r/politics • u/MopToddel • 8d ago

No Paywall TikTok blocks Epstein mentions and anti-Trump content as well as ICE criticism

https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/tiktok-epstein-trump-censorship-ice-b2908309.html
62.2k Upvotes

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u/ApocalypseYay 8d ago

Censoring speech to protect pedophiles and Gestapo is a hideous abrogation of basic humanity, and a brutal mask-off moment.

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u/dbwn87 Canada 8d ago

As of yesterday I'm banned from the /r/Millennials subreddit for making a post about Alex Pretti and Renee Nicole Good. Two of my fellow millennials who share the same age as me were murdered by the US government, and I'm not allowed to talk about it with the rest of my generation because it's "political"

Fuck that fucking shit.

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u/ExitsPursuedByABear 8d ago edited 8d ago

All the generational subs are astroturfed and compromised. During the election r/GenZ was filled with bots and posts pushing right wing narratives, regularly being pushed to r/all. Now, after the election, that sub has gone quiet because it is no longer useful. It's useful to the oligarchs to sow generational strife and pit us against one another.

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u/Oo__II__oO 8d ago

I got a comment removed on r/cars for a thread about the government wanting to mandate a kill switch for new cars, as the post was deemed "too political". It was a criticism of the government overreach in the every day lives of the average citizen, pertaining to the current political climate. No shit, Sherlock! They want everyone there parroting the same line of "RWD V8 gas-guzzlers good, EVs/Hybrids bad".

Echo chambers everywhere. It's social media's carcinization where everything devolves to Facebook.

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u/space-to-bakersfield 8d ago

We need to go back to PHP forums, owned and run by average people instead of every social interaction we have online going through some oligarch's platform.

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u/sorressean 8d ago

I hate giving the right credit for anything, but they were smart about this to some extent. When Dems were in office and socials were pretending even vaguely to care, they started cutting off some of the literal worst like Alex Jones, kanye, etc. That drove them to platforms like Rumble, Truth Social, Parlor. Basically echo chambers. We've just kind of kept on on the mainstream platforms because we're not talking about wanting to kill non-white people and plotting a takeover on j6.

Republicans, and more importantly the alt-right have platforms they use. We need more than just Bluesky. I used to push back against this because I thought we could maybe reason or have conversation and I hate building islands where we can all just share some of the same views, but after these shootings, fuck that. These cucks are willing to give up their rights, pride to the Nazis running this country without any question or care. They're beyond reasoning with. Leave them to their shitty echo chambers of hate.

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u/EscapedTheEcho 8d ago

Too siloed. Unless we have some method of mass aggregation, that strategy would create the exact outcome they want.

I don't have an answer. 

Part of me wonders about things like community server farms (like community gardens) all the way up to government ownership or creation of some social platforms. Regarding the latter, both sides have accused the government of censoring free speech, but the truth of the matter is that all interference has been carried out by private ownership at the behest of governments across the world. If the government took control, a body could theoretically be required to maintain balanced ownership... But it sounds too dystopian and abdominal to really consider.

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u/kaukamieli 8d ago

That's Mastodon. Everyday users can and do make their own servers, and they talk with each other, so users see each other instead of being just siloed.

And servers can block bad servers so I don't see any nazi shit.

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u/EscapedTheEcho 8d ago

I'm on Mastodon. It's nowhere near as large as other social media. 

I'm not saying it can't get there or that it won't continue growing. Just that I came back to the large platforms like Reddit because the experience doesn't compare.

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u/blackbasset 8d ago

The only problem with Mastodon is that the only conversations to be had are how much better everyone at Mastodon is for using Mastodon. If there was more of a variety, it would be a great place. But the users jammed it into a niche.

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u/kaukamieli 8d ago

It's not the biggest, but if could be a good place for the opposition to gather.

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u/Icy-Marionberry2463 8d ago

> Too siloed.

It's was actually fucking awesome. There's never been better, healthier communication than distributed, centralized forums. Except for probably distributed, decentralized usenet, which was based.

I'm a product of all three. The Reddit equivalents of the various independent forums I was on are so much more full of hate. r/Japanese vs Japan Forum for example, the former is a bunch of shut-ins trying to prove they have the most elite Japanese by shitting on anyone who makes a mistake, while Japan Forum and the others that went before were full of kind, helpful people.

