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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   29733 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 13, 2025

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To jump off of this post downthread about the vibe shift around tech vs. the-rest-of-society, with the TikTok ban fast approaching, I have some thoughts to share:

Edit: Interestingly, RedNote apparently has zero geographical siloing, and the CCP has been quick to breathe down RedNote's neck about it.

TikTok isn't being banned due to "potentially spying on users".

There’s almost as much antisemitism on Instagram (have you ever checked out reel comments on anything featuring any Jewish person?) and nobody seems to care at all, least of all Zuck. Hard to believe that’s the reason.

The pro-Palestine content tags to pro-Israeli content tags were like 93% to 7%. Full disclosure I'm not an Instagram user but I seriously doubt Instagram is as threatening to the Gen Z perspective of Israel compared to TikTok.

Hard to believe that’s the reason.

Once again, you are not taking people at face value. Hundreds of Jewish organizations lobby for the ban, and people directly involved admit that the Jewish lobby was decisive in the matter which had previously stalled after failing to get enough support. It is the decisive reason, they even admit this.

people directly involved admit that the Jewish lobby was decisive in the matter which had previously stalled after failing to get enough support. It is the decisive reason, they even admit this

In the interests of fairness, it would be quite nice to have a source for this, too.

I covered this months ago when the Ban was gaining support.

You have ADL chief Jonathan Greenblatt in panic proclaiming "We have a major Tiktok problem" and saying that they have to work together to solve the problem... which they have now done... Then later you get lobbying by hundreds of Jewish groups to ban TikTok:

Jewish Federations of North America, representing hundreds of organized Jewish communities, said its support for the bill is rooted in concerns about antisemitism on the platform.

One of the most prominent Jewish groups in the country has thrown its support behind a fast-advancing bill that could lead to the massively popular video app TikTok being banned in the United States...

Jewish Federations of North America, representing hundreds of organized Jewish communities, said its support for the bill is rooted in concerns about antisemitism on the platform. The Jewish Federations and the Anti-Defamation League have accused TikTok of allowing antisemitism and anti-Israel sentiment to run rampant.

“The single most important issue to our Jewish communities today is the dramatic rise in antisemitism,” JFNA wrote in an official letter to Congress. “Our community understands that social media is a major driver of the drive in antisemitism and that TikTok is the worst offender by far.”

Before the ban acquired enough support, the Times posted an article called Why TikTok Needs to be Sold or Banned Before the 2024 Election which hardly mentions anything about some national security threat from CCP, and instead under the heading "Why it Matters" complains about the portion of pro-Palestinian hashtags on the platform and the spread of antisemitism:

TikTok says users decide whether to post and engage with content on #FreePalestine rather than #StandWithIsrael. But, content moderation decides what posts stay up, what gets taken down, and what accounts get banned from the platform. And it’s TikTok’s algorithm that decides what circulates and what doesn’t.

For anyone who doubts the causal link between TikTok and the rise in antisemitic incidents we’ve seen on U.S. campuses: a November 2023 study conducted by Generation Lab, which I helped to organize, showed that people who spend 30 minutes per day on TikTok are 17% more likely to agree with anti-semitic statements like "Jewish people chase money more than other people do."

And on top of that you have WSJ and Economist admitting that the momentum from the support came from the Jewish lobby.

This is completely typical of @2rafa, and frankly a typical audaciousness of many Jewish people. We have leaked recordings of Greenblatt proclaiming that something must be done about TikTok because they have a GenZ problem. Then you have Jewish journalists posting "why TikTok must be banned" which includes alarmism over anti-semitism as the chief concern. Then you get organized lobbying by hundreds of Jewish groups to ban TikTok because of Israel, not CCP. After the political support for the issue starts to change due to that pressure, you STILL get people like @2rafa who just are unable or unwilling to see an obvious political play even when the means, motive, and opportunity are all crystal clear as day and directly admitted to by the people involved. You get Greenblatt saying on a secret call that "something must be done about TikTok" then you get organized lobbying by hundreds of Jewish groups, but @2rafa enforces the norm that nothing nefarious can be attributed to Jewish people.

And there's a 20% chance I'll be banned for posting this comment, but at this point people like 2rafa are just admiring the Emperor's clothes when denying that the TikTok ban happened because of Jewish lobbying. Even when the people involved directly admit what they are doing and why they are doing it.

Edit: Also why not throw a quite from Mitt Romney into the mix:

Driving the news: In a forum Friday at the McCain Institute in Sedona, Arizona Romney asked Secretary of State Antony Blinken why Israel and the U.S. have "been so ineffective at communicating" justifications for the war in Gaza, adding, "Typically the Israelis are good at PR."

"You have a social media ecosystem environment in which context, history, facts get lost, and the emotion — the impact of images — dominates," Blinken said.

Romney replied, "Some wonder why there was such overwhelming support for us to shut down potentially TikTok or other entities of that nature. If you look at the postings on TikTok and the number of mentions of Palestinians, relative to other social media sites — it's overwhelmingly so among TikTok broadcasts."

Thanks for the links, they mostly check out. The only thing I’d add is that every link emphasis that they believe the content on TikTok is unnatural: Greenblatt talks about an unnatural switch to using Iranian terms, the other links argue that the ratio of pro/anti Israel content on TikTok is significantly different to that found on campus polls (and is therefore evidence of foreign manipulation). This concern about artificiality is probably a fig leaf, I doubt that most of these groups would be happier if they could show it was organic, but I imagine it flipped a few senators.

If you get banned for extensive citations answering a direct question, I think it would just answer another question.

As he's not been banned can we consider that other question answered or will it be implied again?

It's only been a day, hasn't it

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