TikTok Says It's Not the Algorithm, Teens Are Just Pro-Palestine
TikTok Says It's Not the Algorithm, Teens Are Just Pro-Palestine
In a blog post, the company denied allegations that it has been promoting pro-Palestine content in an effort to sway American opinion.
Best platform fr.
TikTok has come under GOP fire in recent weeks after the app showed an apparent spike in pro-Palestine content after the IDF began its bombing campaign of Gaza following Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack. Republican politicians have publicly claimed that the company is intentionally promoting pro-Palestine content with the goal of “brainwashing our [American] youth” into supporting Hamas. In an essay penned for the Free Press, Representative Mike Gallagher of Wisconsin wrote that TikTok was “controlled by America’s foremost adversary, one that does not share our interests or our values: the Chinese Communist Party (CCP),” and that the “rampant pro-Hamas propaganda on the app should serve as a wake-up call to Americans” to ban it. Gallagher wrote that promoting “pro-Hamas” content is something the CCP would do, because two Chinese web platforms that have mapping capabilities do not label Israel on their maps, and that this form of censorship should come as “no surprise.”
But the proliferation of pro-Palestine content on TikTok isn’t due to the app’s algorithm, the company stated in a press release on Monday. Rather, it claimed that teenagers simply tend to support Palestine more. “Attitudes among young people skewed toward Palestine long before TikTok existed,” the release stated. “Support for Israel (as compared to sympathy for Palestine) has been lower among younger Americans for some time. This is evidenced by looking at Gallup polling data of millennials dating as far back as 2010, long before TikTok even existed.” The data linked by the release states that sympathy toward Israel is “solidly positive” among older generations, but that millennials were “evenly divided,” with 42 percent sympathizing more with Palestine and 40 percent sympathizing more with Israel.
The company wrote in the release that its algorithm does not “take sides,” but operates in a positive feedback loop—the more of a certain type of content a user interacts with, the more of that type of content they will be shown. “TikTok does not ‘promote’ one side of an issue over another,” the release read. “In the U.S., we have given our third-party Trusted Technology Provider access to TikTok source code to understand if the system is acting as TikTok intends…On TikTok, the videos people view, like, and share inform the recommendation algorithm about content they might find relevant. Using these signals, the recommendation algorithm creates a prediction score to rank videos to potentially recommend.” The effective thrust of TikTok’s blog post, then, is that young people are seeing more pro-Palestine content on the app because that’s what they’re engaging with.
The post also denied allegations that the company was intentionally boosting pro-Palestine hashtags to get more views. “Blunt comparisons of hashtags is severely flawed and misrepresentative of the activity on TikTok,” the release stated. “Hashtags on the platform are created and added to videos by content creators, not TikTok. Millions of people in regions such as the Middle East and South East Asia account for a significant proportion of views on hashtags. Therefore, there’s more content with #freepalestine and #standwithpalestine and more overall views. It is easy to cherry pick hashtags to support a false narrative about the platform.”
The release also noted that simply counting the number of videos associated with a hashtag was not “sufficient context” for understanding the platform. Though the #standwithIsrael tag is associated with fewer videos than #freePalestine, the release said, it has 68 percent more views per video in the U.S. Additionally, the release states, the #freePalestine tag is much older than #standwithIsrael. “Some hashtags are newer (e.g. #standwithIsrael) while others are more established (e.g. #freePalestine),” the release stated. “The vast majority (9 in 10) of videos tagged #standwithIsrael were posted in the last 30 days in the US. A difference in views and posts is expected.”
At time of writing, the #freepalestine tag has 25.5 billion views, and #standwithisrael has 440.4 million views.
I grew up watching my government wage endless wars based on lies. I watched them funnel billions of dollars to Israel to prop up their militaries in a desperate bid to win the domestic Evangelical, pro-apocalypse, Zionist voting bloc. I watched Israel lie about their military actions, their hunting of journalists for sport, their regular leveling of hospitals, schools, apartments, and places of worship. I saw the blockade, the forced settlements, the casual abuse toward Palestinian people. I watched as the world came to consensus on many issues--my country and Israel excepted. I watched as my country bends over backwards to support Israel and to cover for their misdeeds. And now when a group in Palestine is once again fighting for their freedom people seem to think it came from nowhere and fully support Israel as they engage in collective punishment, and widespread murder.
This is not the fault of the Jew or the Palestinian.
This is the fault of the government of Israel and it's allies.
Hamas' actions are brutal and unacceptable, but entirely predictable, and Israelis retaliatory response is disproportional and genocidal.
I'm not on Tiktok, but I'm not remotely surprised that young people are being weary of the lies their government has told them their entire life and are standing in support of a people under apartheid being hunted by a genocidal leader.
