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One App – Two Worlds: This Is TikTok in Russia and Ukraine

1260 points by mmgu 4y ago

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
karencarits 4y ago
I like the systematic approach they have used, and am a bit scared by the results. In one way, it is not that surprising that a social media app is so tightly controlled and used as a tool by the Russian government to hide unpleasant parts of reality. But I think it is a bit surprising that TikTok hasn't met more criticism and resistance on this
- philliphaydon 4y ago
  I don't find it surprising at all. It's basically a propaganda platform. Can't decide if its worse than Twitter or not.
  - pphysch 4y ago
    Does TikTok mark Washington's enemies with big "X-state affiliated media" warnings while omitting them for American-state affiliated media?
    - creato 4y ago
      I can’t speak for twitter, but every American publicly funded news organization I know of has that label on YouTube (PBS for one)
    - philliphaydon 4y ago
      Which media is controlled by the state in the US? Or are you implying the lack of 'Russia funded media' on Fox?
      - pphysch 4y ago
        Directly, USAGM controls VoA, RFE/RL, RFA, etc. Wikipedia allows these as "reliable sources". Twitter doesn't tag them. The current CEO of NPR is a former USAGM exec. PBS FRONTLINE has unprecedented access to interviewing top DoD/State officials for stories that advance their agendas. Interesting. Indirectly, all the establishment media has close ties to national security. NYT admitted that potentially sensitive stories need to get screened by the government before publishing. That's state control over media where it counts.
- aaaaaaaaata 4y ago
  Tool of the Chinese government, and secondary tool of other governments because they want to remain dominant to push their own agenda(s).
  - bduerst 4y ago
    TikTok doesn't even exist in China. The parent Bytedance does, and their Chinese equivalent is Taiotao. Even the TikTok data servers exist in South Korea. This is an important distinction because there has been zero proof that TikTok is spying or is a tool for China, despite clickbait articles, memes, and accusations existing. This is the first time TikTok is being used observed to be used for government political censorship... And in Russia of all places.
    - qaq 4y ago
      China has being pushing Russian narratives on the war internally in state media. So I think you might be disproving the "is not a tool for China" part.
      - ClumsyPilot 4y ago
        I think the assumption was that it spies on users or does something more interesting that just pedestrial propaganda
        qaq 4y ago
        The fact is it's verifiably used as a propaganda tool increases the chance it's used for other "special" needs too.
        ClumsyPilot 4y ago
        Well what do we have NSA for? President complains about a spying app for months, can't they get off their ass and check? Or are they only good at spying on Joe the piblic? Or maybe they checked but didn't find anything?
- rvz 4y ago
  Well thats what you get with a glorified 'recommendation' algorithm and now it can be used by governments and other unpleasant people in power to hide and control what is seen and unseen from its users. Hardly surprising there and expected. > But I think it is a bit surprising that TikTok hasn't met more criticism and resistance on this If the users are liking their new digital crack / cocaine on the platform and as long as the algorithm is happily manipulating them, then they will never criticise or complain about it, nor will they be able to distinguish between fact or fiction. Hence, I think many jealous governments, three-letter agencies and even ancient wizards want their reality distortion spells back from social networks like TikTok.
- antattack 4y ago
  It's a social media app. No one should expect news or hard facts from tik-tok. With that said - it would interesting so see what tik-tok looks like in China. Based on reports, Russian invasion is also heavily censored in China[0] [0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jf55gMvwc00 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jf55gMvwc00
  - htrp 4y ago
    Except for a certain demographic (somewhere around 22 and under), TikTok is news, entertainment, TV, and Socialization
    - ClumsyPilot 4y ago
      Kids have tictoc while the geneatrics have fox news
- Fervicus 4y ago
  I think everyone should also take a moment and question what we are seeing on our screens. How much of our social media apps are tightly controlled and used as a tool by our governments?
- dncornholio 4y ago
  How can we criticise a platform that picks content for you? It's doing exactly what it's supposed to do, pick content for you. Also it's a Chinese app. Working as intended! We did not need this war to make this obvious.
- jabbany 4y ago
  I mean this is exactly what you'd expect a capitalist company like TikTok (Bytedance) to do: cave to any local regulations in order to make more money, even if that means bowing to pressure of a dictatorship. What's truly unsettling is that in the world today we must contend with the conflict between achieving capitalist goals (more money) and ideological ones (democracy).
  - not2b 4y ago
    Every company has to comply with local regulations or not operate in a country. The same applies to a nonprofit, non-capitalist collective. The alternative to that is fines, or in the case of more authoritarian governments, arrests and jailing of local employees. The choice is to either comply or leave the country, though in some countries it's possible to appeal to the courts. Though it's so bad in Russia now that it seems the only moral choice is to shut down services.
sdfhbdf 4y ago
This article is well made and uncovers very interesting thing. I love how it was technically put together, browsing it on mobile was a great experience, chapeaux bas, i love how great new formats are available to publishers in the digital era outside of serving autoplaying ads. On thing that caught my attention was the supposed USCentric approach since it counted a distance in miles. I also wonder whether it was translated into russian so it can be shared with russian citizens that they’re being lied to by TikTok
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- tokai 4y ago
  Something went wrong with the distance. As there is ~80km between Kharkiv and Belgorod and not 80 miles. If they meant to use Norwgian miles eight would have been correct.
  - karencarits 4y ago
    You are right, the original says "Fra russiske Belgorod til ukrainske Kharkiv er det rundt åtte mil" which is 80 km
    - Symbiote 4y ago
      AI-powered translation tools (Google Translate) can be terrible with this situation. Naturally, I can't get Google Translate to do this now, but I see text like "Vi kjører 100 km. Det koster 30 kr" translated to "We drive 100 miles. It costs 30 SEK" -- km/miles is obviously wrong, and I think kr→SEK (even when it's either kr, kronor, crowns or NOK in English) is because there's more Swedish than Norwegian on the internet. (I get unreasonably annoyed when people convert metric units into American when translating text into English. The English is used by a far wider audience than Americans, and outside the USA it's reasonable to expect Americans to understand metric units.)
      - RugnirViking 4y ago
catchclose8919 4y ago
...uhm, isn't TikTok practically irrelevant in Russia now that they've stopped allowing users to post new content?! I mean, this is what ppl use it for, viewing new content from ppl like them and posting new content hoping to get "famous". With all respect for the author's work, this is not very relevant, since TikTok is in "zombie mode" now for Russia.
- xweber 4y ago
  Sure, but this article also shows that even though new content gets uploaded elsewhere (about the war), Russian TikTok-ers will not get to see that.
- jmiskovic 4y ago
  Unless you have a data on number of users, this is just speculation. One could also speculate that with other sources being turned off the young Russians would all turn to TikTok. This site [1] claims 54.9M active users in January. [1] https://datareportal.com/essential-tiktok-stats https://datareportal.com/essential-tiktok-stats
- idealmedtech 4y ago
  Not sure what your experience is, but when I've used TikTok, only a very small percentage of the content I'm shown is recent. The vast majority is months old, which I think is part of the genius of TikTok; they don't discard good content just due to its age, and instead show it based on novelty to the individual user
  - blamazon 4y ago
    To add on to this - a truism of the internet is that most people don't upload content. They only consume content produced by others. It stands to reason, with the nontemporal algorithm behavior parent comment pointed out, that a vast amount of those consume-only users will not even notice the new content restriction.
    - MrYellowP 4y ago
rvnx 4y ago
Very well executed project! Congratulations
- peter-m80 4y ago
  I hate this UX
dirtyid 4y ago
Govs get to determine propaganda/narratives within their borders via legal instruments. TikTok follows domestic laws to continue operation. As it should be versus Twitter/FB caving to US foreign policy pressures / propaganda world wide.
toxik 4y ago
The dream of the internet as some sort of great democratizing force is already dead and buried, but for any who still believes, this must surely be the final nail in that coffin. Controlling the narrative is only a problem for existing democracies with press freedom. All bets are off once the threat model includes control of the media. So cherish your freedom of speech, and exercise and defend it. I don’t know what to do concretely, maybe donate to the EFF or something.
- ethbr0 4y ago
  Strong encryption is the only true internet freedom.
  - kube-system 4y ago
    Except where it is outlawed.
    - ethbr0 4y ago
      That's exactly why it's outlawed. And notably, Russia hasn't banned VPNs yet, afaik?
- jahnu 4y ago
  The maximalist version of that dream, perhaps, sure. Seems a bit early to write it off completely.
- jmiskovic 4y ago
  Internet is a bit larger than TikTok and some other social networks. Wikipedia, Internet Archive, even the Reddit for all its issues, are still living examples of great democratizing force.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - Zambyte 4y ago
umarniz 4y ago
I love the execution of this! Not comparing but I did a similar project 8 years ago at the peak of Israel / Palestine conflict to compare tweets from Palestine vs tweets from Israel. Incredible difference when you see them side by side. It would be great if someone would execute such an idea for more areas of conflict to bring awareness.
- vmception 4y ago
  Whenever there is a flare up over there, it dominates US news sources, and I’ve been using proxies and VPNs since the 2000s to get another set of articles from other mostly Western countries Its been different
- dotancohen 4y ago
