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"Hate brings views": Confessions of a London fake news TikToker

171 points by pbshgthm 8mo ago

suddenlybananas 8mo ago
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- camillomiller 8mo ago
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  - KellyCriterion 8mo ago
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  - eur0pa 8mo ago
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  - wiseowise 8mo ago
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    - suddenlybananas 8mo ago
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      - incahoots 8mo ago
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unethical_ban 8mo ago
In one thread I am defending anonymity online from government mandated ID laws. Then I think to the persistent, malevolent, destructive lies that people spread with complete impunity and with faked video and photo evidence. This is not what the first amendment was designed to protect. Wary of making government the arbiter of truth, I don't know what society should do to combat this evil. In a fantasy world where I were king, the person who ran this tiktok would be in jail.
- wiseowise 8mo ago
  Don’t forget that not only they can do that, but they also disproportionate amount of damage (see US elections).
- Aurornis 8mo ago
  This person wasn’t anonymous to TikTok. They were doing this for payments. TikTok had their information! Voluntarily, too. Forcing everyone to ID themselves to companies would not have changed anything about this story > In a fantasy world where I were king, the person who ran this tiktok would be in jail. Now take this thought one step further and imagine if the king was someone you disagreed with, putting people in jail for posting things they didn’t like. Imagine if the king disagreed with you. Straight to jail?
  - unethical_ban 8mo ago
    That's why I said it was a fantasy, and why I didn't suggest it as policy. There is such a thing as objective truth and objective lies, though, don't deny that.
  - glasss 8mo ago
    Yes but in my fantasy world I'm the king because my morals and opinions are best for society. And of course I'll always be reasonable and never have a bad day or let my personal interests take priority over the good of my subjects. Obviously this is just wishful thinking about governance that people have been saying for milennia. Socrates said philosophers should of course be kings / the ruling class. There's no simple solution to creating a harmonious society, which of course leads people today and from thousands of years ago to say "Gee, wouldn't it just be nice if everyone listened to me about how to act and what to do when people get out line?". It's a fantasy, and a reminder that anyone wanting a benevolent dictator or to give up their responsibility of being a good citizen shouldn't be taken seriously. But I do pinky promise I would be a good king if everyone wanted to give me a try.
    - unethical_ban 8mo ago
      Right, it's a fantasy. Like I said in my original comment.
Aurornis 8mo ago
> He’d previously run a TikTok account that had amassed 24,000 followers. One night, he was astonished to find, he received his first payout from TikTok’s creator scheme. > His head was turned by the substantial sum of money: “I told my wife, wow, it’s £1,000.” I’m not familiar with TikTok’s payout rate. Is it really so high that an account with 24K followers can start getting checks that large?
- realo 8mo ago
  Apparently yes, as long as you vomit far right hate.
  - 837263292029 8mo ago
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    - deleted 8mo ago
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- bryanrasmussen 8mo ago
  I would assume part of the payout rate would also be determined by level of engagement of those followers, or also people who are not subscribed but are still sitting through your content.
- thinkingaboutit 8mo ago
  Yes, as long as you’re eligible for monetization
- afavour 8mo ago
  TikTok's algorithm makes follower counts less important than they are on other platforms. The means by which your video gets into people's FYP feed is not very clear but it is very, very common to see content from someone you do not follow, and I think if it shows positive engagement stats it'll get shown to more and more people.
- thisisit 8mo ago
vivzkestrel 8mo ago
there is a also a very strong anti india sentiment on twitter / x just search for #india or look at the comments of posts made by people like vivek ramaswamy , nikki haley, and any other politician and you ll see it. I wonder if this is some kinda state sponsored campaign for objectives that are not clear to me
- mhh__ 8mo ago
  I suppose it's possible but I think the more basic answer is that there's been a huge influx of Indians into the west recently i.e. find an example historically where people don't end up fighting in such situations.
  - suddenlybananas 8mo ago
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    - DonHopkins 8mo ago
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      - suddenlybananas 8mo ago
        By being sarcastic, I'm as bad as a lying propagandist? That seems pretty extreme.
- libertine 8mo ago
  A lot of hateful content is boosted by Russian bots, there were also instances of bot accounts that went silent with Iran internet blackout. Another example are conspiracy theory content, and some far right channels - like the case of Tenet Media being funded by Russia. This is the reality we're dealing with, a constant undermining flow of lies and hate to destabilize western democracies. The result is in sight, and will only get worse because one of the consequences is that these account gradually give permission to be racist, xenophobic, etc. And LLMs are making this worse. Of course that there's a sentiment that comes with migrants for example, but it's the disinformation that turns up a notch and blows it out of proportion. At some point comments on social media will have to be disabled.
matthewmacleod 8mo ago
