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I've never in my life used TikTok. Can you please point to a specific article, news source, journal, any piece of information that is legal in the United States

by ericmay 9mo ago

tdb7893 9mo ago
Larry and David Ellison have been buying media outlets and those media outlets have started spiking (or delaying, editing, etc) stories that look bad for Trump. It's not that you don't have access at all, it's that these specific platforms are starting to suppress it. This is the notable example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inside_CECOT https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inside_CECOT
- andsoitis 9mo ago
  > It's not that you don't have access at all, it's that these specific platforms are starting to suppress it. This is the notable example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inside_CECOT https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inside_CECOT The 60 Minutes Episode on CECOT aired on Jan 18 and it is also on CBS News' website: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/what-deported-venezuelans-endured-at-cecot-60-minutes/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/what-deported-venezuelans-endur...
  - woooooo 9mo ago
    And it got a Streisand Effect from the attempted scuttling. That doesn't change what they were trying to do, it just means they're not always executing perfectly. In the long run, they bought out some dying legacy media in CBS and social media has a short half-life. Nobody's saying they're geniuses but it's clear what they're trying to do.
  - gruez 9mo ago
    It got delayed, didn't it? In the meantime the news cycle moved onto Trump's intervention in Venezuela and even greater ICE violence. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inside_CECOT#Broadcast_postponement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inside_CECOT#Broadcast_postpon...
  - miltonlost 9mo ago
    Nice of you to delete their first sentence which includes "delay". Which is what happened if you read the wikipedia article instead of holding water for propagandists, e.g., Bari Weiss.
  - tdb7893 9mo ago
    The fact it was released a month later and only after large internal and external pressure (including a Canadian station just airing it anyway since it was already complete and ready to air) is the problem. These large fights are the sign of a huge change in how it's run, which includes a purposeful political shift. Changes at an organization are slow (all of us software engineers should know this by now) but this is going to be a continual battle and there isn't going to be this fight for every story. We can't see everything an organization is doing as CBS is mostly opaque but from these few public fights (also previous work by these people) we can tell a lot
- miltonlost 9mo ago
  NPR article about the rest of the right wing spin that's happening at CBS news is pretty insightful: https://www.npr.org/2026/01/27/nx-s1-5689849/after-rocky-start-bari-weiss-to-cut-staff-add-commentators-at-cbs-news https://www.npr.org/2026/01/27/nx-s1-5689849/after-rocky-sta...
woooooo 9mo ago
It's not about legality, its about scrolling and recommendations. Young people see stuff by other young people by default. Its been a conservative/zionist talking point for years now that "the youth are getting brainwashed by tiktok", and Ellison in particular seems to be in the "I've gone hard right due to the latest Israel conflict" camp. So of course they're not being subtle about it.
- gruez 9mo ago
  [deleted]
  - woooooo 9mo ago
    Bro, conservative talking points have existed since before Jan 2024.
- ericmay 9mo ago
  So I do have easy access to information, and the OP was incorrect? > its about scrolling and recommendations Don't scroll and don't take recommendations from these platforms. It's better now that it's American owned, but you really shouldn't have been using it when the Chinese Communist Party owned it. And I'm only talking about TikTok because that's the OP. I don't use any social media platforms besides LinkedIn, and LinkedIn is such a big piece of trash I don't think it matters if anyone uses it.
  - woooooo 9mo ago
    OP said "buying TikTok was about hiding information from people", and the people who bought TikTok are trying to suppress certain information on TikTok. Whether you or I think that's effective or not is up for debate, I also avoid social media, but OP made a statement about intentions. (And, aside, the current intentions appear far more pointed and ideological than when it was owned by ByteDance as a lottery winner with a surprise overseas success, optimizing for youth engagement.)
    - 9mo ago
JeremyNT 9mo ago
I've never in my life used TikTok. Can you please point to a specific article, news source, journal, any piece of information that is legal in the United States that I don't have easy access to so I can see what I'm missing? Whataboutism. You presumably know full well what the parent was describing, but if not: TikTok presents users with feeds of videos. For many users, this is their primary news source. An American oligarch and party loyalist now has de facto control of the app. Therefore, the regime has the capability to shape the narrative by boosting or hiding videos from the feed (whether or not they are doing so is an open question). Could users still hypothetically find the same information elsewhere? Sure. But if this app is their primary source of information, would they even know they should bother doing so?
- ericmay 9mo ago
  > For many users, this is their primary news source. That's their problem. You can't make blanket claims saying Americans now don't have easy access to information when there are other sources, ranging from the NYT to the Intercept, to anything you want to read being written and translated right on your computer from the EU or Japan or anywhere else you want to read. > An American oligarch and party loyalist now has de facto control of the app. Chinese oligarch, American oligarch. Either way someone without your best intentions in mind owns your platform. Maybe you should stop using it.
  - JeremyNT 9mo ago
    Goalpost moving, this one. The post you were replying to stated: > hiding information from the US public They didn't say "Americans now don't have easy access to information" (your words). They said this sort of manipulation would be to hide information from the American public. Many people in the American public only see news on TikTok. If information is suppressed within TikTok, it is hidden to them. If TikTok stops showing content, can they find it some other way? Yes, if they know to look. It's not blocked or destroyed, but it's hidden. Is that a problem? Yes. TikTok's dominance was and is a problem in and of itself. But that isn't an excuse to abuse its dominance for propaganda purposes. As X has shown, these platforms are crucial to the information ecosystem, and their selective curation can warp the views of an entire population.
asveikau 9mo ago
You have easy access in that you can find things if you look for it. What that commenter means by easy access is that the information is in mainstream sources pushed to people such that you are likely to know about it without having looked. For example I made a comment here on HN recently that immigrants commit crimes at fewer rates than US born people. That sends a segment of Americans into a flying rage even though they have access to that information, they were never going to hear it in their ordinary channels, even if they stick to "mainstream" media.
- ericmay 9mo ago
  Mainstream sources that control narratives, and are owned by the same extremely wealthy people that we're complaining about now owning TikTok? Sorry, this doesn't pass the smell test for me.
  - asveikau 9mo ago
    Right now the Ellison family owns both CBS and the US version of TikTok, so sometimes the connection is kind of literal. But this complaint is pretty old, I think of Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent. (Setting aside his Epstein connections for a moment) The way we do censorship is much less the methods of a traditional totalitarian state and more like the private sector policing what is acceptable discourse.
    - ericmay 9mo ago
      The problem with Chomsky's argument is that you can't do anything about it. Every country, every group in power, democracy, republic, chiefdom, &c, is participating in manufacturing consent and even if you fight to gain power, once you gain power you wind up doing the same thing.
      - asveikau 9mo ago
        I'm not citing Chomsky with a claim that he's unassailable, just that it's a very old complaint. I also think he was right about a bunch of stuff, and wrong on others. As for what he suggested, this is reminding me that I never read his work On anarchism. I heard him speak favorably about the anarchists in the Spanish Civil War. I also found that topic very interesting when I was getting a Spanish minor many years ago at college. I am sure many HN commenters will disagree that it's something to emulate.