  As someone for whom the conflict affect my childrens' wellbeing, and having good friends on both sides of the conflict, I would love if you would share your findings. If you prefer private conversation my Gmail username is the same as my HN username. > It would be great if someone would execute such an idea for more areas of conflict to bring awareness. If you have any ideas, I can help code it or host it.
- Aeolun 4y ago
  I did this a few years ago for front-page news from different areas of the world. Was very interesting to see the contrasts. Edit, thanks internet archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20180118162502/https://98clicks.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20180118162502/https://98clicks....
InfiniteRand 4y ago
The one war video that made it through to the Russian bot: The clip is shared by a Russian account and contains a gaming reference for pausing games Good factoid to note for dodging automatic filters
fbn79 4y ago
So Facebook was not so bad after all!?
- NoOn3 4y ago
  Even if facebook's methods are a little softer It's not really a good.
throwaway2474 4y ago
This is unsurprising. Every tech company does this. Pretty much all maps apps redraw boundaries of places like Taiwan and Crimea to suit local sensitivities. Search engines selectively censor content, etc.
vilius 4y ago
If governments are censoring our internet we need to change the way we're being geolocated. VPN is too much configuration and centralisation. TOR is over the top privacy. I want something as accessible as turning the flight mode on my mobile. The button can be placed next to flight mode and called CENSORSHIP. You can turn it on. It will then reveal your true IP address and make the internet very fast. However it's off by default. The internet is a bit slower. But your requests are being cleverly routed through random IPs that are not censored. These random IPs are provided by organisations but most importantly by peer users of the feature who happen to live in free countries. Sort of SETI@home but the goal is to increase intraterrestrial intelligence.
- vermilingua 4y ago
  > TOR is over the top privacy And yet what you described is... Tor, almost exactly.
- ryandrake 4y ago
  Having IP addresses whose most significant bits can roughly map to a location (because IP "blocks" are allocated to distinct ISPs that are in known locations) was a big mistake. It would be much harder, but not impossible, to graft geopolitical borders to the internet if every public address that a computer got was random.
- d23 4y ago
  I think Apple is roughly trying that with their VPN service? I'm not sure; I never used it since I'm not a full 100% Apple device person, and if I'm going to pay for a VPN I want to be able to use it on all my devices.
- MrYellowP 4y ago
  None of this matters when people don't believe other people.
rejectfinite 4y ago
I feel like the premis is flawed. Maybe I am a boomer but who would excpect TikTok to provied unbiased news content? It is a chinese social media app. Use established media for news. And yes I know that is how people get content, I use Youtube and Twitch for political news and its just as bad. But this is on another level.
- rvz 4y ago
  I was asking [0] for strong evidence of TikTok being a tool to manipulate the west and it seems that this is all the evidence that satisfies this claim. It is no wonder governments would love to use this glorified recommendation algorithm as it is the new digital crack / cocaine which is effective on manipulating billions of users today. Now looking back at this once again [1], I don't even think it was a clever thing to say that "TikTok is the best thing to have happened to the Internet". At most it is the direct opposite and it is even worse than Facebook. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28463370 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28463370 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28135484 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28135484
  - dncornholio 4y ago
    Those comments on your critical thinking is what is worrying me about todays society. Even going as far as offending you, wow.
- SV_BubbleTime 4y ago
  > Use established media for news. And what if the topic is say, Hunter Biden’s laptop? If you got your news solely from TikTok, you probably would have know that was real about 500 days before NYT and WaPo finally admitted it.
mensetmanusman 4y ago
This is very sad. Obviously, it would be valuable if someone could suddenly change TikTok so that it thinks all Russians are Ukrainians. Such information warfare is vastly less violent than missiles and probably much cheaper to implement. The sooner the Russian population knows what their leadership is really accomplishing, the better for the world.
- NoOn3 4y ago
  Maybe I'll get a lot of downvotes. I just write my opinion, maybe I'm wrong. It's clearly a certain number of people in Ukraine sympathize Russia. Yes it seems that more sympathize The West in the latest times, but this is not much of an overwhelming majority. From that majority has some small group of nationalist. And there are detailed recordings of their bloody crimes. Maybe sometimes Russian media exaggerates it, but you can't say that was no crimes. Western countries have never condemned any of these crimes. The Us could give just one guaranty to not accept Ukraine(maybe even for some time) in NATO to prevent war. And western media have many confirmed fakes too. And Zelensky not very different from dictatorship from the point of view of a simple person. He was banned many tv media and parties in Ukraine. It is difficult to clearly value the actions of the rulers. We don't have so much information that they have on their level. Government does not consist of one person. Sometimes what we think is dictatorship is necessary to save the country. In Crimea for example most people really prefer Russia and speak russian. Minsk agreements could be least damaging to people on both sides. But if they were not fulfilled, How else could this issue be resolved? It's very very complicated situation... It's only my humble opinion. I may be wrong.
  - just-ok 4y ago
    > We don’t have so much information that they have on their level. I wish more people understood this. There is SO much more going on in this conflict than any layman can fathom. There’s deep context behind it spanning years, and the situation itself develops at a breakneck pace, yet everyone is suddenly an expert on the culture and history of the entire region and fully informed on what’s going on.
bertil 4y ago
I feel like the article is dodging the reality of what they are asking: How many people are employed by TikTok in Russia? What is their responsability and how do they influence product decisions? What would happen if TikTok refuses to comply with local laws? I’m not sure that sending local ad sales people who have no influence on the product, and depriving their family of their support is the ethical choice.
Tenoke 4y ago
Isn't tiktok's whole thing that it shows you very personally curated content based on data about you including demographics and most users see different content? Wouldn't users from Ukraine and England or ones from Mexico and America also see different videos? Are the Ukrainian videos actually unavailable in Russian TikTok if you search for them? It seems obvious that as you watch more non-war stuff (which might be the default based on the demographics) you'll see even less of them in the Russian account. And if you really can't see them even if you try (which the article doesn't even say as far as I saw) then isn't that the real news rather than the experiment that just shows how different demographics see different things on TikTok? What am I missing?
- grenoire 4y ago
  The article indeed shows that certain Ukrainian tiktoks are not available to the Russian geolocated IPs.
- yeellow 4y ago
  It is mentioned in the article: "Via our Russian IP address, we try to search for some of the war videos that Ukrainian Nykolai has watched. But they simply don’t appear. Someone doesn’t want us to see them. Who?"
- d23 4y ago
  Are you serious? In the time it took you to write this comment you could have actually read the article to find the exact answer to your question. It's basically the whole point of the post.
  - Tenoke 4y ago
    At least on phone it only gives you one sentence per page with a slow transition, so it wasn't as quick as you suggest to go over it again to confirm. Either way, the point seemed to be more about the different feeds which is not a surprise anywhere while the real and only relevant information actually is that the content is banned.
throwaway48375 4y ago
>Ukrainian Nykolai gets to see men in military attire singing patriotic songs about loving Ukraine. Or talking about it being a man's duty to sign up for battle. >Russian Alexei sees a man tripping over in the water, a puppy patting a duckling on the head and some funny, homemade costumes. Is it just me or does the first one sound like propaganda and the second one sound like normal TikTok?
- SV_BubbleTime 4y ago
  The number of people unwilling to accept and be critical of Ukrainian propaganda has been eye-opening to me. The people that were just railing against “misinformation“ by their political opponents, have been happy to jump all over snake Island, ghost of Kyiv, Z dressed in uniform last year, higher Russian death rate than frontlines of World War II, and going out of their way to ignore neo-Nazi groups there. No one has to be pro-Russia, to notice all the Ukrainian propaganda. Proves to me that everyone is full of shit when it comes to actual standards of acceptability.
  - gruez 4y ago
    >The people that were just railing against “misinformation“ by their political opponents, have been happy to jump all over [...] source? while I don't doubt there's a many people for both groups, I haven't seen concrete examples of what you're describing.
- jimbobimbo 4y ago
  Does inability to explicitly find and watch Ukrainian videos from the Russian IP (see closer to the end of the article) sound like a normal Tiktok?
  - thriftwy 4y ago
    Why do you think they will watch Ukrainian videos? In Telegram there's plenty of Russian war videos. Probably, hundreds of channels with tens-hundreds of thousands subscribers. It's just TikTok does not want to be part of this.
totetsu 4y ago
I don't like how this site take over scrolling. I want to read the text in the middle of my screen where there isn't a crack
- avodonosov 4y ago
  I agree. My screen isn't cracked, by the scrolling behaviour is confusing and inconvenient.
verisimi 4y ago
This is a fair point - that people are seeing different things in Russia and Ukraine. But can we reflect for a second that we are all in the same boat? We don't know what we are presented on screens is real either. Who's to say we are receiving the truth? Are our leaders beneficent? I think not. We are all in the same boat. We are all propagandised. We don't even know what is going on anywhere else, except for what we are able to personally verify. And even that is limited by how we are able to explain and frame our experience!
- Fervicus 4y ago
  Great point. In my circles I have far too often seen people criticizing other governments of propaganda, while also accepting the narratives we live in without question.
