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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   36379 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 10, 2023

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Tik Tok is the last remaining “Wild West” internet platform. Low censorship, low “authority-boosts”, and high anonymity allow for majority discourse like in the old days. It would be hard to gauge the fan reaction without looking at Tik Tok, which (conveniently) is the app that most of his fans use for socializing and discussion. This illuminates how manipulated platforms like YouTube and Twitter are, both because of censorship and because of cancellation fears.

Why should we believe that TikTok, the platform known for going 110% in on "the algorithm", is showing us what is representative of the real world? Especially given that emphasizing polarization is exactly the sort of thing we worry that (foreign adversary) social networks would do.

Of course, teenagers are really difficult to survey, so I don't have a good way to get data, and TikTok might be the best we have.

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