by ericmay 9mo ago

tdb7893 9mo ago

Larry and David Ellison have been buying media outlets and those media outlets have started spiking (or delaying, editing, etc) stories that look bad for Trump. It's not that you don't have access at all, it's that these specific platforms are starting to suppress it. This is the notable example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inside_CECOT https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inside_CECOT

andsoitis 9mo ago
> It's not that you don't have access at all, it's that these specific platforms are starting to suppress it. This is the notable example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inside_CECOT https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inside_CECOT The 60 Minutes Episode on CECOT aired on Jan 18 and it is also on CBS News' website: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/what-deported-venezuelans-endured-at-cecot-60-minutes/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/what-deported-venezuelans-endur...
- woooooo 9mo ago
  And it got a Streisand Effect from the attempted scuttling. That doesn't change what they were trying to do, it just means they're not always executing perfectly. In the long run, they bought out some dying legacy media in CBS and social media has a short half-life. Nobody's saying they're geniuses but it's clear what they're trying to do.
- gruez 9mo ago
  It got delayed, didn't it? In the meantime the news cycle moved onto Trump's intervention in Venezuela and even greater ICE violence. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inside_CECOT#Broadcast_postponement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inside_CECOT#Broadcast_postpon...
- miltonlost 9mo ago
  Nice of you to delete their first sentence which includes "delay". Which is what happened if you read the wikipedia article instead of holding water for propagandists, e.g., Bari Weiss.
- tdb7893 9mo ago
  The fact it was released a month later and only after large internal and external pressure (including a Canadian station just airing it anyway since it was already complete and ready to air) is the problem. These large fights are the sign of a huge change in how it's run, which includes a purposeful political shift. Changes at an organization are slow (all of us software engineers should know this by now) but this is going to be a continual battle and there isn't going to be this fight for every story. We can't see everything an organization is doing as CBS is mostly opaque but from these few public fights (also previous work by these people) we can tell a lot
miltonlost 9mo ago
NPR article about the rest of the right wing spin that's happening at CBS news is pretty insightful: https://www.npr.org/2026/01/27/nx-s1-5689849/after-rocky-start-bari-weiss-to-cut-staff-add-commentators-at-cbs-news https://www.npr.org/2026/01/27/nx-s1-5689849/after-rocky-sta...