- ajross 4y ago
  An important distinction is that if I want to find foreign spin in the west, I can do so trivially and legally and share it with anyone I want. And the worst punishment I will see is a downvote. The core claim in the liked article isn't about content moderation, it's about censorship. And it's really upsetting to see the extent to which HN commenters want to conflate them.
  - verisimi 4y ago
    Content moderation is de facto censorship. If someone is sharing a honestly held opinion, not threatening anyone - that should be allowed. You seem to be unaware of the level of censorship that goes on here, youtube, twitter, etc, etc. It is called breaking community guidelines, de-platforming, shadow banning, hate-speech, etc. Do you remember when Alex Jones was removed from everywhere in a couple of days? Regardless of what you think, should he be allowed a voice? All of this is taking place outside of the legal system btw. Which is meant to establish people's right to free speech.
    - Tozen 4y ago
      Very good points. Including the shadow banning that takes place here and everywhere. Different opinions and views are increasingly censored by those that are empowered. "Power corrupts". Unless a fair system is in place of checks and balances, there will be those that will abuse it whenever they can get away with it.
Koshkin 4y ago
Nitpick: the Ukrainian version of the name Nicholas is Mykolai (with an M).
- jimbobimbo 4y ago
  Mykola. "Ai" ending appears in Russian spelling of the name.
yosito 4y ago
I already kind of knew intuitively that this would be happening in some form, but seeing it examined like this really puts it into perspective. I've noticed that on Snapchat and Instagram, I'm not able to see any new public content coming from Ukraine. On the Snapchat map, Ukraine is completely empty. I have a few Ukrainian friends, and I still see their content, but public stuff seems to be filtered or censored somehow. I'm a US-based account, and I've been in the US and Dominican Republic lately. I think this phenomenon is related to filter bubbles (but also more than that). I've already been noticing for years that my connections with different political views, or different interests, are being fed completely different realities. Sometimes it's benign recommendations, other times it's creepy advertiser-driven manipulation, and this example of Ukraine/Russia shows that there is clearly some blatant, wide-scale censorship going on. The narrative is being controlled by powers operating in the shadows. It really is an unseen information war. As someone who has been traveling for 10 years, my friends are incredibly diverse. So I often hear news from outside of my country and my filter bubbles. And my go-to source for trying to peek outside of the filter bubbles is Wikipedia's current events portal. I've got a few Russian friends. Most are outside of Russia, but one who I regularly talk to is in Russia and stays on Instagram using a VPN. I've had some conversations with her about the war, and while she's certainly not a fan of Putin, and knows there is a war going on, she seems to be completely naive about the severity of it. When we talk about it she says things about how truth is hard to know because the media lies. She is hearing stories from the West but having a hard time knowing what is really happening. There really needs to be some new form of leaflet drops to get real information to Russians despite the Information Age Iron Curtain.
bannedbybros 4y ago
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
macinjosh 4y ago
Now do Yemeni TikTok and the US.
user3939382 4y ago
My position is that Russia's Article 51 legal justification for the invasion is a stretch at best, but that the US policy of unnecessary, aggressive NATO expansion [1] baited Putin into this war whereas he was very clear Ukrainian NATO membership was a red line for him. We also made no effort to encourage Ukraine to honor the Minsk accords which would have almost certainly prevented this. If Mexico was hostile and Russia was in the process of working with them to put nukes in Tijuana I wonder if the US would sit idly by? Meanwhile was have Condoleezza Rice without a hint of irony on the news agreeing that invading a sovereign country is a war crime (does Iraq ring a bell?) I see my point of view reflected only in alternative, independent media. This includes, for example, Pulitzer-prize winning journalist Chris Hedges who had years of his work purged from YouTube simply because he had a show on RT which was never once sympathetic to Putin. My anti-war, pro-diplomacy POV is banned from corporate media, and flagged/downvoted into oblivion on Reddit and even Hacker News. From my perspective most supporting sending arms and money to Ukraine has been the victim of a policy campaign by the arms industry which has already generated windfall arms sales to Ukraine and now Germany (!). So am I surprised by this story? No. I've been seeing a banned perspective on this conflict in the US from day 1. [1] “We reiterate the decision made at the 2008 Bucharest Summit that Ukraine will become a member of the Alliance” June 2021 https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/news_185000.htm https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/news_185000.htm
- gspr 4y ago
  US policy isn't "expanding" NATO. NATO expands because free, sovereign nations apply to join. Name a single country that is in NATO against its own will due to "US policy".
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- kreeben 4y ago
  >> he was very clear Ukrainian NATO membership was a red line for him Whereas in the free world, no one, not even Putin, should and absolutely will not have a say in other nations agreements, because that is a preposterous idea that no supporter of democracy would even consider to be a valid stance.
eunos 4y ago
From the experiment they only change the IP addresses and no need to spoof the GPS?
- querez 4y ago
  I don't understand how they're able to just "change their IP" to something that's located in those 2 cities. How does that work, do they have someone running a proxy for them in those 2 locations?
  - foverzar 4y ago
    > How does that work, do they have someone running a proxy for them in those 2 locations? Sure, there are thousands of proxies in Russia and Ukraine. Lots of them are free. Besides, any decent paid VPN with multiple exit nodes would likely have nodes in both Russia and Ukraine. You could even order a VPS hosting, if that's your thing.
dncornholio 4y ago
The point of the article is, in my opinion, TikTok is working as intended. What did you expect really?
prionassembly 4y ago
This made me finally download TikTok and.. OW! that's REALLY NSFW! (I didn't think I'd live, as a man, to be offended by sparsely-clad voluptuous women, but there I am.)
- psyc 4y ago
  If you weren’t offended enough, many of those G-cup Megan Thee Stallion fans are self-admitted minors crying “stop sexualizing me! I’m a kid!” while they gyrate. I deleted TikTok shortly after I installed it. (Not just because of that. The last thing I need is another attention-optimized vapid rabbit hole.)
- weinzierl 4y ago
  You must be on a different TikTok than me. I'm using TikTok from Germany and I neither get NSFW content nor war stuff. It's all silly dance videos, lots of stupid pranks, wonderful musicians and a bit of English as a Second Language content for me. Regardless how much of this is because of my location or my behaviour, it supports OPs point: TikTok can be very different for different users.
- austinl 4y ago
  This was my first experience using TikTok as well — I think those videos will always appear to new users because they get a lot of engagement. But if you swipe past them quickly, you'll likely never see them again.
throwaway3968 4y ago
It's probably good that Twitter is banned over here at the moment. Overnight, my feed filled up with a nasty mix of ethnic cleansing and "collective guilt" calls coming from Ukraine in response to the massacre. All directed at people who've been on their side by all legal means they have available. I don't know how to react to that.
sporkland 4y ago
Love that people are doing this research. Maybe I'm delusional, but I found it positively surprising that: 1. The Ukrainian user saw videos about the war despite Russia and China wanting to suppress news around it, and I'm sure TikTok taking pressure around it. 2. It mostly isn't algorithmic deception, it's a byproduct of the fact that they had to turn off new video uploads in response to a crazy fake news law.
sAbakumoff 4y ago
Kremlin Press Secretary Dimitro “the cockroach” Peskov openly boasted about using VPN. Nothing prevents RU citizens to use VPN to get the full access to the TT content.
tormeh 4y ago
Hm... Pretty solid argument in favor of federated/decentralized protocols, this. Is there anything out there that doesn't suck? Not for chat. We've got Matrix and chat is usually not censored anyway.
- bogwog 4y ago
  How well would a federated social network hold up to an attack from a government like Russia? Either to flood it with propaganda, or simply to bring it down?
  - NoOn3 4y ago
    Therefore, in part they do not become popular, goverments simply do not allow them to do this.
- d0mine 4y ago
  Nobody in power wants it. For example, look at how alternatives to reddit that gain any traction are treated (they have a reputation that only bigots, incels, other unsavory characters use it--any such platform is overrun by government trolls).
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
cabirum 4y ago
Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter are blocked in Russia because they only allow pro-Ukraine narrative. The social platforms became weapons in this war. Anyone noticed they blocked accounts of most Russian media companies and news sources? Or users with "wrong" opinions are being shadow banned? Or Google deprioritised or excluded some Russian gov services (even non news)? Sorry, but unbiased sources do not exist. Free speech does not exist. It's not two worlds, but two bubbles.
- alex-ant 4y ago
  Currently Russia doesn't have a singe reliable news source. We all have seen the pro-Russian narrative - there's no war, we're not murdering the civilians, all Ukrainians are nazis developing bioweapons targeting "slav DNA" and to be delivered across the border by birds, etc. Those are not news. Needless to say that this propaganda also targets people in other countries with large ethnical Russian population, specifically the Baltic states and incites those people to riot and hate the land they live on creating a bridgehead for possible Russian invasion.
  - pphysch 4y ago
    What is your standard for "reliable news source"? Does it look something like this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Perennial_sources https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Per...
  - cabirum 4y ago
    However "unreliable" these news sources are, they present a different opinion that is being censored. And since there are just two sides in this war, you can only see just one side of a story.