It's a genuinely surprising feeling to live in a place, but see an absolute torrent of malevolent misinformation about it. The "London has fallen" trope that has been prevalent on social media recently stank of some kind of deliberate manipulation. But increasingly—in part due to stories like this—I wonder if it is actually just all "for the views".
- graemep 8mo ago
  One of the "British" racist social media posters turned out to be Pakistani, another Sri Lankan: https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2025-11-16/king-of-slop-how-anti-migrant-ai-content-made-one-sri-lankan-influencer-rich https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2025-11-16/kin... Both in it for the money.
- mhh__ 8mo ago
  It's definitely being pushed by people looking for views but there is obviously some truth to it when half the businesses around Leicester Square are completely empty frauds.
  - matthewmacleod 8mo ago
    No, there is not “obviously some truth to it”. There are any number of actual problems with London, including but not limited to a lack of enforcement against obvious frauds, and none of which are the related to the topic being discussed.
- gorpomon 8mo ago
  It's such a bummer to see such blatant manipulation, and even worse to see people buy into it wholesale.
- afavour 8mo ago
  For what it's worth living in NYC often feels the same. There are people who live on Long Island - many just an hour or so from the city - who are convinced it's a hellscape here. Even people with children who live in the city are somehow able to tolerate the cognitive dissonance of hearing their children talk about the lives they lead while also believing the city is crime-ridden and dangerous.
kotaKat 8mo ago
“This article is based on the opinion of one unnamed individual, and it is not representative of the positive and creative experience that millions enjoy every day on TikTok.” I always love the response from TikTok: “It’s only ever one person, guys! It’s never our cackhanded (lack of) moderation!”
SimianSci 8mo ago
Seems to be an extension of something we are dealing with across multiple parts of many societies. Monetary pursuit has become a guiding principle for alot of people, and its been revealed that such thinking is leading to major societal consequences. The current Technocratic idealization of efficiency by those in powerful positions is missing the second order consequences of financializing everything, and it appears to me that we are sacrificing societal necessities like trustworthiness and collective responsbility in favor of more efficient markets. If no corrective action is taken, we can expect increasing issues.
- barbazoo 8mo ago
  > Monetary pursuit has become a guiding principle for alot of people People need money to survive. The wealthy class have made it such that it's harder and harder to earn enough money the normal way. Often it doesn't even pay enough to survive. This is what creative people come up with in order to make a living. And it's obviously not in the wealthy class' interest to make any changes to that.
  - iamwil 8mo ago
    Doesn't make it excusable. I get it's hard to uphold principles when the stomach is empty. But it's clear the person in the piece wasn't thinking about much else, though he was also clearly not in the streets and starving.
  - deleted 8mo ago
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- legitster 8mo ago
  Culture is a pendulum, but humans are consistently greedy. "Journalistic integrity" was a marketing concept designed to sell newspapers at a time when there were hundreds and most were inaccurate. It was extremely profitable to have ethics. (A good reminder that noble minded Benjamin Franklin ran his own periodical that he regularly and intentionally slandered others in.) Now we have an entrenched media (with their own ethics problems) and there is opportunity to start pumping out garbage again. As Voltaire said, "History is only the pattern of silken slippers descending the stairs to the thunder of hobnailed boots climbing upward from below." In other words, progress has to be fought for from hard lessons, but once that progress is taken for granted, people let it slip not knowing the value of what they have.
alyandon 8mo ago
As long as there is a financial benefit to lying, there will always be people willing to do so. I personally believe that many of these "influencers" do not believe any of the stuff they spew into the public space.
aquir 8mo ago
TikTok should be sowed with salt like Carthage back then...along with these hate-influencers. We need new social media now.
ageitgey 8mo ago
As a sidenote, Jim Waterson is doing amazing work at London Centric, single-handedly doing the kind of investigative journalism week after week via Substack funding that traditional media has abandoned. I highly recommend subscribing if you are in the London area.
- drcongo 8mo ago
  It's a shame he's doing it on Substack, where hate brings views.
nine_k 8mo ago
I always remember this excellent sci-fi story about exactly such things: https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/30/sort-by-controversial/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/30/sort-by-controversial/ Strong emotions drive engagement. There are rather few of them; simple joy / laughter (think cat videos) is one that's relatively easy to evoke, but hate is equally easy to evoke, and it's much stronger.
deleted 8mo ago
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legitster 8mo ago
I know a lot of people who watch this kind of garbage and find it very convincing. The minute you add a video component, it tricks people into thinking they are seeing something raw and firsthand. We're all so worried about the effects of AI generated video (with good reason), but the truth is that DIP (Deceptive imagery persuasion) is unbelievably easy and cheap to do anywhere. You can take an innocuous video of a tank from anywhere, and then add a fake caption that says "this is a Venezuela drug cartel" and an average person has almost no defense mechanisms against it. It's also not something platforms could even police. If anything, nation state actors are already taking this to their advantage.
