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by umanwizard 409 days ago
> If TikTok didn't exist, wouldn't you expect those Pro-Palestine viewpoints to appear somewhere else

Not necessarily. It depends why they were primarily successful on TikTok, which we don't know. If it's because American platforms tend not to highly rank content that goes against the US's geopolitical ideology, then no, I wouldn't expect that.

2 comments

Social media platforms rank content based on how profitable it is to them. There is no evidence to suggest otherwise. Maybe it would be unprofitable to resist censorship requests on behalf of US government, but the exact same pressure would be applied to TikTok.
If the pressure is a direct bribe, then TikTok could get in hot water with China for accepting that bribe. With a US corp, the US government can make any criminal liability go away.
A company has to follow the local rules of a country. Was Microsoft bribed to censor the Tiananmen Square Massacre on Bing?
We forgot the Twitter files already?
TikTok isn’t the only non-US social media platform. Why wouldn’t it show up elsewhere?
It is the only one that's widely used in the US, as far as I know.