    - renw0rp 4y ago
      Russians doing what they have been doing for a hundred years: lying, blaming, spreading clearly false propaganda, stealing, murdering and raping people. Meanwhile people in the west, or at least outside of the conflict zone, discussing about free speech. Nothing has changed. You can be proud of yourself and your principles.
soheil 4y ago
What is ironic is surely the dancing video mentioned and not that a publicly funded Norwegian government-owned media, NRK, (Jens Stoltenberg from Norway is the head of Nato) publishes a hit piece on TikTok all the while ignoring what FB, Twitter and many other social media have been doing to people in their own counties including the US for years. Very convenient.
- older 4y ago
  You clearly have no idea what are you talking about. Here's what NRK has published about Facebook: https://nrkbeta.no/?s=F https://nrkbeta.no/?s=F facebook Feel free to search for articles about other social media.
  - soheil 4y ago
    What? You literally just sent me a link to a keyword search for "Facebook" on that site.
    - older 4y ago
      Yes, that's what I literally did. And that's what you shoul've done before writing all that nonsence about how they are ignoring what other social media is doing.
sebastianconcpt 4y ago
Social Media big tech in collusion with party propagandists is poison in the internet freedom dream. Ideologues owning big tech is a dream come true for authoritarians. How are we going to fix this I have no idea.
dcchambers 4y ago
This is a great visual and concrete example of how easily a narrative can be controlled. This is but one example of a larger systemic issue with media in the 21st century, and an issue with how people consume that media. Virtually every platform is like this, not just TikTok. It's not like TikTok tries to present itself as a neutral, unbiased source. Their whole premise is delivering "highly curated" content to you as fast as possible. The problem is that people have accepted that as normal and it's doing horrible things to the world. There's a reason everyone feels like we're the most divided we've ever been...and it starts with things like this. As far as the war in Ukraine is concerned, this is just like classic WW2 propaganda but turned up to 11 due to the nature of how fast and easy it is to spread [mis]information these days.
- ec109685 4y ago
  This where sanctions could be used. TikTok is profiting by keeping this neutered version up in Russia, so US government could prohibit making money in US until they take it down in Russia.
  - blaser-waffle 4y ago
    Tik Tok is Chinese -- and was raged against by Trump for that reason -- and would constitute picking a fight with the CCP. That's a big ole can of worms to open up while running other big-deal sanctions and playing the brinkmanship game with Russia.
    - sharken 4y ago
      Absolutely, it's tempting to go after China as well using the saying, If you're not with us, you're against us. But the current strategy of appealing to China to at least not help Russia in any way, is the best outcome. And thankfully China has opted to pursue a rather novel way of fighting COVID, which prevents them from getting stronger economically.
- latchkey 4y ago
  Speaking of controlled narratives, I'd like to see the source code to their bots so that this experiment can be reproduced. I'm not saying that they didn't just make up the article, but how do we know? How do we know their bots didn't have bugs in them that pushed the results in favor of the tone of the article?
hermannj314 4y ago
Aggressor nations have the privilege of lying to themselves on the consequences and reality of their wars. The defenders do not get the privilege to ignore that. Americans barely talked about Afghanistan. For 20 years, our internet was full of funny videos, stupid songs, and memes of Osama bin Laden. Sure we bombed civilians targets and committed war crimes too, but we had very smart lawyers that taught us clever words for why it was moral when we did it. And we nodded our heads in agreement and turned the channel to American Idol. Americans are well aware that technology enables us to live in our own artificially constructed reality. We spent the last 20 years building it.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- lambdasquirrel 4y ago
  Well, lest we gaslight ourselves into what'd happened, the Putin Administration spent a lot of time hand-waving and saying that they weren't going to invade Ukraine. And then they did, and apparently expecting that they were going to be greeted as liberators. So there is no reason to trust them at all. (Maybe just like there was no reason to trust GWB's folks either.) From where I'm sitting, Biden's folks did no small part in subtlely goading the Russians into doing stupid things. But really, they just led Putin and Xi into their own worst excesses, much like how those have been doing to the U.S. in turn. The world is an ugly place, and it's up to us citizens to figure out what's going on. We are not served when the U.S. invades Afghanistan. How was that geopolitically smart, even in a realpolitik sense? Likewise the Russian people would be smart to realize just how much the public opinion in sympathetic countries (like Germany) has turned against them. When we buy into this Brave New World stuff, we are creating a worse situation for ourselves – and even more so for future generations. Most of all, we need to know ourselves, because these artificially constructed realities work against us when the algorithms know us better than we do.
- asveikau 4y ago
  On the other hand... I was really against the Iraq war and nobody ever threatened me with 15 years of jail for it. The architects of that conflict left when term limits were up. (Putin did not.) Don't get me wrong, Iraq was pointless. Afghanistan seemed to have a justification at the start but was mismanaged early on. In terms of culture, wide swaths of the population were brainwashed in a similar way to how we talk about Russia now, though with a little more vocal opposition. But what I can say is there is room in the American system for course correction.
dark-star 4y ago
It would have helped if they had made it more prominent that you're supposed to scroll down. I was watching the first video, expecting to see a second one for comparison or something. I already closed the tab again and only later saw a coworker browsing HN who clicked on the same link and saw him scroll :)
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
bacan 4y ago
This is exactly what happens when algorithms tailor what people see on their newsfeed. They will push narratives. One of the main reasons I prefer Reddit is the existence of r/All. Provides a very balanced view
- d0mine 4y ago
  Reddit is a typical western media that promotes corresponding world view.
- goldenchrome 4y ago
  If you think Reddit isn’t highly curated too, you’re wrong. Perhaps you could make that argument 10 years ago but no longer. In the last few years Reddit has taken on hundreds of millions of dollars of funding to morph the site into a more mainstream advertiser-friendly offering. They’ve silenced lots of controversial communities by outright banning them or neutered them with “quarantines”. Over the years, Reddit has succeeded at pushing out people who don’t have palatable opinions and retained a core base of advertiser-friendly true believers. “Advertiser-friendly” in the contemporary era means “left-leaning with no reservations“. This is about the furthest thing you can get from a “balanced view”.
  - bacan 4y ago
    Curated sure. Tailored to individual tastes - absolutely not Kinda like a newspaper
- zarriak 4y ago
  This is an absurd statement. Reddit is by far the most effectively gamed and manipulated social media platform that exists. There’s countless examples of how powerful mods are on Reddit on shaping narratives.
- ShivShankaran 4y ago
  reddit is one of the absolutely most gamed social media on the internet. Don't forget that the "head of content" that was hired few years back is from NATO with no technical background. Reddit is on harcore mode right now deleting entire subreddits and permabanning people that even slightly critique NATO or Ukraine. /r/all is nauseatingly full of "russia bad, ukraine good" with mindless flinging of feces. Yall be blaming facebook but reddit is the real snake in the grass.
beprogrammed 4y ago
What a fantastic article, was captivated from beginning to end.
globalise83 4y ago
Excellent production: right length, fabulous graphics, very creative approach overall: A grade from me.
startoffs 4y ago
I have noticed that TikTok is more likely to show the content from my current location as I travel between countries. Must be the geo tagging that makes it easy for the . 80km is a long distance when it crosses national borders.
lastdong 4y ago
Brilliant article, thank you for sharing
VincentEvans 4y ago
Westerners should stop projecting their culture and values on Russians when trying to make sense of what is going on. Russians are not these poor bamboozled fools. Support for Putin is real. Denial of atrocities and justification for war is not rooted in ignorance, but pride. For years Kremlin cultivated in Russians a sense of injured pride, something akin to the “straight white male” victimhood and persecution complex you see in US fringe groups. Russians were told of greatnesses of their achievements of the past, and how it was stolen from them, how the West is weak, gullible, and corrupt, and is trying to sabotage the inevitable rise of Russia to it’s destined glory. Russians have enough access to sources of truth, but their world view simply does not compel them to believe those sources that create dissonance with their righteous cause - they can’t be brother killing monsters that rape mothers in front of their children, crush people with tanks, bomb maternity hospitals - so it’s obviously all lies. And since everyone is accusing them of this - then it simply means that everyone is lying and will get what is coming to them. How do I know this? I was born in Soviet Union, am Russian-speaking and I am unable to explain my anger and grief over what is happening to my own father who thinks that I am a fool to believe in propaganda staged videos full of crisis actors manufactured by Western media.
- kikimora 4y ago
  All true. Same problem with my father. My wife also has the same problem with her father as well.
stanislavb 4y ago
And this is one of the means how China will sway future democratic elections around the world - by brainwashing all the TikTok zombies and presenting to them the China manipulated story.
gytdev 4y ago
since HN is a technology oriented site, can someone explain what technologies are being used in this article? The graphics are amazing! Is it mainly three.js?
VoodooJuJu 4y ago
A lot of people are praising this article's design, but I personally did not appreciate it. I get it - it's a TikTok story that's made to look and work like TikTok, probably made to appeal to the TikTok class. As one who prefers clear prose over "consoom the content!" video snippets and soundbites, I felt distracted from the message by all the dynamic media.

