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"The Russian invasion of Ukraine will be the first war to fully play out on social media. There will be no possibility of controlling the information." I disag

• dustymcp 5y ago
  This war is absolutely televised, there was some disgusting scenes on r/ukraine, i was pretty amazed about following it all in real time..
• godelski 5y ago
  While I think you're right that China has the power to shift the information dominance through TikTok I don't think it changes the author's main thesis about OSINT. There are other platforms. If information starts getting censored then people will jump to other platforms to share it. There is definitely a dangerous tool here too because there already has been a lot of fake images and videos appearing. It's unclear who is posting these but it certainty generates a lot of noise for OSINT. While the former situations had low noise but high bias in the current situation we may just have so much noise that it is impossible to figure out what is real or not. Though I think it still changes things since military analysts have better tools and know corroborating information to sort through this noise more easily. But fake news travels faster than truth.
  • zozbot234 5y ago
    Sure, but real time info about military conflicts has been shared on the internet since the 1991 Gulf War, and perhaps earlier. TikTok is just the latest in a long series of platforms where such info has been shared, and as you say there's nothing really special about it, it's just the most popular right now.
    • Mezzie 5y ago
      The difference is photo and video. Sure, we've been discussing war online since the Web started (I sure did; I was online after I got out of school on 9/11), but that was all or mostly text. All the photos and video we were provided were still carefully controlled. It's not TikTok. It's the smart phone. In the Gulf War, if the one guy with a camcorder agreed not to show you committing a war atrocity, that was it. It was done. Now? Good luck. And medium matters. The outrage generated by the Vietnam War is partially due to it being the first major US conflict after a substantial portion of the population had access to TV.
  • nomel 5y ago
    > If information starts getting censored then people will jump to other platforms to share it. I imagine these hypothetical "other platforms" (could you name one?) will be deemed as "that bad place that platforms <insert scary thing here>", omitted from search engine results/feeds, advertisers blasted on twitter/pull out, and payment systems cancelled, with direct sharing being the only real way to propagate the videos. We've clearly seen effective censorship like this over the last few years, with other unfavorable topics (right or wrong). I don't see how it's possible to consider the internet as some free place where unfavorable ideas can be exchanged, at a public/viral level.
    • godelski 5y ago
      > could you name one? Reddit, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, WhatsApp, PeerTube, Signal, Telegram, Matrix. Need I go on? > We've clearly seen effective censorship I'd beg to differ.
      • nomel 5y ago
        The percentage of the population that uses Matrix, PeerTube, etc, is absolutely negligible, and news can't propagate nearly as far with peer to peer sharing.
• webmobdev 5y ago
  And on the other side we have US BigTech, who will act under the orders of the US. Apart from that, the social media propagandist of the intelligence division of every country will also be involved to sway opinions.
• slg 5y ago
  People here are focusing too much on the "TikTok" in the title. This is not about Tiktok. This is about everyone having a device in their pocket in which they can immediately record video and post it to social media. The platform is irrelevant. If TikTok manipulates content that video can go to Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, Reddit...
  • webmobdev 5y ago
    The point is that the Platform matters as it allows certain countries to control the narration. Do you think US BigTechs don't take orders from the US government or act for US interests? China also has such platforms. The internet is now being cartelized into corporate platforms, and this is only going to increase and become worse (from a consumers point of view).
  • joefife 5y ago
    Only if they're aware that the information was manipulated.
  • nomel 5y ago
    > The platform is irrelevant. I understand your point, but I think the platform is relevant. There are four platforms that have a considerable number of users (TikTok, Youtube, Twitter, Facebook/Instagram), and they all have provenly effective censorship, especially optimized over the past couple of years. If it's one of those four, it does matter. I would also claim that the platform is only irrelevant if removing that platform results in a negligible reduction in views. Removing TikTok removes 1/4 of the services, and probably the vast majority of younger eyes.
    • slg 5y ago
      These platforms don't exist in a vacuum. Imagine we have a table with four legs. What happens when one leg is too short or too long. It becomes immediately obvious by comparing it to the other legs. If everyone on Twitter, Facebook, and Youtube is talking about something, people will be talking about it on TikTok. If they aren't, that is noticeable and that too will be something people will talk about. That can actually lead to more attention on that platform due to the Streisand effect. The primary concern would be if all the social networks censor the same thing, but that isn't a concern here due to the opposing political views unless your concern about censorship is just these platforms not allowing extreme violence, but that isn't what the article is discussing.