- LorenPechtel 8mo ago
  Exactly--we don't need AI video for the problem. I've watched it happening again and again. Deceptive image that people want to believe, they won't listen when contradictions are pointed out. And they forget that anyone even pointed out the problem. Few people seem to get it that when there's a thousand bad proofs of something it's probably false--and, for those that do, there's the opposite: present a thousand bad proofs of something true.
aaroninsf 8mo ago
The epitaph for civil society. The devil's bargain for those on this site: a pleasant work environment and paycheck deriing from engagementmaxxing and the resultant surveillance this provides. This is not sustainable.
smoovb 8mo ago
We are living thru the 'doctors prescribing cigarettes' era of lucrative fear-mongering.
rapatel0 8mo ago
I agree with this entire article, except that it's not just a right-wing phenomenon. Both sides distort the truth for financial gain and from a quantitative POV it's not a false equivalence.
- FatherOfCurses 8mo ago
  To quote you from an earlier comment of yours: "This is exactly the sensational take (devoid of nuance and information) that we should collectively push back against." The left has been traditionally anti-capitalist and in favor of improving rights and living conditions. Who on the left is gaining financially from distorting the truth to the level of someone like Larry Ellison, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, the Koch Brothers, or Jeff Bezos?
  - LorenPechtel 8mo ago
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  - Nasrudith 8mo ago
    In the favor of improving living conditions? If and only if it is through their ideology. If it is through something which goes against their ideology the goalposts move at the speed of light and out comes some rationalization like "it wasn't really important, what we need is community". When communism had claims to being more productive growth was the most important thing in the world and why we should adopt their ideology. Now look at the 'degrowth' people what a coincidence and they are literally arguing for worsening living conditions....
    - orwin 8mo ago
      That's because Marx was a productivist, and communism was strictly productivist until a decade ago (and still is mainly productivist nowadays). In a lot of country political ecology used to be liberal/capitalist (save a few radical feminist like D'Eaubonne who linked environment with feminism, but it's less than a minority). Basically Blair's 'third way' but with less nuclear (for some reason, although I think this position is loosing ground in ecologist), and more electric cars. The degrowth movement is an offshot of that ideology. Degrowth is to political ecologism what anarchism is to communism, based a very Idealist and hopeful view of humanity. Communists and ecologists are broadly on the 'left', but rarely allied until maybe a decade ago, and again, on minor things (Communists love nuclear,as it is typically something you don't want a capitalist with 'limited liability' to take care of), and while degrowth might be close to anarchists in some way, it is very, very dishonest to put them in the same basket.
lordnacho 8mo ago
There's a huge problem with the media landscape. It's similar to the junk-food problem, or gambling, or addiction to drugs. We've made a society where "number goes up" is the only measure of success. We don't care whether what makes the number go up is good, and that leads to exploiting the irrationality of consumers. People know they aren't supposed to eat chips all day. They know they aren't likely to win their bet. They know it's not a good idea to watch the most exciting news. But they can't help themselves, so they get exploited, and the exploiters are wealthy enough to write it into law that they aren't responsible. Point this out, and inevitably someone says "who are you to decide what's good for other people", and yes, I used to think this way. Well, one thing is that I'm straight up taking it from the people who are being used. Who wants to be fat? Virtually everyone is eating more than they should. Are we supposed to think this is the revealed, rational preference of everyone? The other thing that changed is that I'm a parent. I have to make choices for my kids, and doing that makes me recognize that people their age aren't the only children. Paternalistic much? Sure. Eat your vegetables! Who wants to be uninformed? Yet we are. People can just look up the crime statistics in London and see which way it has been going the past couple of decades. I don't have a solution, I'm afraid, just a diagnosis. We're living in a society that is being abused under the pretense of personal freedom. Someone better read than me has probably written an essay or two about this, please link. I don't know the best keywords for such a search.
- kelseyfrog 8mo ago
  It's the same perspective that asks, "If he's so bad, why doesn't she leave him?" And when she doesn't ultimately reconciles it by blaming her. It reveals that the emotional relationship to the consequences take priority over the consequences themselves. Whether it's justifying domestic violence or justifying the consequences of an obesity epidemic, or the consequences of a sizeable fraction of people living in a false reality. Those problems still exist, nothing is solved except if we apply the salve of personal choice, we can avoid meaningful change. It's a nilhistic, defeatist defense mechanism that says much more about the person employing it and their inability to withstand emotional discomfort than the facts of each case - that people regularly take actions that are objectively against their best interest. Our failure to provide aid and cling to the that really the world is just by hiding behind the idea of rational choice is childishly naive.
WillMorr 8mo ago
It's fascinating how he has fully outsourced his conscience to the TikTok content guidelines. With all of the discussion about what restrictions should exist on platforms it never ever occurred to me that people would start to view them as moral authorities.
