[somenameforme]

Imagine you tune into something and it's just Bin Laden or related stuff. If you don't find it interesting it's not like you're going to just sit there for hours watching it. Most likely you'd just find a different site if they kept shoving it down your throat. And, in fact, even if you somehow had to sit there for hours watching it, it's not like it's ever going to convince you to decide to convert to his sect of Islam and go become a Jihadist. The point I make with this is that people can only really be significantly influenced on things they don't already have preformed opinions on. And even then it tends to be quite brief, because more natural opinions start to coalesce pretty quickly. See - basically every war the US has ever been involved when the other country is some place most people couldn't even find on a map, at first.

IMO the real threat the US perceives isn't TikTok manipulating information, but them not manipulating it. Look up information about the Gaza War on YouTube and you'll be inundated with various sources promoting a uniformly pro-Israel narrative. The relatively low views on these hits (no recommendation had more than 400k views) for such a hot topic, with premium placement in the search results, suggests it's not resonating or organic, to say the least. But that's because, again, I don't think the goal is to actually get people to watch this and suddenly start cheering on Israel or whatever. Rather, I think the idea is to encourage people to think that they hold a minority view, and motivate them to self censor their own views and opinions. And that's pretty hard to do when you have this massive 'uncontrolled' site openly allowing people to express their wrongthink, and it not being artificially downranked.

[wumeow]

> Look up information about the Gaza War on YouTube and you'll be inundated with various sources promoting a uniformly pro-Israel narrative

I encourage everyone to try this out in a private tab to see how untrue this is.

[somenameforme]

Here is the search I'm using: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=gaza+war

Most links are covering the recent Israel strike on the refugee camp in Rafah, where dozens of civilians were killed in a single strike. That happened after the UN's International Court of Justice specifically ordered Israel to halt their offensive in Rafah. I think hyperbolic responses to this would not only be expected, but perfectly appropriate. Instead I'm just getting a bunch of links to stuff that is repeating Israeli PR verbatim - it was a "tragic mistake", multiple senior Hamas killed, and so on. Are you getting something different? Opening up the link in multiple Tor windows I keep getting mostly the same sites: livenow fox, channel 4 news, TBN Israel, StudyIQ IAS, etc.

[wumeow]

I get a couple videos from Democracy Now and Al-Jazeera as well, some from TRT World further down, not to mention the recommended Shorts. None of the videos are shying away from showing the harrowing aftermath of the strike, and they make sure to qualify any statement from the IDF or Netanyahu as being such.

[thunky]

Honest question:

If Hamas used a precision strike to destroy an Israeli school full of children do you think the coverage would be similar? Or would it be conveyed as an act of terrorism rather than an act of war?