• harry8 5y ago
  Imgur has large amounts of curated propaganda on its front page nowadays despite claiming to be social & voted etc. No republican is mentioned except to condemn them or agree with Democrat orthodoxy. Nothing criticising any mainstream democrat appears ever on the front page. You won't see something funny by a Sanders supporter criticising Hilary in any circumstances, for example. As long as there is no criticism of a Democrat there's a reasonable amount of very left wing supporting posts. eg "People deserve healthcare, rich don't pay tax, middle america has been robbed etc." The only exceptions are for the pariahs Sinema & Manchin - who opposed the mainstream. Plenty of vitriol there, which even if you think it's entirely justified underscores how there is none, zero, elsewhere. Imgur used to show currently viral images and was all about entertainment and filled a fairly similar niche to Tik Tok. Nowadays it has gone down the outrage engagement path(?) Politics seems like most of the content and it's so curated that it's feels like Pravda levels of blatant propaganda - even reading takes that seem to agree with what you were already thinking gives you pause that you must have missed something. I'm predicting there will be zero "anti-war" posts advocating that the US stay out of the Russia-Ukraine disaster. None. Such a position, right or wrong, is likely to be held by a signficant fraction of Imgur users and indeed Democrats. Imgur is so extreme as to be obvious especially in the light of how dramatically it changed, which is instructive for us as an example. How would we know if facebook and twitter were playing with their algorithms with just a little more subtlety than that? (And maybe in an utterly different, unpredictable and unexpected direction?)
  • Talanes 5y ago
    It's not the Pravda, it's just a bunch of left-leaning kids doing the meme version of political discourse. Same energy as my high school in the mid 2000's, just the names have changed. It's grating and immature, but it does plausibly reflect an actual demographic.
    • harry8 5y ago
      Obiviously it isn't the Pravda. Maybe it's all organic and a totally fair reflection? How do you explain the change from an almost equal amount of eye-rollingly bad pro-trump stuff as there is pro-biden stuff now to zero. There was vast amounts of pro-sanders, anti-democratic establishment stuff ranging from fair to pretty silly that all suddenly vanished too. I also have trouble with the sheer consistency of the viewpoint. It's one voice, there's no variation to speak of at all. I've never seen any realistic crowd chatter that works that way. Have you? But sure, I guess it's possible. How would you know that's what it is? How would you know if Facebook and Twitter were tweaking their algorithms to drive public opinion? It's the whole point of this. How would you find that out?
• twoxproblematic 5y ago
• stjohnswarts 5y ago
  I hope someone keeps stats on the number of russian propaganda videos that hit tiktok vs more honest takes from Ukrainian citizens on the ground. I suspect russia will either dwarf them or simply firewall/block off tiktok. It's really sad to see 40 million innocent Ukrainians fall to a white supremacist dictatorship.
  • Jerrrry 5y ago
    [flagged]
    • stjohnswarts 5y ago
      No it isn't. Sure there are a few, just like in the USA but it is statistically insignificant portion of the population. I didn't see them invading a sovereign democratic nation in order to enslave it's entire populace to the will of Putin who it seems wants to become the next Stalin.
• Jonovono 5y ago
  haha ya, look how easy it was for the Canadian Government to control the narrative on the Freedom Convoy.
  • brailsafe 5y ago
    I take your point, but I bet they wish it was a little more consistent now
  • wolverine876 5y ago
    Do you have evidence? What was the true narrative? How do you know it was true?
    • Jonovono 5y ago
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQb-6yXKBlE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQb-6yXKBlE They are still pushing this "nazi" narrative weeks later, when social media and many of the millions of people that attended the protests are like, what are you talking about? It's been truly eye opening to see blatant lies by the government. I was at the protests for 3 weekends. I guess that's my "source". I think that's as close as you can get to a true source (your own experience). And I say that as someone that leans left, previously voted liberal, is vaxxed, and was also against "anti vaxxers" previously to attending the protests. I'd say the actual narrative is it's a group of diverse people all affected by mandates, lockdowns and other government responses to covid. I don't agree with what they all want, but I can understand their pain. And I think we can figure out a solution that would make life better for them while also protecting our hospitals and vulnerable.
      • wolverine876 5y ago
        I haven't followed it closely, but that's the first time I heard the word "Nazi" associated with the protests.
• ksec 5y ago
  It has already happened [1]. >"In the summer of 2019, as pro-democracy protests raged throughout Hong Kong, U.S. employees of TikTok were horrified to discover that content moderators on the global team, who reported to TikTok managers in China, were taking down videos of the demonstrations, according to a person involved in the discussions. [1] https://www.theinformation.com/articles/tiktok-wants-to-avoid-facebooks-mess-its-corporate-culture-could-complicate-that https://www.theinformation.com/articles/tiktok-wants-to-avoi...
• chrismcb 5y ago
  This comment is exactly why everyone should want free speech. Should push for companies to want free speech as well... Instead we've been losing for companies to silence people who we don't like. But this is why free speech is important