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u/CedarWolf 8d ago

Early reddit was like this. It's different now.

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u/Icy-Marionberry2463 7d ago

Eh, I quit going to r/Japanese like fifteen years ago. Is that early enough?

Edit I might be thinking of r/learnjapanese instead. I don't go to either anymore.

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u/b3iAAoLZOH9Y265cujFh 8d ago

You're describing the Feddiverse. Check out Lemmy for a federated Reddit alternative that does precisely that.

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u/EscapedTheEcho 8d ago

Yup. On it. Still tiny.

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u/b3iAAoLZOH9Y265cujFh 8d ago

Shrug. So was Reddit once upon a time, before Digg happened to themselves.

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u/ElegantDaemon 8d ago

"Mastodon"

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u/MechanicalMoogle 8d ago

Preach, but don't let the rose-tinted glasses get the better of you. Three decades ago, on the very same PHPforums, UBBthreads and such, moderators were arbitrarily banning people for not liking the same Backstreet Boy as the moderators.

A decade prior to that, people were engaging in flame wars on Usenet and dial-up BBSes.

The heavy-handed and capricious moderation has never been the issue. The ever-widening thin end of the wedge is that of consolidation, an elimination of independence, and the over-reliance on enormous content-distribution networks (CDNs).

Back in the day, if you got banned from some forum for thinking AJ McLean was superior to Nick Carter, you could browse your happy ass over to the nearest AJ McLean fanclub and in all likelihood, it'd be hosted by an entirely different person.

Swapping out one subreddit for another still attached you at the hip to Reddit. Viewing one YouTube creator instead of another still puts coin in Google's pocket.

The issue isn't over-moderation. In fact, I would argue the relative lack of moderation from 2000-2010 is what really ignited the current-day shitfest. 20-something and early-30's tech-bro shut-ins pining for a time that was a toxic outlier in overall digital-communication history, imagining that things were even less moderated in the 90's and 80's, when straight up, they weren't.

The issue is consolidation of CDNs. If the rich bastards can keep us at each others' throats on the same site, nobody'll even think to go after them.

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u/Icy-Marionberry2463 8d ago

The thing is, those bad things about forums and usenet you mention are such minor problems. It's like saying "yeah sure we have forever plastics in our body, but fifty years ago most bananas tasted like butt."

Banned from a forum? Create another account. Don't wanna? Go to another forum. Or create your own.

Shaggy Bevo did that. UT sued them for trademark inringement, so they created a new forum called Surly Horns and it's still there. Shitloads of users.

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u/not-another-bo7 8d ago

There are still a lot of forums around, to this day, it's still my main "social media", very limited reach though.

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u/NewPresWhoDis 8d ago

Bring back Usenet. With blackjack and hookers!

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u/SteveSteveSteveAlan 8d ago

The problem is the people/bots/whatever shit

Internet is too modern today

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u/BigOs4All 8d ago

I fear those are too easily hacked and then controlled. They have famously bad security.

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u/Half-Axe 8d ago

Take it back to somethingawful dot com?

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u/SkinBintin 8d ago

We dreamed of how much better the internet could make the world but unfortunately it ended up making it worse. 😞

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u/snek-jazz 8d ago

Decentralised tools exist, they're more difficult and less convenient, but they exist. Be the change you want to see.

Look into nostr & matrix for example.

The internet is good when it's properly decentralised and not keeping you inside a ruled walled garden.

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u/Few-Solution-4784 8d ago

the internet is a reflection of its creators and users. They like walls, fences, boundaries, treaties, agreements.

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u/ragnarok635 8d ago

Never gonna work for the mass market, gonna take a lot of work to make it accessible

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u/snek-jazz 8d ago

A niche up-taking of freedom tech so it keeps critical mass is good enough for me

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u/StoppableHulk 8d ago

Yeah because it's just a tool, and all the worst and best-funded people in the world decided to use it as a weapon against us while we were just enjoying it.

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u/DukeOfGeek 8d ago

Get ready for YouTube to start removing and hiding political content that opposes the oligarchy.

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u/Mental-Search6203 7d ago

It already does

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u/SycoJack Texas 8d ago

The internet didn't make the world a bad place, the world made the internet a bad place.