1260 points by mmgu 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

I like the systematic approach they have used, and am a bit scared by the results. In one way, it is not that surprising that a social media app is so tightly controlled and used as a tool by the Russian government to hide unpleasant parts of reality. But I think it is a bit surprising that TikTok hasn't met more criticism and resistance on this

philliphaydon 4y ago
I don't find it surprising at all. It's basically a propaganda platform. Can't decide if its worse than Twitter or not.
- pphysch 4y ago
  Does TikTok mark Washington's enemies with big "X-state affiliated media" warnings while omitting them for American-state affiliated media?
  - creato 4y ago
    I can’t speak for twitter, but every American publicly funded news organization I know of has that label on YouTube (PBS for one)
  - philliphaydon 4y ago
    Which media is controlled by the state in the US? Or are you implying the lack of 'Russia funded media' on Fox?
    - pphysch 4y ago
      Directly, USAGM controls VoA, RFE/RL, RFA, etc. Wikipedia allows these as "reliable sources". Twitter doesn't tag them. The current CEO of NPR is a former USAGM exec. PBS FRONTLINE has unprecedented access to interviewing top DoD/State officials for stories that advance their agendas. Interesting. Indirectly, all the establishment media has close ties to national security. NYT admitted that potentially sensitive stories need to get screened by the government before publishing. That's state control over media where it counts.
aaaaaaaaata 4y ago
Tool of the Chinese government, and secondary tool of other governments because they want to remain dominant to push their own agenda(s).
- bduerst 4y ago
  TikTok doesn't even exist in China. The parent Bytedance does, and their Chinese equivalent is Taiotao. Even the TikTok data servers exist in South Korea. This is an important distinction because there has been zero proof that TikTok is spying or is a tool for China, despite clickbait articles, memes, and accusations existing. This is the first time TikTok is being used observed to be used for government political censorship... And in Russia of all places.
  - qaq 4y ago
    China has being pushing Russian narratives on the war internally in state media. So I think you might be disproving the "is not a tool for China" part.
    - ClumsyPilot 4y ago
      I think the assumption was that it spies on users or does something more interesting that just pedestrial propaganda
      - qaq 4y ago
        The fact is it's verifiably used as a propaganda tool increases the chance it's used for other "special" needs too.
        ClumsyPilot 4y ago
        Well what do we have NSA for? President complains about a spying app for months, can't they get off their ass and check? Or are they only good at spying on Joe the piblic? Or maybe they checked but didn't find anything?
rvz 4y ago
Well thats what you get with a glorified 'recommendation' algorithm and now it can be used by governments and other unpleasant people in power to hide and control what is seen and unseen from its users. Hardly surprising there and expected. > But I think it is a bit surprising that TikTok hasn't met more criticism and resistance on this If the users are liking their new digital crack / cocaine on the platform and as long as the algorithm is happily manipulating them, then they will never criticise or complain about it, nor will they be able to distinguish between fact or fiction. Hence, I think many jealous governments, three-letter agencies and even ancient wizards want their reality distortion spells back from social networks like TikTok.
antattack 4y ago
It's a social media app. No one should expect news or hard facts from tik-tok. With that said - it would interesting so see what tik-tok looks like in China. Based on reports, Russian invasion is also heavily censored in China[0] [0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jf55gMvwc00 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jf55gMvwc00
- htrp 4y ago
  Except for a certain demographic (somewhere around 22 and under), TikTok is news, entertainment, TV, and Socialization
  - ClumsyPilot 4y ago
    Kids have tictoc while the geneatrics have fox news
Fervicus 4y ago
I think everyone should also take a moment and question what we are seeing on our screens. How much of our social media apps are tightly controlled and used as a tool by our governments?
dncornholio 4y ago
How can we criticise a platform that picks content for you? It's doing exactly what it's supposed to do, pick content for you. Also it's a Chinese app. Working as intended! We did not need this war to make this obvious.
jabbany 4y ago
I mean this is exactly what you'd expect a capitalist company like TikTok (Bytedance) to do: cave to any local regulations in order to make more money, even if that means bowing to pressure of a dictatorship. What's truly unsettling is that in the world today we must contend with the conflict between achieving capitalist goals (more money) and ideological ones (democracy).
- not2b 4y ago
  Every company has to comply with local regulations or not operate in a country. The same applies to a nonprofit, non-capitalist collective. The alternative to that is fines, or in the case of more authoritarian governments, arrests and jailing of local employees. The choice is to either comply or leave the country, though in some countries it's possible to appeal to the courts. Though it's so bad in Russia now that it seems the only moral choice is to shut down services.

sdfhbdf 4y ago

This article is well made and uncovers very interesting thing. I love how it was technically put together, browsing it on mobile was a great experience, chapeaux bas, i love how great new formats are available to publishers in the digital era outside of serving autoplaying ads. On thing that caught my attention was the supposed USCentric approach since it counted a distance in miles. I also wonder whether it was translated into russian so it can be shared with russian citizens that they’re being lied to by TikTok

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
tokai 4y ago
Something went wrong with the distance. As there is ~80km between Kharkiv and Belgorod and not 80 miles. If they meant to use Norwgian miles eight would have been correct.
- karencarits 4y ago
  You are right, the original says "Fra russiske Belgorod til ukrainske Kharkiv er det rundt åtte mil" which is 80 km
  - Symbiote 4y ago
    AI-powered translation tools (Google Translate) can be terrible with this situation. Naturally, I can't get Google Translate to do this now, but I see text like "Vi kjører 100 km. Det koster 30 kr" translated to "We drive 100 miles. It costs 30 SEK" -- km/miles is obviously wrong, and I think kr→SEK (even when it's either kr, kronor, crowns or NOK in English) is because there's more Swedish than Norwegian on the internet. (I get unreasonably annoyed when people convert metric units into American when translating text into English. The English is used by a far wider audience than Americans, and outside the USA it's reasonable to expect Americans to understand metric units.)
    - RugnirViking 4y ago

catchclose8919 4y ago

...uhm, isn't TikTok practically irrelevant in Russia now that they've stopped allowing users to post new content?! I mean, this is what ppl use it for, viewing new content from ppl like them and posting new content hoping to get "famous". With all respect for the author's work, this is not very relevant, since TikTok is in "zombie mode" now for Russia.

xweber 4y ago
Sure, but this article also shows that even though new content gets uploaded elsewhere (about the war), Russian TikTok-ers will not get to see that.
jmiskovic 4y ago
Unless you have a data on number of users, this is just speculation. One could also speculate that with other sources being turned off the young Russians would all turn to TikTok. This site [1] claims 54.9M active users in January. [1] https://datareportal.com/essential-tiktok-stats https://datareportal.com/essential-tiktok-stats
idealmedtech 4y ago
Not sure what your experience is, but when I've used TikTok, only a very small percentage of the content I'm shown is recent. The vast majority is months old, which I think is part of the genius of TikTok; they don't discard good content just due to its age, and instead show it based on novelty to the individual user
- blamazon 4y ago
  To add on to this - a truism of the internet is that most people don't upload content. They only consume content produced by others. It stands to reason, with the nontemporal algorithm behavior parent comment pointed out, that a vast amount of those consume-only users will not even notice the new content restriction.
  - MrYellowP 4y ago

rvnx 4y ago

Very well executed project! Congratulations

peter-m80 4y ago
I hate this UX

dirtyid 4y ago

Govs get to determine propaganda/narratives within their borders via legal instruments. TikTok follows domestic laws to continue operation. As it should be versus Twitter/FB caving to US foreign policy pressures / propaganda world wide.

toxik 4y ago

The dream of the internet as some sort of great democratizing force is already dead and buried, but for any who still believes, this must surely be the final nail in that coffin. Controlling the narrative is only a problem for existing democracies with press freedom. All bets are off once the threat model includes control of the media. So cherish your freedom of speech, and exercise and defend it. I don’t know what to do concretely, maybe donate to the EFF or something.

ethbr0 4y ago
Strong encryption is the only true internet freedom.
- kube-system 4y ago
  Except where it is outlawed.
  - ethbr0 4y ago
    That's exactly why it's outlawed. And notably, Russia hasn't banned VPNs yet, afaik?
jahnu 4y ago
The maximalist version of that dream, perhaps, sure. Seems a bit early to write it off completely.
jmiskovic 4y ago
Internet is a bit larger than TikTok and some other social networks. Wikipedia, Internet Archive, even the Reddit for all its issues, are still living examples of great democratizing force.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- Zambyte 4y ago

umarniz 4y ago

I love the execution of this! Not comparing but I did a similar project 8 years ago at the peak of Israel / Palestine conflict to compare tweets from Palestine vs tweets from Israel. Incredible difference when you see them side by side. It would be great if someone would execute such an idea for more areas of conflict to bring awareness.

vmception 4y ago
Whenever there is a flare up over there, it dominates US news sources, and I’ve been using proxies and VPNs since the 2000s to get another set of articles from other mostly Western countries Its been different
dotancohen 4y ago
As someone for whom the conflict affect my childrens' wellbeing, and having good friends on both sides of the conflict, I would love if you would share your findings. If you prefer private conversation my Gmail username is the same as my HN username. > It would be great if someone would execute such an idea for more areas of conflict to bring awareness. If you have any ideas, I can help code it or host it.
Aeolun 4y ago
I did this a few years ago for front-page news from different areas of the world. Was very interesting to see the contrasts. Edit, thanks internet archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20180118162502/https://98clicks.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20180118162502/https://98clicks....