Brutal, yes. Unacceptable, I'm not sure. The issue is we only get a glimpse into what is actually going on in the area. For example, Israel stated originally that Oct. 7th was a massive terrorist attack that killed a thousand people. Then the story comes out that maybe the IDF pilots might have whoopsied and killed a bunch of their own civilians before realizing they should try to not just blow up anything that moves.
When asked why someone supported Israel in their continued bombing of civilian targets in Gaza, someone replied "war is hell". So wait, flip the sides. Hamas' attack was not "unprovoked", it was a response to the oppression and constant murder of their people for decades. If you can handwave the absolute destruction of the Palestinian population simply because "war is hell", then you should also be able to handwave the attack Hamas conducted.
No shit, peace would be awesome. Unfortunately it's hard for peace to exist when one side has cornered the other and routinely fucks their shit up (very watered down description of the treatment of Palestinians). Eventually, revolution has to happen for them to break free. That's not exactly "unacceptable".
War absolutely is hell, but that is not enough to hand wave away either side's actions. Neither Hamas nor the IDF are exclusively targeting government, infrastructure, and combatants. I decry both sides' lack of restraint and focus, but it is also not lost on me that Israel's blockade has directly impacted Hamas' ability to surgically respond. Israel, however, does not lack the means for a surgical response--they have the ability to take out specific involved people without leveling a city block. They just choose not too because they want to kill all the Palestinians from the river to the sea.
I'm inclined to agree that a revolution is inevitable and even acceptable, but I don't think that uninvolved Israelis are valid targets in the revolution, and I'm not disillusioned enough to mirror the IDF's justification in saying that all Israelis are culpable animals who should have staged a coup and thrown out Netanyahu years ago. Citizens are not universally responsible for the actions of their government.
“TikTok does not ‘promote’ one side of an issue over another,” the release read.
it'd be a lot cooler if you did
"B-b-but you were MANIPULATED into thinking the illegal occupation is... le BAD! You didn't even see my soyjack and Chad meme about Israel's right of conquest! Who knows whether blood thirsty hogs would have gotten more organic traffic if you're putting your finger on the scale?"
I saw some other NGO think tank is "concerned" about twitch streamers (Hasan) pushing pro-hamas propaganda
Honestly I sort of hope (sorry Hasan) that they try to get Amazon to do something about him because he's so popular especially amongst younger people that the blowback from trying would definitely... do something. I mean, who knows the final result in that case, but the insanely bad PR it would cause... I dunno. I can't see it going over well for the Israeli lobby morons. They think they can just censor censor censor like they do in Israel in the US, and I gotta say, it's just not gonna fucking work. Not without a massive pushback that frankly they won't win in the end. No one is buying their shit and if our fucking President wasn't around when the comet killed the dinosaurs maybe he'd say "ok, enough is enough... this untenable." But that isn't the case. Guess we'll see how dumb they are.
It's funny that these freaks are pulling their hair out that they can't just carpet bomb a civilian population and expect the "Israel has a right to defend itself" and "It's antisemitic to criticize Israel" excuses to work. Like it's to the point where even people I know who are pretty disconnected from politics are just like "What the fuck are they doing?"
Like of course it's not Tiktok or
pulling the strings, it's a trend based on what people are seeing and opinions, like mistrust in the media and American foreign policy, that people already had.All these old fossils in charge can't comprehend that the style of propaganda that worked 50 years ago is no longer effective. They're running the same media play book from the Gulf War and when they see it isn't working they need some external factor to blame instead of themselves.
Like, some officials make some statements, the president gives an address, cable news pundits and major newspapers solemnly agree, and that's it, the issue is settled. Except that a) none of those people have any credibility anymore and b) no one even watches any of sources anymore. If it wasn't for people debunking the mainstream news I would never even see what their message was to begin with.
Here’s my issue with this though. The propaganda worked really well with Russia/Ukraine (“Russia is imperialist, we need to critically support Ukrainian Nazis as they ethnically cleanse the Donbass.”). I think Israel/Palestine is a turd that’s much harder to polish since the two sides aren’t evenly matched at all. If and when Hamas makes major gains, support from the American populace might cool. Americans maybe just prefer the underdog. This is also perhaps one reason why they are so desperate to start WW3 with China over Taiwan.
I believe it. All I’m asking for is that any of the people who praised Osama Bin Laden listen to Blowback. It’s scary to see people whose whole point is that they went and read A Letter To America and came away thinking how correct he was. He singles out the problem of Jewish capital almost immediately. And his supposed support for Palestine is incredibly suspect given his CIA funding and his Saudi ties. Before 9/11, he was famous for killing communists.
Those videos weren't as popular as made out to be. The biggest one of them got 80k likes, while a lot of the pro Palestine videos have gotten millions
Good qualification, thank you. I didn’t mean to imply that his letter going viral meant the entire pro-Palestine presence on TikTok was related to it. I can see how it came off that way.
Its a letter that comes off stronger if one's adhd brain only reads the first few points about israel and us empire.