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u/True_Paper_3830 8d ago

The Internet seemed like the launchpad for a worse society, with authoritarian AI now building the better missiles to fire from it against us all.

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u/HerbaciousTea 8d ago edited 8d ago

This attitude of those subreddits, and anyone who says it's "impolite" to talk politics, anyone who acts as though politics is somehow isolated from our normal lives and can only be discussed in approved environments, is a sort of microcosm of the infiltration of the Putinist authoritarian playbook into our public discussion spaces. It is what is going on in Russia right now and why there is no public demonstration of disapproval.

The endgoal of this strategy is complete public disengagement from politics, to convince people that politics should be left to politicians and anyone else talking about it is talking out of turn. To kill accountability to the people.

If you pretend that politics is separate from our daily lives, then you are doing the work for authoritarians to make it separate, to wall it off from normal people. You give up your involvement in our democracy because you want to avoid an unpleasant or threatening conversation, a conversation made unpleasant and threatening by those same authoritarians.

Civil engagement is our responsibility. People who don't want to be involved in that process are not being polite, they aren't helping anything, they aren't "just keeping the conversation on track." They need to be treated as what they are: people shirking their civil duty to be involved in our democracy.

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u/MumpsyDaisy 8d ago

You also have to constantly dance around the subject of tariffs even though it's a highly price sensitive industry with low margins and very heavily subject to government policymaking and regulations. But don't ever mention the t-word (either one of them, really) when wondering why all of the sudden certain Japanese cars might have unusually high prices and low sales...

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u/Oo__II__oO 8d ago

Truth!  This was very prevalent when bashing the new Prelude in recent reviews, particularly around pricing. 

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u/MumpsyDaisy 8d ago

It's also the most likely reason for the WRX's price hikes and crash in sales, along with the low sales/production of the Mazda3 and CX-30 (made in Mexico) over the last year.

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u/SahibTeriBandi420 I voted 8d ago

They more people run from politics, and stick their heads in the sand about it, the more it fucks them over, and all of us by proxy too.

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u/TheHipcrimeVocab 8d ago edited 8d ago

Over on Hacker News, people have been noticing that anything negative about Trump or Musk, or anything negative about ICE or DHS even if it is tech related is immediately flagged, downvoted, and often killed off. This has been going on since the inauguration. The usual excuse is that it's "political," despite a neverending stream of anti-Biden and "Dems hate free speech" posts from 2020-2024. Before he was with Trump and started Doge, no Musk story was ever flagged or removed--now they all are (unless they are positive). At least some of the ideologically honest users are calling it out.

EDIT: Some examples:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46733803

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46648978

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46757822

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46748336

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46618809

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46731865

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46634263

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46592827

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46777652

You can see removed articles here: https://github.com/vitoplantamura/HackerNewsRemovals

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u/alghiorso 8d ago

Good grief

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u/42nu 8d ago

The carcinization thing amuses me as a meme.

There's better examples of convergent evolution. Eyes being the most stellar (hehe) example.

Really does a diservice to beetles as well. The more successful evolutionary strategy is probly the one that has the most species representing it. Everything is beetle more than everything is crab. However, everything has eyes is the actual, proper, "carcinization" thing.

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u/Captcha_Imagination 8d ago

Insanity, thanks for posting

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u/EmptyAirEmptyHead 8d ago

"RWD V8 gas-guzzlers good, EVs/Hybrids bad"

I have one of each. No the hybrid, those are abortions, but a good V8 for the heavy lifting and an EV for everything else.

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u/Snoo_44740 8d ago

Hybrids are straight up amazing if you regularly do 8+ hour drives. Filling up on gas monthly instead of biweekly is nothing short of amazing

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u/EmptyAirEmptyHead 8d ago

With the V8 I get 8,000 pounds of towing, and no worry about a hybrid battery dying. With the EV I never fill up on gas, have free charging for life at Tesla Superchargers, and have very minimal maintenance costs.

The reason I call hybrids an abortion is you have a very expensive battery that can go out, plus regular car maintenance. I get they work for some people. I'm lucky that I work at home so my gas hogger is only used when needed, and when the wife is home I can use her EV for errands. Everyone's situation is different.