InfiniteRand 4y ago

The one war video that made it through to the Russian bot: The clip is shared by a Russian account and contains a gaming reference for pausing games Good factoid to note for dodging automatic filters

fbn79 4y ago

So Facebook was not so bad after all!?

NoOn3 4y ago
Even if facebook's methods are a little softer It's not really a good.

throwaway2474 4y ago

This is unsurprising. Every tech company does this. Pretty much all maps apps redraw boundaries of places like Taiwan and Crimea to suit local sensitivities. Search engines selectively censor content, etc.

vilius 4y ago

If governments are censoring our internet we need to change the way we're being geolocated. VPN is too much configuration and centralisation. TOR is over the top privacy. I want something as accessible as turning the flight mode on my mobile. The button can be placed next to flight mode and called CENSORSHIP. You can turn it on. It will then reveal your true IP address and make the internet very fast. However it's off by default. The internet is a bit slower. But your requests are being cleverly routed through random IPs that are not censored. These random IPs are provided by organisations but most importantly by peer users of the feature who happen to live in free countries. Sort of SETI@home but the goal is to increase intraterrestrial intelligence.

vermilingua 4y ago
> TOR is over the top privacy And yet what you described is... Tor, almost exactly.
ryandrake 4y ago
Having IP addresses whose most significant bits can roughly map to a location (because IP "blocks" are allocated to distinct ISPs that are in known locations) was a big mistake. It would be much harder, but not impossible, to graft geopolitical borders to the internet if every public address that a computer got was random.
d23 4y ago
I think Apple is roughly trying that with their VPN service? I'm not sure; I never used it since I'm not a full 100% Apple device person, and if I'm going to pay for a VPN I want to be able to use it on all my devices.
MrYellowP 4y ago
None of this matters when people don't believe other people.

rejectfinite 4y ago

I feel like the premis is flawed. Maybe I am a boomer but who would excpect TikTok to provied unbiased news content? It is a chinese social media app. Use established media for news. And yes I know that is how people get content, I use Youtube and Twitch for political news and its just as bad. But this is on another level.

rvz 4y ago
I was asking [0] for strong evidence of TikTok being a tool to manipulate the west and it seems that this is all the evidence that satisfies this claim. It is no wonder governments would love to use this glorified recommendation algorithm as it is the new digital crack / cocaine which is effective on manipulating billions of users today. Now looking back at this once again [1], I don't even think it was a clever thing to say that "TikTok is the best thing to have happened to the Internet". At most it is the direct opposite and it is even worse than Facebook. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28463370 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28463370 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28135484 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28135484
- dncornholio 4y ago
  Those comments on your critical thinking is what is worrying me about todays society. Even going as far as offending you, wow.
SV_BubbleTime 4y ago
> Use established media for news. And what if the topic is say, Hunter Biden’s laptop? If you got your news solely from TikTok, you probably would have know that was real about 500 days before NYT and WaPo finally admitted it.

mensetmanusman 4y ago

This is very sad. Obviously, it would be valuable if someone could suddenly change TikTok so that it thinks all Russians are Ukrainians. Such information warfare is vastly less violent than missiles and probably much cheaper to implement. The sooner the Russian population knows what their leadership is really accomplishing, the better for the world.

NoOn3 4y ago
Maybe I'll get a lot of downvotes. I just write my opinion, maybe I'm wrong. It's clearly a certain number of people in Ukraine sympathize Russia. Yes it seems that more sympathize The West in the latest times, but this is not much of an overwhelming majority. From that majority has some small group of nationalist. And there are detailed recordings of their bloody crimes. Maybe sometimes Russian media exaggerates it, but you can't say that was no crimes. Western countries have never condemned any of these crimes. The Us could give just one guaranty to not accept Ukraine(maybe even for some time) in NATO to prevent war. And western media have many confirmed fakes too. And Zelensky not very different from dictatorship from the point of view of a simple person. He was banned many tv media and parties in Ukraine. It is difficult to clearly value the actions of the rulers. We don't have so much information that they have on their level. Government does not consist of one person. Sometimes what we think is dictatorship is necessary to save the country. In Crimea for example most people really prefer Russia and speak russian. Minsk agreements could be least damaging to people on both sides. But if they were not fulfilled, How else could this issue be resolved? It's very very complicated situation... It's only my humble opinion. I may be wrong.
- just-ok 4y ago
  > We don’t have so much information that they have on their level. I wish more people understood this. There is SO much more going on in this conflict than any layman can fathom. There’s deep context behind it spanning years, and the situation itself develops at a breakneck pace, yet everyone is suddenly an expert on the culture and history of the entire region and fully informed on what’s going on.

bertil 4y ago

I feel like the article is dodging the reality of what they are asking: How many people are employed by TikTok in Russia? What is their responsability and how do they influence product decisions? What would happen if TikTok refuses to comply with local laws? I’m not sure that sending local ad sales people who have no influence on the product, and depriving their family of their support is the ethical choice.

Tenoke 4y ago

Isn't tiktok's whole thing that it shows you very personally curated content based on data about you including demographics and most users see different content? Wouldn't users from Ukraine and England or ones from Mexico and America also see different videos? Are the Ukrainian videos actually unavailable in Russian TikTok if you search for them? It seems obvious that as you watch more non-war stuff (which might be the default based on the demographics) you'll see even less of them in the Russian account. And if you really can't see them even if you try (which the article doesn't even say as far as I saw) then isn't that the real news rather than the experiment that just shows how different demographics see different things on TikTok? What am I missing?

grenoire 4y ago
The article indeed shows that certain Ukrainian tiktoks are not available to the Russian geolocated IPs.
yeellow 4y ago
It is mentioned in the article: "Via our Russian IP address, we try to search for some of the war videos that Ukrainian Nykolai has watched. But they simply don’t appear. Someone doesn’t want us to see them. Who?"
d23 4y ago
Are you serious? In the time it took you to write this comment you could have actually read the article to find the exact answer to your question. It's basically the whole point of the post.
- Tenoke 4y ago
  At least on phone it only gives you one sentence per page with a slow transition, so it wasn't as quick as you suggest to go over it again to confirm. Either way, the point seemed to be more about the different feeds which is not a surprise anywhere while the real and only relevant information actually is that the content is banned.

throwaway48375 4y ago

>Ukrainian Nykolai gets to see men in military attire singing patriotic songs about loving Ukraine. Or talking about it being a man's duty to sign up for battle. >Russian Alexei sees a man tripping over in the water, a puppy patting a duckling on the head and some funny, homemade costumes. Is it just me or does the first one sound like propaganda and the second one sound like normal TikTok?

SV_BubbleTime 4y ago
The number of people unwilling to accept and be critical of Ukrainian propaganda has been eye-opening to me. The people that were just railing against “misinformation“ by their political opponents, have been happy to jump all over snake Island, ghost of Kyiv, Z dressed in uniform last year, higher Russian death rate than frontlines of World War II, and going out of their way to ignore neo-Nazi groups there. No one has to be pro-Russia, to notice all the Ukrainian propaganda. Proves to me that everyone is full of shit when it comes to actual standards of acceptability.
- gruez 4y ago
  >The people that were just railing against “misinformation“ by their political opponents, have been happy to jump all over [...] source? while I don't doubt there's a many people for both groups, I haven't seen concrete examples of what you're describing.
jimbobimbo 4y ago
Does inability to explicitly find and watch Ukrainian videos from the Russian IP (see closer to the end of the article) sound like a normal Tiktok?
- thriftwy 4y ago
  Why do you think they will watch Ukrainian videos? In Telegram there's plenty of Russian war videos. Probably, hundreds of channels with tens-hundreds of thousands subscribers. It's just TikTok does not want to be part of this.

totetsu 4y ago

I don't like how this site take over scrolling. I want to read the text in the middle of my screen where there isn't a crack

avodonosov 4y ago
I agree. My screen isn't cracked, by the scrolling behaviour is confusing and inconvenient.

verisimi 4y ago

This is a fair point - that people are seeing different things in Russia and Ukraine. But can we reflect for a second that we are all in the same boat? We don't know what we are presented on screens is real either. Who's to say we are receiving the truth? Are our leaders beneficent? I think not. We are all in the same boat. We are all propagandised. We don't even know what is going on anywhere else, except for what we are able to personally verify. And even that is limited by how we are able to explain and frame our experience!