ticulatedspline 8mo ago
Man what a PoS this guy was. he started as a lame re-poster >His head was turned by the substantial sum of money: “I told my wife, wow, it’s £1,000.” >Then, to his annoyance, TikTok immediately deleted his account because he was just stealing other people’s videos and reposting them. and dove straight into fabricating hate, and worst of all after directly confronted seems to literally have no concept of what he was doing or that it was in any way wrong or distasteful. >The man appears confused by the fuss his actions have caused. He gives the impression that he considered TikTok’s algorithm and the site’s content regulation policies to be the ultimate arbiter of whether a video crossed a line. >It wasn’t racist,” the man says of his account. He argues that if the videos had really been racist, TikTok’s algorithm would have downgraded the content. Seems to lack any internal moral compass, basically if the website lets him slander or lie it must be ok because he has no capacity to assess that value for himself. Flippin scary people like that are out there.
- sdellis 8mo ago
  Yes, there are people like that out there. If this makes your head spin, I can't imagine what the Epstein Files must be doing to you!
- safeimp 8mo ago
  If this topic interests you, I recommend `Antisocial: Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation`, by Andrew Marantz. Great read but it's definitely stress inducing at times.
- deleted 8mo ago
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- jbm 8mo ago
  These people are everywhere. Instagram serves me antisemetic content consistently with no way for me to downvote it. Likewise when it tries to rage bait me with islamophobic shit. I do not engage or upvote other than taking screenshots and reporting. At this point I just don't open Instagram except for messages from friends It is incredible that they literally fund selfish assholes to do this. What worse is that they will not reap the vile harvest.
csours 8mo ago
I feel like the huge and obvious problems with social media hide a small and subtle, but insidious problem: How do I show that I care about you? I feel like there is a range that might be described: I don't care very much about you one way or another. (Small/no signal on social media, very unlikely to be boosted) I care enough to fight for you. (Big Signal on social media, likely to be boosted) I care enough to calmly discuss the problem. (Small signal on social media, unlikely to be boosted, likely to be trolled, unsatisfying in the face of active fighting words) --- "How do I show that I care about you?" might also be called "virtue signaling". Unfortunately "virtue signaling" has taken on such a negative meaning that it is no longer useful for communication.
giancarlostoro 8mo ago
> “My first video got one million [views],” he says. I hear this a LOT. It seems Tik Tok sets itself up to let a new person's first video go completely viral, not sure what the "trick" is, but I read it often enough it makes me believe that if your first videos good enough you really can hit over a million. Of course who knows if that million is inflated or what. As for the rest of the article, this person seems to just not care about the consequences of their actions, its pretty disgusting.
garethsprice 8mo ago
"While the social media revolution has come with extraordinary benefits..." curious what Khan would say those benefits are. It's certainly something a lot of people find entertaining but I would not say there have been "extraordinary benefits" to society or individuals from the average UK adult spending 1h 37m a day[1] of their lives on social media platforms. "While smoking cigarettes has come with extraordinary benefits, we've seen a surge in people misusing these products and getting sick due to a lack of guardrails, tobacco companies need to do much more to make their product healthy and discourage bad faith actors from developing cancer..."/s [1] https://wearesocial.com/uk/blog/2025/02/digital-2025/ https://wearesocial.com/uk/blog/2025/02/digital-2025/
- DarkNova6 8mo ago
  Maybe replace "benefits" with "profits"?
deleted 8mo ago
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normalaccess 8mo ago
An extent presentation (IMHO) by Sam Vaknin on how the very way modern social networks operate even down to their structure are deeply destructive and anti-human. Hate has been and always will be the easiest and most monetizable emotion used by platform operators. Hate requires little complexity or nuance making it ideal for short form viral content where every second counts. The "Internet Hate Machine" is real and it was created that way by design by anti social deeply narcissistic nerds. Youtube Link: https://youtu.be/Ef7bqgeHenU https://youtu.be/Ef7bqgeHenU
Noumenon72 8mo ago
The only evidence provided for any of the videos being fake is that one house they visited had legal residents renting the property. But it's not fake that many London neighborhoods like Earl's Court provide 65% of their social housing to people born outside the UK, of whom 40% are in employment (source: migrationfacts.com), so one error doesn't mean much. Thus it's unclear to me (never having seen any of the videos) whether the misinformation was on TikTok or in this article.
sunaookami 8mo ago
Single biggest mistake of Social Media was to pay users for what they post. Started with YouTube, went the same way with Facbook, Instagram, TikTok and Twitter. People only post ragebait or engagement bait or play "the reply guy" with low-effort AI-generated content. Many people in countries like India and Pakistan are doing this because it pays better than their jobs. There was an interesting article on NHK that is always on the top of my mind when it's about this, I actually found it again: https://news.web.nhk/newsweb/na/na-k10014341931000 https://news.web.nhk/newsweb/na/na-k10014341931000 In Japan they are called "Impression Zombies", kinda fitting.

