TikTok users posting cat videos do not threaten UK national security, minister
52 comments
·January 19, 2025throw0101a
janice1999
Instagram is hardly a reliable benchmark given that it has been widely criticised for its suppression of Palestinian content. [1]
[1] https://www.hrw.org/report/2023/12/21/metas-broken-promises/...
redeux
So what does that say when they’re even more underrepresented on TikTok as GP showed?
noworriesnate
That's not what the paper is saying. Hashtags like #PrayForIsrael or #IsraelUnderAttack are way lower on Tiktok than on Instagram[1]. They aren't talking about anti-genocide or pro-Palestinian hashtags.
Basically, Instagram is way more pro-Israel than Tiktok.
Many people think that that is why Tiktok is coming under fire. Because China is ambivalent towards the Israel/Hamas conflict whereas many power structures in the U.S. are very pro-Israel.
[1] https://networkcontagion.us/wp-content/uploads/A-Tik-Tok-ing... page 14
fsflover
Why is this not reliable for other topics than Palestine?
janice1999
If one topic is being provably artificially suppressed, how is any data reliable? Instagram is not a good baseline -perhaps no large social is.
zug_zug
This feels pretty convincing to me.
It also feels to me like we shouldn't have to reverse-engineer platforms to deduce whether they are pushing an agenda... If they aren't doing any interfering then they should simply put out an official statement clarifying that.
josephcsible
Are you saying that if they just assert they're not doing any interfering, we should uncritically take them at their word?
zug_zug
No, I'm saying that if they aren't even willing to assert innocence of manipulating what trends then we certainly shouldn't presume innocence.
I'd like for them to testify under oath about how they alter what is trending, then I'd like for us to independently verify those those results to the best of our ability.
guilhas
Or they found Instagram is censoring things, and boosting others, as demanded by the US government
Which we know to be true for Covid or Palestine/Israel
zjp
It’s less the cat videos and more the constant deluge of at best half researched context-free clips about how awful western society is.
RandomBacon
> at best half researched context-free clips about how awful western society is.
Is reddit next? Although in their case, it's less clips and more pictures and text.
zjp
God I hope so, and twitter next. Set me free, US government.
remram
This is such a textbook strawman that it's not even funny.
stupidhooper
[dead]
nokya
Having a foreign and hostile both economic and military adversary fully controlling an app that is installed on 18 million smartphones in UK is a national security issue. Not cat videos. Too bad this concept has become too difficult to understand for most European "leaders" (and journalists...).
zug_zug
Sure, the ones posting cat videos don't. But what are the odds that TikTok would ever let a Taiwan Protest go viral?
I wonder if it even lets use use the word Taiwan...
rKarpinski
Plenty of topics sensitive topics to the CCP are allowed on TikTok. Being allowed on Douyin is another matter...
zug_zug
My question was whether they are allowed to go viral.
Sounds like there's evidence in another thread that they are actively manipulating what goes viral on key current political topics... which seems pretty damning.
bhhaskin
It's crazy how people forget they already have censored activists during China's takeover over of Hong Kong.
DiogenesKynikos
I just looked up #Taiwan on TikTok. There are 3.6 million videos.
zug_zug
Well, I looked up Taiwan protest and the 4 I looked at were all allegedly Taiwanese protesting against their own independence.... (For context only 10% of Taiwanese support unification with China per a google search)
Would love somebody who has an account (and can translate) to do a sanity check here.
duskwuff
A "protest" is implicitly a demonstration by people who are unsatisfied with the status quo. As far as Taiwanese are concerned, Taiwan is already independent, so a protest to support its independence would be a bit redundant - and if there were one, it'd probably be referred to as a parade or a rally, not a protest.
nimbius
[flagged]
daghamm
I belive there is a linear relation between how big of threat to the nation Toktok is and the amount of money Zuckerberg spends on lobbyists in said nation.
GeoAtreides
Maybe he should get in touch with the Foreign Affairs minister and ask about Romania's latest presidential elections.
Or, closer to home, maybe he can check the FYP of all those people that were recently jailed for race rioting.
Turns out, it's not all cat videos. Turns out, sometimes is foreign-backed propaganda.
pjc50
Perhaps more to the point: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/01/10/elon-musk-tweets...
And also https://news.sky.com/story/jordan-parlour-facebook-user-jail...
If you say someone should go commit a violent crime, and they do, then you should expect a visit from the police.
guilhas
They would be more terrified by a company not being regulated by their ever increasing internet surveillance laws, backroom deals, and censorship
When I went to UK 2015 there were big billboards in Manchester saying "Be careful who do you speak on the internet, you don't know who is on the other side" with a terrorist in front of a keyboard and monitor
gazchop
Our tradition of electing morons into ministerial positions continues unimpeded by rationality, logic or perhaps even competence. I expect to see a resignation at some point in the future.
Fortunately their civil service underlings and our judiciary are slightly less incompetent when applied in large numbers.
chvid
"Darren Jones defends decision to allow app to continue running in UK as it stops working in US ahead of national ban"
Crazy how this half-a-day ban in the US triggers chatter about bans in European countries.
Etheryte
That's not really accurate, please see [0]. Many countries have already either partially or fully banned TikTok, the US is hardly the forerunner here.
tonyedgecombe
It would be crazy if the US banned TikTok and similar developed countries didn't consider doing the same. All the reasons the US came to the conclusion they did apply equally well in Europe.
pjc50
The whole business plus Microsoft Safe Harbor is starting to raise the question of whether US social media (functioning as spies) should be allowed in the EU either.
Neonlicht
Europe doesn't have a competitor for TikTok. America has Facebook and Instagram that stand to win billions with a ban.
I also observe that the US tech bro billionaires have been complaining about how mean Europe is to them.
sebmellen
If anything, Europe is more protectionist about data security, so European nations should have a bigger concern about the claims of ByteDance siphoning user data.
mupuff1234
That's exactly what the cats want you to think.
umeshunni
It's all cat videos till some Jihadi livestreams bombing a Taylor Swift concert or something.
drivingmenuts
That actually works in the UK government's favor - people would be demanding that the government start more surveillance and crackdowns. If the attack was backed by a government in the Middle-East, they would have near-total immunity due to the politics of oil.
umeshunni
Does the UK government actually care about oil or is the chumminess with Middle Eastern countries due to the levels of investments they have in the UK, particularly London?
A paper out of Rutger's:
> For pop-culture hashtags, the ratio between platforms is consistently range-bound:
> Conversely, the ratios we found for topics sensitive to the Chinese Government were completely out-of-bounds.
> The data below illustrates that across topics directly sensitive to the Chinese Government, relevant hashtags are dramatically underrepresented on TikTok vs. Instagram.
> Given the unanimity of anomalies, we expanded our research to topics relevant to the Chinese Government’s geopolitical interests: 1) Ukraine-Russia War; 2) Kashmir Secessionism; 3) Israel-Hamas War. There too, we found relevant hashtags are dramatically underrepresented on TikTok vs. Instagram.
* https://networkcontagion.us/wp-content/uploads/A-Tik-Tok-ing...
* Via: https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/tiktok-is-just-the-beginning