Fervicus 4y ago
Great point. In my circles I have far too often seen people criticizing other governments of propaganda, while also accepting the narratives we live in without question.
ajross 4y ago
An important distinction is that if I want to find foreign spin in the west, I can do so trivially and legally and share it with anyone I want. And the worst punishment I will see is a downvote. The core claim in the liked article isn't about content moderation, it's about censorship. And it's really upsetting to see the extent to which HN commenters want to conflate them.
- verisimi 4y ago
  Content moderation is de facto censorship. If someone is sharing a honestly held opinion, not threatening anyone - that should be allowed. You seem to be unaware of the level of censorship that goes on here, youtube, twitter, etc, etc. It is called breaking community guidelines, de-platforming, shadow banning, hate-speech, etc. Do you remember when Alex Jones was removed from everywhere in a couple of days? Regardless of what you think, should he be allowed a voice? All of this is taking place outside of the legal system btw. Which is meant to establish people's right to free speech.
  - Tozen 4y ago
    Very good points. Including the shadow banning that takes place here and everywhere. Different opinions and views are increasingly censored by those that are empowered. "Power corrupts". Unless a fair system is in place of checks and balances, there will be those that will abuse it whenever they can get away with it.

Koshkin 4y ago

Nitpick: the Ukrainian version of the name Nicholas is Mykolai (with an M).

jimbobimbo 4y ago
Mykola. "Ai" ending appears in Russian spelling of the name.

yosito 4y ago

I already kind of knew intuitively that this would be happening in some form, but seeing it examined like this really puts it into perspective. I've noticed that on Snapchat and Instagram, I'm not able to see any new public content coming from Ukraine. On the Snapchat map, Ukraine is completely empty. I have a few Ukrainian friends, and I still see their content, but public stuff seems to be filtered or censored somehow. I'm a US-based account, and I've been in the US and Dominican Republic lately. I think this phenomenon is related to filter bubbles (but also more than that). I've already been noticing for years that my connections with different political views, or different interests, are being fed completely different realities. Sometimes it's benign recommendations, other times it's creepy advertiser-driven manipulation, and this example of Ukraine/Russia shows that there is clearly some blatant, wide-scale censorship going on. The narrative is being controlled by powers operating in the shadows. It really is an unseen information war. As someone who has been traveling for 10 years, my friends are incredibly diverse. So I often hear news from outside of my country and my filter bubbles. And my go-to source for trying to peek outside of the filter bubbles is Wikipedia's current events portal. I've got a few Russian friends. Most are outside of Russia, but one who I regularly talk to is in Russia and stays on Instagram using a VPN. I've had some conversations with her about the war, and while she's certainly not a fan of Putin, and knows there is a war going on, she seems to be completely naive about the severity of it. When we talk about it she says things about how truth is hard to know because the media lies. She is hearing stories from the West but having a hard time knowing what is really happening. There really needs to be some new form of leaflet drops to get real information to Russians despite the Information Age Iron Curtain.

bannedbybros 4y ago

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macinjosh 4y ago

Now do Yemeni TikTok and the US.

user3939382 4y ago

My position is that Russia's Article 51 legal justification for the invasion is a stretch at best, but that the US policy of unnecessary, aggressive NATO expansion [1] baited Putin into this war whereas he was very clear Ukrainian NATO membership was a red line for him. We also made no effort to encourage Ukraine to honor the Minsk accords which would have almost certainly prevented this. If Mexico was hostile and Russia was in the process of working with them to put nukes in Tijuana I wonder if the US would sit idly by? Meanwhile was have Condoleezza Rice without a hint of irony on the news agreeing that invading a sovereign country is a war crime (does Iraq ring a bell?) I see my point of view reflected only in alternative, independent media. This includes, for example, Pulitzer-prize winning journalist Chris Hedges who had years of his work purged from YouTube simply because he had a show on RT which was never once sympathetic to Putin. My anti-war, pro-diplomacy POV is banned from corporate media, and flagged/downvoted into oblivion on Reddit and even Hacker News. From my perspective most supporting sending arms and money to Ukraine has been the victim of a policy campaign by the arms industry which has already generated windfall arms sales to Ukraine and now Germany (!). So am I surprised by this story? No. I've been seeing a banned perspective on this conflict in the US from day 1. [1] “We reiterate the decision made at the 2008 Bucharest Summit that Ukraine will become a member of the Alliance” June 2021 https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/news_185000.htm https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/news_185000.htm

gspr 4y ago
US policy isn't "expanding" NATO. NATO expands because free, sovereign nations apply to join. Name a single country that is in NATO against its own will due to "US policy".
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kreeben 4y ago
>> he was very clear Ukrainian NATO membership was a red line for him Whereas in the free world, no one, not even Putin, should and absolutely will not have a say in other nations agreements, because that is a preposterous idea that no supporter of democracy would even consider to be a valid stance.

eunos 4y ago

From the experiment they only change the IP addresses and no need to spoof the GPS?

querez 4y ago
I don't understand how they're able to just "change their IP" to something that's located in those 2 cities. How does that work, do they have someone running a proxy for them in those 2 locations?
- foverzar 4y ago
  > How does that work, do they have someone running a proxy for them in those 2 locations? Sure, there are thousands of proxies in Russia and Ukraine. Lots of them are free. Besides, any decent paid VPN with multiple exit nodes would likely have nodes in both Russia and Ukraine. You could even order a VPS hosting, if that's your thing.

dncornholio 4y ago

The point of the article is, in my opinion, TikTok is working as intended. What did you expect really?

prionassembly 4y ago

This made me finally download TikTok and.. OW! that's REALLY NSFW! (I didn't think I'd live, as a man, to be offended by sparsely-clad voluptuous women, but there I am.)

psyc 4y ago
If you weren’t offended enough, many of those G-cup Megan Thee Stallion fans are self-admitted minors crying “stop sexualizing me! I’m a kid!” while they gyrate. I deleted TikTok shortly after I installed it. (Not just because of that. The last thing I need is another attention-optimized vapid rabbit hole.)
weinzierl 4y ago
You must be on a different TikTok than me. I'm using TikTok from Germany and I neither get NSFW content nor war stuff. It's all silly dance videos, lots of stupid pranks, wonderful musicians and a bit of English as a Second Language content for me. Regardless how much of this is because of my location or my behaviour, it supports OPs point: TikTok can be very different for different users.
austinl 4y ago
This was my first experience using TikTok as well — I think those videos will always appear to new users because they get a lot of engagement. But if you swipe past them quickly, you'll likely never see them again.

throwaway3968 4y ago

It's probably good that Twitter is banned over here at the moment. Overnight, my feed filled up with a nasty mix of ethnic cleansing and "collective guilt" calls coming from Ukraine in response to the massacre. All directed at people who've been on their side by all legal means they have available. I don't know how to react to that.

sporkland 4y ago

Love that people are doing this research. Maybe I'm delusional, but I found it positively surprising that: 1. The Ukrainian user saw videos about the war despite Russia and China wanting to suppress news around it, and I'm sure TikTok taking pressure around it. 2. It mostly isn't algorithmic deception, it's a byproduct of the fact that they had to turn off new video uploads in response to a crazy fake news law.

sAbakumoff 4y ago

Kremlin Press Secretary Dimitro “the cockroach” Peskov openly boasted about using VPN. Nothing prevents RU citizens to use VPN to get the full access to the TT content.

tormeh 4y ago

Hm... Pretty solid argument in favor of federated/decentralized protocols, this. Is there anything out there that doesn't suck? Not for chat. We've got Matrix and chat is usually not censored anyway.

bogwog 4y ago
How well would a federated social network hold up to an attack from a government like Russia? Either to flood it with propaganda, or simply to bring it down?
- NoOn3 4y ago
  Therefore, in part they do not become popular, goverments simply do not allow them to do this.
d0mine 4y ago
Nobody in power wants it. For example, look at how alternatives to reddit that gain any traction are treated (they have a reputation that only bigots, incels, other unsavory characters use it--any such platform is overrun by government trolls).

