Oopsie, we accidentally set the censorship settings to exactly what we wanted.
Tick Tock was always heavier with moderation that the other socials. It was rare for content to be blocked or removed. They simply didn’t promote videos with objectionable political content. And since the nature of the platform is choosing videos for you, most users never noticed. Meta and Alphabet were taking notes and I’d be surprised if Youtube and Facebook aren’t starting to work more that way.
So the new owners are not worse than the Chinese, just less elegant and subtle.
We’ve noticed a recent increase in interest in peertube in that community, and suspect it’s related to TikTok’s moves.
Not sure how some instances will need to handle US government requests/demands if it comes to that. Ones hosted outside the US are probably safer.
The funny thing?
Just having a policy of no guns or military apparel would prevent ice AND normal cop bastard footage from getting uploaded. And be MUCH easier to train a model to detect.
But they still want their gun nut influencers and the combat footage people solemnly watch endlessly while worrying someone might yell “hand check”.
Last week, a majority American-owned joint venture took control of TikTok’s assets in the US, in a deal shepherded by the Trump administration under a 2024 law requiring the app to move out from under its previous Chinese ownership or face a ban in the United States. Among its new investors is the tech company Oracle, whose executive chair Larry Ellison is a close affiliate of President Donald Trump. Oracle will store US TikTok users’ data in a “secure US cloud environment,” according to TikTok, and the new joint venture will “have decision-making authority for trust and safety policies and content moderation.”
My money is anything that doesn’t match Ellison’s views was set up to get archived along with a whole bunch of user info and location data…
Then it gets uploaded, and tracks who interacts with it.
Because that’s the only way “data server issues” could only impact certain topics but not everything.
If you use TikTok you support fascism. That’s that.