171 points by pbshgthm 8mo ago

suddenlybananas 8mo ago

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camillomiller 8mo ago
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- KellyCriterion 8mo ago
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- eur0pa 8mo ago
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- wiseowise 8mo ago
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  - suddenlybananas 8mo ago
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    - incahoots 8mo ago
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unethical_ban 8mo ago

In one thread I am defending anonymity online from government mandated ID laws. Then I think to the persistent, malevolent, destructive lies that people spread with complete impunity and with faked video and photo evidence. This is not what the first amendment was designed to protect. Wary of making government the arbiter of truth, I don't know what society should do to combat this evil. In a fantasy world where I were king, the person who ran this tiktok would be in jail.

wiseowise 8mo ago
Don’t forget that not only they can do that, but they also disproportionate amount of damage (see US elections).
Aurornis 8mo ago
This person wasn’t anonymous to TikTok. They were doing this for payments. TikTok had their information! Voluntarily, too. Forcing everyone to ID themselves to companies would not have changed anything about this story > In a fantasy world where I were king, the person who ran this tiktok would be in jail. Now take this thought one step further and imagine if the king was someone you disagreed with, putting people in jail for posting things they didn’t like. Imagine if the king disagreed with you. Straight to jail?
- unethical_ban 8mo ago
  That's why I said it was a fantasy, and why I didn't suggest it as policy. There is such a thing as objective truth and objective lies, though, don't deny that.
- glasss 8mo ago
  Yes but in my fantasy world I'm the king because my morals and opinions are best for society. And of course I'll always be reasonable and never have a bad day or let my personal interests take priority over the good of my subjects. Obviously this is just wishful thinking about governance that people have been saying for milennia. Socrates said philosophers should of course be kings / the ruling class. There's no simple solution to creating a harmonious society, which of course leads people today and from thousands of years ago to say "Gee, wouldn't it just be nice if everyone listened to me about how to act and what to do when people get out line?". It's a fantasy, and a reminder that anyone wanting a benevolent dictator or to give up their responsibility of being a good citizen shouldn't be taken seriously. But I do pinky promise I would be a good king if everyone wanted to give me a try.
  - unethical_ban 8mo ago
    Right, it's a fantasy. Like I said in my original comment.

Aurornis 8mo ago

> He’d previously run a TikTok account that had amassed 24,000 followers. One night, he was astonished to find, he received his first payout from TikTok’s creator scheme. > His head was turned by the substantial sum of money: “I told my wife, wow, it’s £1,000.” I’m not familiar with TikTok’s payout rate. Is it really so high that an account with 24K followers can start getting checks that large?

realo 8mo ago
Apparently yes, as long as you vomit far right hate.
- 837263292029 8mo ago
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bryanrasmussen 8mo ago
I would assume part of the payout rate would also be determined by level of engagement of those followers, or also people who are not subscribed but are still sitting through your content.
thinkingaboutit 8mo ago
Yes, as long as you’re eligible for monetization
afavour 8mo ago
TikTok's algorithm makes follower counts less important than they are on other platforms. The means by which your video gets into people's FYP feed is not very clear but it is very, very common to see content from someone you do not follow, and I think if it shows positive engagement stats it'll get shown to more and more people.
thisisit 8mo ago

vivzkestrel 8mo ago

there is a also a very strong anti india sentiment on twitter / x just search for #india or look at the comments of posts made by people like vivek ramaswamy , nikki haley, and any other politician and you ll see it. I wonder if this is some kinda state sponsored campaign for objectives that are not clear to me

mhh__ 8mo ago
I suppose it's possible but I think the more basic answer is that there's been a huge influx of Indians into the west recently i.e. find an example historically where people don't end up fighting in such situations.
- suddenlybananas 8mo ago
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  - DonHopkins 8mo ago
    [flagged]
    - suddenlybananas 8mo ago
      By being sarcastic, I'm as bad as a lying propagandist? That seems pretty extreme.
libertine 8mo ago
A lot of hateful content is boosted by Russian bots, there were also instances of bot accounts that went silent with Iran internet blackout. Another example are conspiracy theory content, and some far right channels - like the case of Tenet Media being funded by Russia. This is the reality we're dealing with, a constant undermining flow of lies and hate to destabilize western democracies. The result is in sight, and will only get worse because one of the consequences is that these account gradually give permission to be racist, xenophobic, etc. And LLMs are making this worse. Of course that there's a sentiment that comes with migrants for example, but it's the disinformation that turns up a notch and blows it out of proportion. At some point comments on social media will have to be disabled.