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cabirum 4y ago

Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter are blocked in Russia because they only allow pro-Ukraine narrative. The social platforms became weapons in this war. Anyone noticed they blocked accounts of most Russian media companies and news sources? Or users with "wrong" opinions are being shadow banned? Or Google deprioritised or excluded some Russian gov services (even non news)? Sorry, but unbiased sources do not exist. Free speech does not exist. It's not two worlds, but two bubbles.

alex-ant 4y ago
Currently Russia doesn't have a singe reliable news source. We all have seen the pro-Russian narrative - there's no war, we're not murdering the civilians, all Ukrainians are nazis developing bioweapons targeting "slav DNA" and to be delivered across the border by birds, etc. Those are not news. Needless to say that this propaganda also targets people in other countries with large ethnical Russian population, specifically the Baltic states and incites those people to riot and hate the land they live on creating a bridgehead for possible Russian invasion.
- pphysch 4y ago
  What is your standard for "reliable news source"? Does it look something like this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Perennial_sources https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Per...
- cabirum 4y ago
  However "unreliable" these news sources are, they present a different opinion that is being censored. And since there are just two sides in this war, you can only see just one side of a story.
  - renw0rp 4y ago
    Russians doing what they have been doing for a hundred years: lying, blaming, spreading clearly false propaganda, stealing, murdering and raping people. Meanwhile people in the west, or at least outside of the conflict zone, discussing about free speech. Nothing has changed. You can be proud of yourself and your principles.

soheil 4y ago

What is ironic is surely the dancing video mentioned and not that a publicly funded Norwegian government-owned media, NRK, (Jens Stoltenberg from Norway is the head of Nato) publishes a hit piece on TikTok all the while ignoring what FB, Twitter and many other social media have been doing to people in their own counties including the US for years. Very convenient.

older 4y ago
You clearly have no idea what are you talking about. Here's what NRK has published about Facebook: https://nrkbeta.no/?s=F https://nrkbeta.no/?s=F facebook Feel free to search for articles about other social media.
- soheil 4y ago
  What? You literally just sent me a link to a keyword search for "Facebook" on that site.
  - older 4y ago
    Yes, that's what I literally did. And that's what you shoul've done before writing all that nonsence about how they are ignoring what other social media is doing.

sebastianconcpt 4y ago

Social Media big tech in collusion with party propagandists is poison in the internet freedom dream. Ideologues owning big tech is a dream come true for authoritarians. How are we going to fix this I have no idea.

dcchambers 4y ago

This is a great visual and concrete example of how easily a narrative can be controlled. This is but one example of a larger systemic issue with media in the 21st century, and an issue with how people consume that media. Virtually every platform is like this, not just TikTok. It's not like TikTok tries to present itself as a neutral, unbiased source. Their whole premise is delivering "highly curated" content to you as fast as possible. The problem is that people have accepted that as normal and it's doing horrible things to the world. There's a reason everyone feels like we're the most divided we've ever been...and it starts with things like this. As far as the war in Ukraine is concerned, this is just like classic WW2 propaganda but turned up to 11 due to the nature of how fast and easy it is to spread [mis]information these days.

ec109685 4y ago
This where sanctions could be used. TikTok is profiting by keeping this neutered version up in Russia, so US government could prohibit making money in US until they take it down in Russia.
- blaser-waffle 4y ago
  Tik Tok is Chinese -- and was raged against by Trump for that reason -- and would constitute picking a fight with the CCP. That's a big ole can of worms to open up while running other big-deal sanctions and playing the brinkmanship game with Russia.
  - sharken 4y ago
    Absolutely, it's tempting to go after China as well using the saying, If you're not with us, you're against us. But the current strategy of appealing to China to at least not help Russia in any way, is the best outcome. And thankfully China has opted to pursue a rather novel way of fighting COVID, which prevents them from getting stronger economically.
latchkey 4y ago
Speaking of controlled narratives, I'd like to see the source code to their bots so that this experiment can be reproduced. I'm not saying that they didn't just make up the article, but how do we know? How do we know their bots didn't have bugs in them that pushed the results in favor of the tone of the article?

hermannj314 4y ago

Aggressor nations have the privilege of lying to themselves on the consequences and reality of their wars. The defenders do not get the privilege to ignore that. Americans barely talked about Afghanistan. For 20 years, our internet was full of funny videos, stupid songs, and memes of Osama bin Laden. Sure we bombed civilians targets and committed war crimes too, but we had very smart lawyers that taught us clever words for why it was moral when we did it. And we nodded our heads in agreement and turned the channel to American Idol. Americans are well aware that technology enables us to live in our own artificially constructed reality. We spent the last 20 years building it.

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lambdasquirrel 4y ago
Well, lest we gaslight ourselves into what'd happened, the Putin Administration spent a lot of time hand-waving and saying that they weren't going to invade Ukraine. And then they did, and apparently expecting that they were going to be greeted as liberators. So there is no reason to trust them at all. (Maybe just like there was no reason to trust GWB's folks either.) From where I'm sitting, Biden's folks did no small part in subtlely goading the Russians into doing stupid things. But really, they just led Putin and Xi into their own worst excesses, much like how those have been doing to the U.S. in turn. The world is an ugly place, and it's up to us citizens to figure out what's going on. We are not served when the U.S. invades Afghanistan. How was that geopolitically smart, even in a realpolitik sense? Likewise the Russian people would be smart to realize just how much the public opinion in sympathetic countries (like Germany) has turned against them. When we buy into this Brave New World stuff, we are creating a worse situation for ourselves – and even more so for future generations. Most of all, we need to know ourselves, because these artificially constructed realities work against us when the algorithms know us better than we do.
asveikau 4y ago
On the other hand... I was really against the Iraq war and nobody ever threatened me with 15 years of jail for it. The architects of that conflict left when term limits were up. (Putin did not.) Don't get me wrong, Iraq was pointless. Afghanistan seemed to have a justification at the start but was mismanaged early on. In terms of culture, wide swaths of the population were brainwashed in a similar way to how we talk about Russia now, though with a little more vocal opposition. But what I can say is there is room in the American system for course correction.

dark-star 4y ago

It would have helped if they had made it more prominent that you're supposed to scroll down. I was watching the first video, expecting to see a second one for comparison or something. I already closed the tab again and only later saw a coworker browsing HN who clicked on the same link and saw him scroll :)

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bacan 4y ago

This is exactly what happens when algorithms tailor what people see on their newsfeed. They will push narratives. One of the main reasons I prefer Reddit is the existence of r/All. Provides a very balanced view

d0mine 4y ago
Reddit is a typical western media that promotes corresponding world view.
goldenchrome 4y ago
If you think Reddit isn’t highly curated too, you’re wrong. Perhaps you could make that argument 10 years ago but no longer. In the last few years Reddit has taken on hundreds of millions of dollars of funding to morph the site into a more mainstream advertiser-friendly offering. They’ve silenced lots of controversial communities by outright banning them or neutered them with “quarantines”. Over the years, Reddit has succeeded at pushing out people who don’t have palatable opinions and retained a core base of advertiser-friendly true believers. “Advertiser-friendly” in the contemporary era means “left-leaning with no reservations“. This is about the furthest thing you can get from a “balanced view”.
- bacan 4y ago
  Curated sure. Tailored to individual tastes - absolutely not Kinda like a newspaper
zarriak 4y ago
This is an absurd statement. Reddit is by far the most effectively gamed and manipulated social media platform that exists. There’s countless examples of how powerful mods are on Reddit on shaping narratives.
ShivShankaran 4y ago
reddit is one of the absolutely most gamed social media on the internet. Don't forget that the "head of content" that was hired few years back is from NATO with no technical background. Reddit is on harcore mode right now deleting entire subreddits and permabanning people that even slightly critique NATO or Ukraine. /r/all is nauseatingly full of "russia bad, ukraine good" with mindless flinging of feces. Yall be blaming facebook but reddit is the real snake in the grass.

beprogrammed 4y ago

What a fantastic article, was captivated from beginning to end.

globalise83 4y ago

Excellent production: right length, fabulous graphics, very creative approach overall: A grade from me.

startoffs 4y ago

I have noticed that TikTok is more likely to show the content from my current location as I travel between countries. Must be the geo tagging that makes it easy for the . 80km is a long distance when it crosses national borders.

lastdong 4y ago

Brilliant article, thank you for sharing

VincentEvans 4y ago

Westerners should stop projecting their culture and values on Russians when trying to make sense of what is going on. Russians are not these poor bamboozled fools. Support for Putin is real. Denial of atrocities and justification for war is not rooted in ignorance, but pride. For years Kremlin cultivated in Russians a sense of injured pride, something akin to the “straight white male” victimhood and persecution complex you see in US fringe groups. Russians were told of greatnesses of their achievements of the past, and how it was stolen from them, how the West is weak, gullible, and corrupt, and is trying to sabotage the inevitable rise of Russia to it’s destined glory. Russians have enough access to sources of truth, but their world view simply does not compel them to believe those sources that create dissonance with their righteous cause - they can’t be brother killing monsters that rape mothers in front of their children, crush people with tanks, bomb maternity hospitals - so it’s obviously all lies. And since everyone is accusing them of this - then it simply means that everyone is lying and will get what is coming to them. How do I know this? I was born in Soviet Union, am Russian-speaking and I am unable to explain my anger and grief over what is happening to my own father who thinks that I am a fool to believe in propaganda staged videos full of crisis actors manufactured by Western media.

kikimora 4y ago
All true. Same problem with my father. My wife also has the same problem with her father as well.

stanislavb 4y ago

And this is one of the means how China will sway future democratic elections around the world - by brainwashing all the TikTok zombies and presenting to them the China manipulated story.

gytdev 4y ago

since HN is a technology oriented site, can someone explain what technologies are being used in this article? The graphics are amazing! Is it mainly three.js?

VoodooJuJu 4y ago

A lot of people are praising this article's design, but I personally did not appreciate it. I get it - it's a TikTok story that's made to look and work like TikTok, probably made to appeal to the TikTok class. As one who prefers clear prose over "consoom the content!" video snippets and soundbites, I felt distracted from the message by all the dynamic media.