[incahoots]

This was always about running defense for the likes of Israel and it’s ongoing televised genocide….

This isn’t about national security, if it had been this would’ve never gotten as far as it has been, the door would’ve been closed long ago.

TikTok and its algorithm isn’t beholden to the US’s government mandate like the other social media platforms. It also just happens to be the one with the largest amount of users and engagement, compared to the others..

Anyone who’s been paying attention to the numerous times TikTok has been on the chopping block (nearly every year it’s existed) understand what’s at play here.

[hetman]

Anyone who's used TikTok knows the platform is heavily moderated and not at all an "anything goes" paradise for the exchange of free ideas. So, if, as you suggested, the moderation does not favour the US government's mandate, then the obvious question one should be asking is: whose mandate does it favour?

[dqv]

False dichotomy. It doesn't need to favor anyone else's mandate. We are observing a lack of favor to any one mandate. The US mandate is to suppress "anti-US views" (in quotations because what the American populace thinks is anti-US/pro-US and what the American government thinks is anti-US/pro-US is oftentimes drastically different).

What people really mean (without even knowing it) when they say tiktok pushes propaganda is that it isn't suppressing the propaganda they don't like. They mean that after the "funniest Trump moments" video with 10 million views, there shouldn't be a video about the evils of Black Rock, it should instead be one of the "US military is EPIC" phonk edits.

[hetman]

Again, this would only be true if the platform had a laissez-faire attitude toward content, which it clearly does not. What can and can not be shown on the platform is heavily moderated, therefore there is _some_ mandate being fulfilled.

Now we've already agreed that it's not the US's mandate, and I suppose you could argue that it is not the mandate of any of the US's opponents ether. Whether there are any geopolitical entities who don't seem to have the same balance of criticism vs. praise as the others, I'll leave as an exercise for the reader.

[kelnos]

This has nothing to do with Israel. It's economic protectionism and refusing to allow a totalitarian government to have a platform they can use to run unfetterd influence campaigns on our citizens.

> TikTok and its algorithm isn’t beholden to the US’s government mandate like the other social media platforms

Oh please, possible government censorship/influence over US-run social media has been investigated to death over the past several years. There's no there there.

[oefrha]

> There's no there there.

You mean, like the DoD antivax campaign [1], which Meta explicitly allowed to continue after warning DoD their campaign was obvious to them? The same Meta that constantly publishes blog posts about them taking down foreign influence campaigns? DoD already admitted, but I guess I should probably take your word that these things don’t exist? (To be fair, these things usually don’t exist (tm) until declassified decades later. I always wondered why this one was exposed and even acknowledged so soon.)

[1] https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-covi...