matthewmacleod 8mo ago

It's a genuinely surprising feeling to live in a place, but see an absolute torrent of malevolent misinformation about it. The "London has fallen" trope that has been prevalent on social media recently stank of some kind of deliberate manipulation. But increasingly—in part due to stories like this—I wonder if it is actually just all "for the views".

graemep 8mo ago
One of the "British" racist social media posters turned out to be Pakistani, another Sri Lankan: https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2025-11-16/king-of-slop-how-anti-migrant-ai-content-made-one-sri-lankan-influencer-rich https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2025-11-16/kin... Both in it for the money.
mhh__ 8mo ago
It's definitely being pushed by people looking for views but there is obviously some truth to it when half the businesses around Leicester Square are completely empty frauds.
- matthewmacleod 8mo ago
  No, there is not “obviously some truth to it”. There are any number of actual problems with London, including but not limited to a lack of enforcement against obvious frauds, and none of which are the related to the topic being discussed.
gorpomon 8mo ago
It's such a bummer to see such blatant manipulation, and even worse to see people buy into it wholesale.
afavour 8mo ago
For what it's worth living in NYC often feels the same. There are people who live on Long Island - many just an hour or so from the city - who are convinced it's a hellscape here. Even people with children who live in the city are somehow able to tolerate the cognitive dissonance of hearing their children talk about the lives they lead while also believing the city is crime-ridden and dangerous.

kotaKat 8mo ago

“This article is based on the opinion of one unnamed individual, and it is not representative of the positive and creative experience that millions enjoy every day on TikTok.” I always love the response from TikTok: “It’s only ever one person, guys! It’s never our cackhanded (lack of) moderation!”

SimianSci 8mo ago

Seems to be an extension of something we are dealing with across multiple parts of many societies. Monetary pursuit has become a guiding principle for alot of people, and its been revealed that such thinking is leading to major societal consequences. The current Technocratic idealization of efficiency by those in powerful positions is missing the second order consequences of financializing everything, and it appears to me that we are sacrificing societal necessities like trustworthiness and collective responsbility in favor of more efficient markets. If no corrective action is taken, we can expect increasing issues.

barbazoo 8mo ago
> Monetary pursuit has become a guiding principle for alot of people People need money to survive. The wealthy class have made it such that it's harder and harder to earn enough money the normal way. Often it doesn't even pay enough to survive. This is what creative people come up with in order to make a living. And it's obviously not in the wealthy class' interest to make any changes to that.
- iamwil 8mo ago
  Doesn't make it excusable. I get it's hard to uphold principles when the stomach is empty. But it's clear the person in the piece wasn't thinking about much else, though he was also clearly not in the streets and starving.
- deleted 8mo ago
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legitster 8mo ago
Culture is a pendulum, but humans are consistently greedy. "Journalistic integrity" was a marketing concept designed to sell newspapers at a time when there were hundreds and most were inaccurate. It was extremely profitable to have ethics. (A good reminder that noble minded Benjamin Franklin ran his own periodical that he regularly and intentionally slandered others in.) Now we have an entrenched media (with their own ethics problems) and there is opportunity to start pumping out garbage again. As Voltaire said, "History is only the pattern of silken slippers descending the stairs to the thunder of hobnailed boots climbing upward from below." In other words, progress has to be fought for from hard lessons, but once that progress is taken for granted, people let it slip not knowing the value of what they have.

alyandon 8mo ago

As long as there is a financial benefit to lying, there will always be people willing to do so. I personally believe that many of these "influencers" do not believe any of the stuff they spew into the public space.

aquir 8mo ago

TikTok should be sowed with salt like Carthage back then...along with these hate-influencers. We need new social media now.

ageitgey 8mo ago

As a sidenote, Jim Waterson is doing amazing work at London Centric, single-handedly doing the kind of investigative journalism week after week via Substack funding that traditional media has abandoned. I highly recommend subscribing if you are in the London area.

drcongo 8mo ago
It's a shame he's doing it on Substack, where hate brings views.

nine_k 8mo ago

I always remember this excellent sci-fi story about exactly such things: https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/30/sort-by-controversial/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/30/sort-by-controversial/ Strong emotions drive engagement. There are rather few of them; simple joy / laughter (think cat videos) is one that's relatively easy to evoke, but hate is equally easy to evoke, and it's much stronger.

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legitster 8mo ago

I know a lot of people who watch this kind of garbage and find it very convincing. The minute you add a video component, it tricks people into thinking they are seeing something raw and firsthand. We're all so worried about the effects of AI generated video (with good reason), but the truth is that DIP (Deceptive imagery persuasion) is unbelievably easy and cheap to do anywhere. You can take an innocuous video of a tank from anywhere, and then add a fake caption that says "this is a Venezuela drug cartel" and an average person has almost no defense mechanisms against it. It's also not something platforms could even police. If anything, nation state actors are already taking this to their advantage.

