s talk about oligarchy” because they’re now learning what it is, lets talk about “Fascism”, but only when Republicans are in office.
If what I wrote gives the appearance that I believe every claim of censorship is a Liberal Hallucination, then that’s a fault of my presentation. Part of the message of “Killing the liberal in your head” involves being aware that this kind of narrative shaping is already happening, and that people, especially leftists, need to enter in to centralized social media assuming that is the case. If you looked at the reporting done by this group of political sleep walkers, considered yourself a leftist, but thought “Oh, it’s different now, TikTok is finally cooked”, then you might have been sleepwalking too. Is it pedantic to point this out? It probably is, honestly. What does it matter if things were being shaped before, and people are only now realizing it? At least they’re realizing it, right? I think that’s the danger, though, and why I felt compelled to write what I did. I think there is a lot more tangible danger ahead within the borders of America, and people shouldn’t be caught sleeping.
Maybe that illuminates things. Perhaps it only confuses it more. Please let me know.
Thanks for taking the time to explain in such detail. I think I understand better now where you’re coming from on this. I (unfairly) assumed a much more off the cuff sentiment compared to what you put into your perspective on this.
There is one point that stands out to me that I’m not fully clear on and it’s not your point exactly, but something that may just require more investigation in general and may not have a clear answer any time soon: Which is that we can to an extent speculate on how much the legislators believe their own lies and how much the alphabet agencies have gotten control over TikTok, but I’m not sure we’ll ever be clear on how concretely it swings in one way or another. if I were hedging on the complexities that may arise from trying to control an app that is owned by a Chinese company but has a US branch, I’m inclined to believe they have tried to censor TikTok to their desires, but have struggled to fully do so in part because of those complexities. And perhaps that’s where the legislator buzz kicked more into gear recently, is when the alphabet types failed to fully suppress the genocide.
I don’t think TikTok is as simple a case as fully western apps, in terms of the imperialists being in control, but I do get your point about not acting like it was a bastion of freedom before and has now suddenly done a 180. I was also wondering when I first heard about this if technical issues were part of the problem, so it’s insightful to hear some of it was.
So I had a quick exchange earlier on hexbear about this phenomenon I’m trying to articulate, and this was an illuminating part: https://hexbear.net/comment/5847348
In his biography, William Herst (newspaper mogul) talked about this exact phenomena within newspapers and editorial staff. Basically, people who believed the lies you told would come work for the newspaper and within a generation the entire newspaper wouldn’t even know they were telling lies, which (according to him) was incredibly dangerous because then you aren’t controlling the narrative, the narrative is controlling you and you are unable to adapt and change the narrative to suit the market.
He basically said most of his job was trying to get his editorial staff to understand that they were shaping a changing narrative, not reporting truth (because he believed getting actual truth is borderline impossible, therefore not the job of a newspaper).
[…]
It’s been awhile since I read it, but I think Herst’s conclusion for that chapter was that, the best he could personally do was get them to learn how to shape the message, but he was never able to truly disabuse them of the notion that what they believed and what they had been told was shaped in exactly the same way, if not more egregiously false, which he believed would eventually be catastrophic for the U.S. down the line. Never believe your own bullshit.
Propaganda, has its own motion through time. What was once deliberate lies told by warmongers to maintain supremacy, became history written by propagandized educators, which became lessons learned by unassuming students. Those students are impacted by this education and become living vessels of propaganda. The lines between truth and reality fully blurred. Those students who become educated in the halls of the ivy league and go on to become part of the legislature do so as those vessels of propaganda, as living agents of the propagandas intention. Where before it was a performance, able to be changed or rewritten to adjust for public sentiment, now it is fully animated mythology acting autonomously, reaping the inevitable consequences embedded within it.
This is, I think, how you end up with senators and house members like MTG, John Fetterman, Lauren Bobert. Why the Democrats hate the progressive caucus, and why Burnie Sanders lost in 2016, and why he’s the closest we might ever get to a Marxist elected official, even if he is a far cry from being a Marxist.
There are some who understand what’s behind the vale like Hillary Clinton, but for every Hillary there is a Harris, who I think is one of those people possessed by our mythology.
This is so important for us to understand, how propaganda becomes accepted as fact by the very people who peddle it. Thank you for that excellent explanation!
I found a YouTube link in your post. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