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This is a good thing to see, the kids are showing they really do know right from wrong. When Israel (and their enablers) tries to convince people that just saying "Genocide is bad" is somehow antisemitic, they are going to get pushback. They want to outlaw being humane and caring for justice. Fuck the colonizers. #freepalestine
Fuck the colonizers
It's funny but I was watching a deprogram video with Hakim talking to the founders of a website called (decolonize Palestine?), and among the parallels they drew, they mentioned I believe Algeria where they said that there had been many French people living there, and at first when Algeria was freed the French began to engage in terrorism, and then eventually the French left. They said when October 7th happened, many Israelis renewed their French, Belgian and English passports and also left, because they still had somewhere else they could call home; Palestinians on the other hand want to stay despite the horrors because this is their home. It was a fascinating listen:
Thanks for the link, I will watch it on something other than youtube.
I know that israel must be pissed over people leaving like that since they need population growth to "justify" stealing more land. It would be great if ALL of the invaders went back to their other homes, and took their guns and bombs with them.
Seeseepee, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 Hamas hospital command centers that are missing.the kids are alright
This whole thing just tells me that pre-loading people with propaganda prior to a conflict results in people taking vastly different sides.
Take Ukraine for example. If people had been preloaded with propaganda on Donbass over the 8 years of Ukraine bombing and attacking them, the sides people would have taken globally on the conflict when it all escalated would have been different.
In Palestine, people are already preloaded with propaganda determining their support for Palestine and opposition to Israel's apartheid. This preloading inoculates people to all propaganda that has occurred since the outbreak of the conflict.
Getting ahead and preloading people with propaganda makes an absolutely enormous difference at the moment of crisis. And I think there is very little you can do to change people's minds with propaganda after the moment of crisis has occurred.
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True but also, half the pro-Palestine people now didn't know shit about it, or were even sympathetic to Israel, before October. I think it's just more clear cut who's the aggressor and Israel being on stolen land
I mean, what are you basing that on? I think a lot of people have heard about Palestine being brutalized, because Palestine's been in the news repeatedly as hte victim leading up to this. In particular, that pretty Christian white lady the IDF murdered got a ton of attention because of obvious reasons, she was a reporter and that's liked baiting even the MSM to cover her death when htey don't give a shit about random Palestinians dying. It may be that a lot of pro-Palestine people aren't terminally online leftists who can immediately articulate the exact history of hte conflict, but my bet is that most people became sympathetic before the attacks and the outright genocide has forced them to overtly take a side in the matter.
This is compounded by the fact that younger people get more news from social media, whicb isn't as curated at US traditional news sources, and that Israel is really bad running a propavanda campaign online.
Bombing that first hospital was a huge blunder, as people saw footage of heads and legs strewn in rubble and had visceral reactions, while refusing to show anything from oct 7
Now if we could just pry the ghouls' fossilized fingers off the levers of power
They are so pissed because TikTok won't play their control game
I'm reminded of a video by some guy called Gideon Levy that Youtube recommended to me:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3EtNFXL_ykg
It sucks but if he's right, to a lot of Israelis they really can't empathize with Palestinians; it doesn't occur to them to think 'what if I was in their position?'. The ethnic supremacy going on requires for colonizers to dehumanize their victims.
young people are seeing more pro-Palestine content on the app because that’s what they’re engaging with.
There are people here on Hexbear who say that generational politics isn't real, but this is just one of many examples of clear generational divides. You can pick just about any issue you care to name and there will be a clear trend where people get more conservative as they get older.
That doesn't mean people are getting more conservative as they get older, it means older generations are more conservative. Gen Z is also getting older, all generations are getting older, but Gen Z isn't getting more conservative as they age. Millenials might as the deaths of boomers would means some level of inherited wealth that might shift those that get it further to the right, but Gen Z has grown up being told over and over that the future is dead and capitalism has no plans for them. Different generations had different overall makeups of experiences, and since both millenials and gen Z have a lot more people falling through the cracks there's much less faith in the existing system. It would require a signifcant chunk of the people in ta generation actually getting theirs to be able to say fuck you I got mine.
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poor people get more dead as they get older compared to rich people. Nutrition, health care, stress, working conditions, environmental living quality.
I can't believe they didn't bend the knee to the zionist celebrities crying to them.
It is a lot easier to be disconnected from the human suffering of Israel conducting 'precision strikes' when there aren't hundreds of videos showing it. Traditional media simply don't show it, other than maybe a picture of a crying child while talking about it in the most sanitised way possible.
Also helps that more American kids get exposed to perspectives from outside the US. The only country outside Israel that is more gung ho about wanting the Palestinians genocided is Germany.
I saw plenty of Pro-Palestine posts im Splatoon recently, so can confirm.
Is it finally 1984
Oh and to the right it's still the algorithm, because it's not rigged to produce the outcome they want. (yet, because it will be)