LorenPechtel 8mo ago
Exactly--we don't need AI video for the problem. I've watched it happening again and again. Deceptive image that people want to believe, they won't listen when contradictions are pointed out. And they forget that anyone even pointed out the problem. Few people seem to get it that when there's a thousand bad proofs of something it's probably false--and, for those that do, there's the opposite: present a thousand bad proofs of something true.

aaroninsf 8mo ago

The epitaph for civil society. The devil's bargain for those on this site: a pleasant work environment and paycheck deriing from engagementmaxxing and the resultant surveillance this provides. This is not sustainable.

smoovb 8mo ago

We are living thru the 'doctors prescribing cigarettes' era of lucrative fear-mongering.

rapatel0 8mo ago

I agree with this entire article, except that it's not just a right-wing phenomenon. Both sides distort the truth for financial gain and from a quantitative POV it's not a false equivalence.

FatherOfCurses 8mo ago
To quote you from an earlier comment of yours: "This is exactly the sensational take (devoid of nuance and information) that we should collectively push back against." The left has been traditionally anti-capitalist and in favor of improving rights and living conditions. Who on the left is gaining financially from distorting the truth to the level of someone like Larry Ellison, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, the Koch Brothers, or Jeff Bezos?
- LorenPechtel 8mo ago
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- Nasrudith 8mo ago
  In the favor of improving living conditions? If and only if it is through their ideology. If it is through something which goes against their ideology the goalposts move at the speed of light and out comes some rationalization like "it wasn't really important, what we need is community". When communism had claims to being more productive growth was the most important thing in the world and why we should adopt their ideology. Now look at the 'degrowth' people what a coincidence and they are literally arguing for worsening living conditions....
  - orwin 8mo ago
    That's because Marx was a productivist, and communism was strictly productivist until a decade ago (and still is mainly productivist nowadays). In a lot of country political ecology used to be liberal/capitalist (save a few radical feminist like D'Eaubonne who linked environment with feminism, but it's less than a minority). Basically Blair's 'third way' but with less nuclear (for some reason, although I think this position is loosing ground in ecologist), and more electric cars. The degrowth movement is an offshot of that ideology. Degrowth is to political ecologism what anarchism is to communism, based a very Idealist and hopeful view of humanity. Communists and ecologists are broadly on the 'left', but rarely allied until maybe a decade ago, and again, on minor things (Communists love nuclear,as it is typically something you don't want a capitalist with 'limited liability' to take care of), and while degrowth might be close to anarchists in some way, it is very, very dishonest to put them in the same basket.

lordnacho 8mo ago

There's a huge problem with the media landscape. It's similar to the junk-food problem, or gambling, or addiction to drugs. We've made a society where "number goes up" is the only measure of success. We don't care whether what makes the number go up is good, and that leads to exploiting the irrationality of consumers. People know they aren't supposed to eat chips all day. They know they aren't likely to win their bet. They know it's not a good idea to watch the most exciting news. But they can't help themselves, so they get exploited, and the exploiters are wealthy enough to write it into law that they aren't responsible. Point this out, and inevitably someone says "who are you to decide what's good for other people", and yes, I used to think this way. Well, one thing is that I'm straight up taking it from the people who are being used. Who wants to be fat? Virtually everyone is eating more than they should. Are we supposed to think this is the revealed, rational preference of everyone? The other thing that changed is that I'm a parent. I have to make choices for my kids, and doing that makes me recognize that people their age aren't the only children. Paternalistic much? Sure. Eat your vegetables! Who wants to be uninformed? Yet we are. People can just look up the crime statistics in London and see which way it has been going the past couple of decades. I don't have a solution, I'm afraid, just a diagnosis. We're living in a society that is being abused under the pretense of personal freedom. Someone better read than me has probably written an essay or two about this, please link. I don't know the best keywords for such a search.

kelseyfrog 8mo ago
It's the same perspective that asks, "If he's so bad, why doesn't she leave him?" And when she doesn't ultimately reconciles it by blaming her. It reveals that the emotional relationship to the consequences take priority over the consequences themselves. Whether it's justifying domestic violence or justifying the consequences of an obesity epidemic, or the consequences of a sizeable fraction of people living in a false reality. Those problems still exist, nothing is solved except if we apply the salve of personal choice, we can avoid meaningful change. It's a nilhistic, defeatist defense mechanism that says much more about the person employing it and their inability to withstand emotional discomfort than the facts of each case - that people regularly take actions that are objectively against their best interest. Our failure to provide aid and cling to the that really the world is just by hiding behind the idea of rational choice is childishly naive.