woooooo 9mo ago

It's not about legality, its about scrolling and recommendations. Young people see stuff by other young people by default. Its been a conservative/zionist talking point for years now that "the youth are getting brainwashed by tiktok", and Ellison in particular seems to be in the "I've gone hard right due to the latest Israel conflict" camp. So of course they're not being subtle about it.

gruez 9mo ago
[deleted]
- woooooo 9mo ago
  Bro, conservative talking points have existed since before Jan 2024.
ericmay 9mo ago
So I do have easy access to information, and the OP was incorrect? > its about scrolling and recommendations Don't scroll and don't take recommendations from these platforms. It's better now that it's American owned, but you really shouldn't have been using it when the Chinese Communist Party owned it. And I'm only talking about TikTok because that's the OP. I don't use any social media platforms besides LinkedIn, and LinkedIn is such a big piece of trash I don't think it matters if anyone uses it.
- woooooo 9mo ago
  OP said "buying TikTok was about hiding information from people", and the people who bought TikTok are trying to suppress certain information on TikTok. Whether you or I think that's effective or not is up for debate, I also avoid social media, but OP made a statement about intentions. (And, aside, the current intentions appear far more pointed and ideological than when it was owned by ByteDance as a lottery winner with a surprise overseas success, optimizing for youth engagement.)
  - 9mo ago

JeremyNT 9mo ago

I've never in my life used TikTok. Can you please point to a specific article, news source, journal, any piece of information that is legal in the United States that I don't have easy access to so I can see what I'm missing? Whataboutism. You presumably know full well what the parent was describing, but if not: TikTok presents users with feeds of videos. For many users, this is their primary news source. An American oligarch and party loyalist now has de facto control of the app. Therefore, the regime has the capability to shape the narrative by boosting or hiding videos from the feed (whether or not they are doing so is an open question). Could users still hypothetically find the same information elsewhere? Sure. But if this app is their primary source of information, would they even know they should bother doing so?

ericmay 9mo ago
> For many users, this is their primary news source. That's their problem. You can't make blanket claims saying Americans now don't have easy access to information when there are other sources, ranging from the NYT to the Intercept, to anything you want to read being written and translated right on your computer from the EU or Japan or anywhere else you want to read. > An American oligarch and party loyalist now has de facto control of the app. Chinese oligarch, American oligarch. Either way someone without your best intentions in mind owns your platform. Maybe you should stop using it.
- JeremyNT 9mo ago
  Goalpost moving, this one. The post you were replying to stated: > hiding information from the US public They didn't say "Americans now don't have easy access to information" (your words). They said this sort of manipulation would be to hide information from the American public. Many people in the American public only see news on TikTok. If information is suppressed within TikTok, it is hidden to them. If TikTok stops showing content, can they find it some other way? Yes, if they know to look. It's not blocked or destroyed, but it's hidden. Is that a problem? Yes. TikTok's dominance was and is a problem in and of itself. But that isn't an excuse to abuse its dominance for propaganda purposes. As X has shown, these platforms are crucial to the information ecosystem, and their selective curation can warp the views of an entire population.

asveikau 9mo ago

You have easy access in that you can find things if you look for it. What that commenter means by easy access is that the information is in mainstream sources pushed to people such that you are likely to know about it without having looked. For example I made a comment here on HN recently that immigrants commit crimes at fewer rates than US born people. That sends a segment of Americans into a flying rage even though they have access to that information, they were never going to hear it in their ordinary channels, even if they stick to "mainstream" media.

ericmay 9mo ago
Mainstream sources that control narratives, and are owned by the same extremely wealthy people that we're complaining about now owning TikTok? Sorry, this doesn't pass the smell test for me.
- asveikau 9mo ago
  Right now the Ellison family owns both CBS and the US version of TikTok, so sometimes the connection is kind of literal. But this complaint is pretty old, I think of Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent. (Setting aside his Epstein connections for a moment) The way we do censorship is much less the methods of a traditional totalitarian state and more like the private sector policing what is acceptable discourse.
  - ericmay 9mo ago
    The problem with Chomsky's argument is that you can't do anything about it. Every country, every group in power, democracy, republic, chiefdom, &c, is participating in manufacturing consent and even if you fight to gain power, once you gain power you wind up doing the same thing.
    - asveikau 9mo ago
      I'm not citing Chomsky with a claim that he's unassailable, just that it's a very old complaint. I also think he was right about a bunch of stuff, and wrong on others. As for what he suggested, this is reminding me that I never read his work On anarchism. I heard him speak favorably about the anarchists in the Spanish Civil War. I also found that topic very interesting when I was getting a Spanish minor many years ago at college. I am sure many HN commenters will disagree that it's something to emulate.