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It actually doesn't seem like that at all, it literally seems like Israeli agents acquiring property to make sure American Media is pro-Israel and pro-Jewish. You can't say "oh they just want to waste their money on clout" to explain Bari Weiss being installed at CBS New, or the political sequence of events that led TikTok algorithm into falling in the lap of Ellison (hundreds of Jewish lobbies lobby for the TikTok ban because TikTok is antisemitic, then the ban happens and Ellison gets the algorithm, that's not "bored billionaires")- which Netanyahu directly identified as the most important development in Israel's eighth-front war. That's not "bored billionaires trying to buy everything" it's something else.
The word 'seems' is doing all the work here.
Does it seem like that? I believe it seems like that to you. But when you spill the milk, it seems to you like it was the dastardly Jews making the handle slippery.
Thus in this case, some Jewish organisations hate TikTok. Okay. But Christian organisations also hate TikTok. Muslim organisations hate TikTok. Secular groups hate TikTok. I hate TikTok. If you cherry-pick everything involving a Jew and then strategically ignore the rest (or assume the rest to have been conned into it by those ever-so-sneaky Jews), it is possible to curate the illusion that Jews are the sole movers of public policy. The ADL hates TikTok too? Get in line.
The common ingredient here isn't Jews so much as it is you. The seeming is in your head, not in the world.
"Seems" was tongue-in cheek mirroring of the comment I was responding to. The means, motives, and opportunities are clear as fucking day, and people attributing it to motives like "spoiled heir" are just obviously wrong. It was a sarcastic qualification to avoid the banhammer for building consensus, but to avoid ambiguity: it doesn't seem that way, it is obviously what is happening and I don't think rational people have any more leeway to attribute other explanations like "bored, spoiled heir" at this point.
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And among those, doesn't "Tiktok is bad because it's antisemitic" stand out like a sore thumb? When they bought Tiktok, did they change it to stop it from being brainrot, or were they completely happy to keep the brainrot as long as it wasn't "antisemitic"?
As far as I'm aware Jewish criticism of TikTok has frequently featured anti-semitism as a theme, but I don't view it as particularly sinister for Jews to be worried about anti-semitism. I think every group is allowed to be worried about people hating them. In this regard as far as I can tell there is no particular difference between Jews and other groups that are often hated on social media. It's true that the Christian and Islamic responses focus more on TikTok and social media being psychologically harmful in a general sense, and personally I think those responses are better. I think the Christians and the Muslims have one up on the Jews in this particular case. (I think the specific Pakistani fatwa against TikTok has a misaimed criticism, and overall I think the Christian responses are the best and most nuanced - but then, I am a Christian, so I may well be biased.)
I should also clarify that I'm not saying that Jewish groups are necessarily right in terms of policy direction - for instance, recently in Australia, Jewish organisations have been strongly in support of new hate speech laws after Bondi, whereas other religious and secular groups have, in my opinion correctly, raised concerns that these laws are rushed and will not help.
But I suppose my position is that insofar as there is lots of anti-semitism on TikTok, I think it is understandable and non-conspiratorial that Jews dislike this and want something to be done about it. I think there is a meaningful difference between that and positing backroom deals or conspiracies among Jewish elites to acquire TikTok.
Even if it is so, it does show that your earlier "there's nothing special about Jews hating TikTok, Christians, Muslims, and Atheists hate it too" is wrong. The latter hate it for universal good reason, the former only for self-interested reasons.
I don't know if I agree that it's understandable either. Between them having a habit of framing any form of criticism as bigotry, and the sort of attacks that they're complaining about being seen as pretty mundane when they're done to other groups, I really don't see why they shouldn't just learn to deal with it like everyone else did.
Even if it was understandable, that doesn't make it non-conspiratorial. They didn't just so happen to offer to buy TikTok, and the Chinese didn't just so happen to accept the offer, this was all a result of pressure from the American government. Once the US forced the sale, they also weren't the ones that just so happened to offer the highest bid in an open auction. This is almost certainly a result of shady elites picking and choosing favorites.
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That was pretty clearly a "fuck you" to CBS News (and the legacy media in general) and if she weren't Jewish you'd be laughing as hard as I did when it happened.
Oh yeah and the Ellison's getting TikTok algo was also just a "fuck you" to PRC, nothing to do with the stated motives pushed by the Jewish lobby for forcing the TikTok divestment. Bored billionaires, burning cash because they are spoiled heirs, just sending "fuck yous", Weiss's pro-Israel allegiance and steering of the network is just incidental- none of those explanations are plausible given this pattern of facts.
Why did Netanyahu support the sale of TikTok and acquisition of the algo by Ellison? To send a "fuck you" to China?
If Ellison wanted a liberal who was also a Zionist there were thousands of people in the NYC media business (and indeed already at CBS News) he could have picked to run the news business, it would be a remarkable turnaround in your view on the ethnocentrism of the Jewish community if you disagreed with this.
So the fact he picked Weiss transparently has much more to do with her “anti-woke” views and perceived sympathy or at least neutrality toward Trump (whose administration ultimately has to approve his empire building) than policy vis a vis Israel (which a ‘traditional’ candidate from TV news could also have).
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