WillMorr 8mo ago

It's fascinating how he has fully outsourced his conscience to the TikTok content guidelines. With all of the discussion about what restrictions should exist on platforms it never ever occurred to me that people would start to view them as moral authorities.

ticulatedspline 8mo ago

Man what a PoS this guy was. he started as a lame re-poster >His head was turned by the substantial sum of money: “I told my wife, wow, it’s £1,000.” >Then, to his annoyance, TikTok immediately deleted his account because he was just stealing other people’s videos and reposting them. and dove straight into fabricating hate, and worst of all after directly confronted seems to literally have no concept of what he was doing or that it was in any way wrong or distasteful. >The man appears confused by the fuss his actions have caused. He gives the impression that he considered TikTok’s algorithm and the site’s content regulation policies to be the ultimate arbiter of whether a video crossed a line. >It wasn’t racist,” the man says of his account. He argues that if the videos had really been racist, TikTok’s algorithm would have downgraded the content. Seems to lack any internal moral compass, basically if the website lets him slander or lie it must be ok because he has no capacity to assess that value for himself. Flippin scary people like that are out there.

sdellis 8mo ago
Yes, there are people like that out there. If this makes your head spin, I can't imagine what the Epstein Files must be doing to you!
safeimp 8mo ago
If this topic interests you, I recommend `Antisocial: Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation`, by Andrew Marantz. Great read but it's definitely stress inducing at times.
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jbm 8mo ago
These people are everywhere. Instagram serves me antisemetic content consistently with no way for me to downvote it. Likewise when it tries to rage bait me with islamophobic shit. I do not engage or upvote other than taking screenshots and reporting. At this point I just don't open Instagram except for messages from friends It is incredible that they literally fund selfish assholes to do this. What worse is that they will not reap the vile harvest.

csours 8mo ago

I feel like the huge and obvious problems with social media hide a small and subtle, but insidious problem: How do I show that I care about you? I feel like there is a range that might be described: I don't care very much about you one way or another. (Small/no signal on social media, very unlikely to be boosted) I care enough to fight for you. (Big Signal on social media, likely to be boosted) I care enough to calmly discuss the problem. (Small signal on social media, unlikely to be boosted, likely to be trolled, unsatisfying in the face of active fighting words) --- "How do I show that I care about you?" might also be called "virtue signaling". Unfortunately "virtue signaling" has taken on such a negative meaning that it is no longer useful for communication.

giancarlostoro 8mo ago

> “My first video got one million [views],” he says. I hear this a LOT. It seems Tik Tok sets itself up to let a new person's first video go completely viral, not sure what the "trick" is, but I read it often enough it makes me believe that if your first videos good enough you really can hit over a million. Of course who knows if that million is inflated or what. As for the rest of the article, this person seems to just not care about the consequences of their actions, its pretty disgusting.

garethsprice 8mo ago

"While the social media revolution has come with extraordinary benefits..." curious what Khan would say those benefits are. It's certainly something a lot of people find entertaining but I would not say there have been "extraordinary benefits" to society or individuals from the average UK adult spending 1h 37m a day[1] of their lives on social media platforms. "While smoking cigarettes has come with extraordinary benefits, we've seen a surge in people misusing these products and getting sick due to a lack of guardrails, tobacco companies need to do much more to make their product healthy and discourage bad faith actors from developing cancer..."/s [1] https://wearesocial.com/uk/blog/2025/02/digital-2025/ https://wearesocial.com/uk/blog/2025/02/digital-2025/

DarkNova6 8mo ago
Maybe replace "benefits" with "profits"?

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normalaccess 8mo ago

An extent presentation (IMHO) by Sam Vaknin on how the very way modern social networks operate even down to their structure are deeply destructive and anti-human. Hate has been and always will be the easiest and most monetizable emotion used by platform operators. Hate requires little complexity or nuance making it ideal for short form viral content where every second counts. The "Internet Hate Machine" is real and it was created that way by design by anti social deeply narcissistic nerds. Youtube Link: https://youtu.be/Ef7bqgeHenU https://youtu.be/Ef7bqgeHenU

Noumenon72 8mo ago

The only evidence provided for any of the videos being fake is that one house they visited had legal residents renting the property. But it's not fake that many London neighborhoods like Earl's Court provide 65% of their social housing to people born outside the UK, of whom 40% are in employment (source: migrationfacts.com), so one error doesn't mean much. Thus it's unclear to me (never having seen any of the videos) whether the misinformation was on TikTok or in this article.

sunaookami 8mo ago

Single biggest mistake of Social Media was to pay users for what they post. Started with YouTube, went the same way with Facbook, Instagram, TikTok and Twitter. People only post ragebait or engagement bait or play "the reply guy" with low-effort AI-generated content. Many people in countries like India and Pakistan are doing this because it pays better than their jobs. There was an interesting article on NHK that is always on the top of my mind when it's about this, I actually found it again: https://news.web.nhk/newsweb/na/na-k10014341931000 https://news.web.nhk/newsweb/na/na-k10014341931000 In Japan they are called "Impression Zombies", kinda fitting.