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TikTok likely helped far right in elections: researchers – DW – 09/02/2024

www.dw.com TikTok likely helped far right in elections: researchers – DW – 09/02/2024

The AfD was twice as effective at reaching first-time voters on the app than all other parties combined, according to an analysis of platform data. This may explain why the party performed so well among young voters.

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Which is why we should either ban them or force them to make their algorithm public. Being a Chinese company, you have to be very naive not to assume close ties to the Chinese state. As a system rival, China is more opponent than partner and allowing them to operate such a network of influence, while they tightly prohibit any unwanted information themselves is foolish.

It's time to tighten the grip.

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- YouTube does the same as TikTok and is arguably controlled by the US state too, why not ban all social media owned by corpos?
  
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  I mean, I know this won't be a popular opinion, but it's a huge security risk to allow any non-european social network.
  
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- Thing is, it mostly amplifies what u interact with. If youre an eastern german diesel head with racist friends, then thats what you get. More afd bullshit to Spam blue hearts under.
  
  My feed is very leftist, afd-critical and pol-sci focused.
  
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  it mostly amplifies what u interact with.
  
  Thus it cultivates whatever memes prove themselves most infectious. Whether the content is overtly political or not, algorithm-driven social media like that is a weapon of mass delusion.
  
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Half of all 16-24 year olds only get their political information from TikTok

Presumably the other half get it from Instagram. Democracy — what little of it the world has — seems unlikely to survive such a situation for long. Would we be better off if were somehow arranged that they got all their political info from the fediverse instead? I don't know, couldn't be much worse.

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- The fediverse would be an improvement for now. But if it gets popular, bots will take over.
  
  And corporate owned media hasn't really brought us much good, either.
  
  It got us into wars in Vietnam and Iraq and it also got us the destruction of the middle class.
  
  I don't think there really is a silver bullet. Best I can think of is, media owned by the people and for the people.
  
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- I was thinking exactly this.
  
  I don't blame 16 to 24 year olds mind you - lord knows I wasn't much of a thinker at that age.
  
  I do wonder whether social media might actually be fermi's great filter though. It's getting worse and there are no good solutions.
  
  In the end skynet won't need a single bot to conquer is. We will destroy each other with LLM chat bots just in time for AGI to emerge and snatch a economic control.
  
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This has long been known.

Auditing TikTok: Other search for … the opposition party (July 2024) ---- [Archived]

The AfD, Germany’s far-right party, was disproportionally mentioned in the search suggestions of other parties. We see this as a crucial ill-equilibrated misrepresentation of German parties and what they stand for. The AfD is likely the most active party on TikTok, which is a possible explanation of their overrepresentation. However, the disproportionate leveraging of its visibility within the search suggestion feature clearly perpetuates this imbalance. This is a distinct indication of TikTok prioritizing engagement and virality over quality, messaging, or proportional representation of political parties on their platform.

How the far-right used TikTok to spread lies and conspiracies in Central Eastern European countries (July 2024) ---- [Archived]

Germany’s huge TikTok market is vulnerable to extremists’ tactics, which have gained major traction with young voters. Our cross-border investigation proved that you can easily buy virality on social networks.

In Romania, reporters showed that the social network was a key platform for emerging far-right political figures.

Similarly, in Poland, the TikTok champions of the European Parliament elections were the far-right, who are now heading to Brussels.

In Slovakia, TikTok served as a fertile ground for conspiracies about the attempted assassination of Prime Minister Robert Fico.

Meanwhile, in the Czech Republic, reporters found that the platform’s algorithm was pushing users into a bubble of disinformation.

Estonians were exposed to fear-mongering related to war that was propagated through TikTok.

In Hungary, Russian narratives flow to TikTok via public media.

And these are just two investigations on the topic. There is much more. No politician can say they didn't know it.
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- Might also be a because of bots and click farms. Platforms boost content that performs well. If a bot farm floods a post with likes, shares and comments then the platform conts that as positive engagement and will show it to more people.
  
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  Sure, the algorithms do their part. But here it doesn't seem to be only explanation. The first study I posted above says, among others:
  
  Throughout the “Others Searched For” data of party and candidate queries, we surprisingly found that many queries did not return any search suggestions. From 60 query terms, the search suggestions for 21 consistently returned no results, as seen in the Table below. This indicates that the platform intervened to specifically disable the search suggestion for these search terms, e.g., through a blocklist. The No Suggestions label was applied to queries “AfD”, “BSW”, “FDP” and “Christlich-Soziale Union” and various political candidates too. Across party affiliation, the AfD and the CSU seem to have the most no-result queries, closely followed by Die Grüne.
  
  Emphasis mine, but it's just one example. The whole study makes a good read.
  
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So… do something about it?

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I am shocked. This is my shocked face.

😐

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