[_ptgt]

Did you miss the section about Hong Kong and the blanket ban on political/protest content?

The latter is very Brave New World-esque in that it both “keeps the app fun” and acts as a means to suppress dissent. If they have the capability to identify political/protest content, why not label and allow filtering instead of blanket removing all of it from the app?

[ridaj]

I think it's very reasonable for a content platform to enforce some kind of norm on speech including against protest content. Back when Tiktok was musical.ly, ie more explicitly devoted to music-based content, I suppose it wouldn't have raised an eyebrow.

[_ptgt]

Sure, I might be okay with that for a niche community. But social networks tend to be monopolies or oligopolies due to network effects and general audience social network apps (which TikTok is) empirically appear to be the main for platform for large-scale organized protest movement in the internet world we now live in.

I don’t judge it as worthwhile to get rid of such a platform for capitalistic soma reasons. I’m even more suspicious when the company is from a country with close government-business ties where the government has openly demonstrated it uses such apps to suppress political dissent.

[ridaj]

It's not clear to me that Tiktok is, or wants to be, a general audience social network. In any case I really haven't seen it used to advertise or organize protests... And let's be honest it is by itself in no monopoly situation...

> I’m even more suspicious when the company is from a country with close government-business ties where the government has openly demonstrated it uses such apps to suppress political dissent.

I agree it's a reason for heightened suspicion but I feel like in this and a lot of stories around Tiktok, the suspicion is close to the only thing there is.

What I don't like about this argument that all platforms, even privately-owned, should be open to political or protest speech, is that the same argument can be used to criticize the moderation of hate speech, conspiracy theories, recruitment for fundamentalist religious terrorism networks, and other toxic social forces. In the US, the law prevents the government from getting involved, so we are dependent on private actors to moderate speech online.

Now if there's something in these policies about Tiktok censoring differently videos of HK protests or criticism of the Chinese communist party vs those of unrelated protests in the US, that would be different. It's not what I've seen though....