this post was submitted on 27 Jan 2026
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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/59392382


TikTok wants users to believe that errors blocking uploads of anti-ICE videos or direct messages mentioning Jeffrey Epstein are due to technical errors—not the platform seemingly shifting to censor content critical of Donald Trump after he hand-picked the US owners who took over the app last week.

However, experts say that TikTok users’ censorship fears are justified, whether the bugs are to blame or not.

Ioana Literat, an associate professor of technology, media, and learning at Teachers College, Columbia University, has studied TikTok’s politics since the app first shot to popularity in the US in 2018. She told Ars that “users’ fears are absolutely justified” and explained why the “bugs” explanation is “insufficient.”

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[–] reddig33@lemmy.world 125 points 2 days ago (5 children)

Find. Another. Service.

TikTok is dead — just like Twitter. I don’t understand people who cling to these services. Might as well post on MySpace while you’re at it.

[–] felixwhynot@lemmy.world 10 points 1 day ago

If you are uninstalling, you can try the federated alternative: loops

[–] VeryVito@lemmy.ml 31 points 2 days ago (2 children)

What? MySpace never tried to topple a democracy.

[–] reddig33@lemmy.world 26 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Remember when MySpace was owned by Rupert Murdoch? Wikipedia remembers…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myspace

[–] tonytins@pawb.social 17 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

Most of us were teens during the 2000s. No one with fond memories of Myspace knew who Murdoch was.

Also, he only owned it for the latter half of the decade before it got sold off again.

[–] treesquid@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago

They didn't have the opportunity. They absolutely wanted to,

[–] EndlessNightmare@reddthat.com 6 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

It's probably either sunk-cost fallacy or outright denial

[–] Tollana1234567@lemmy.today 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

shortform content, is addictive to people.

[–] chaogomu@lemmy.world 5 points 1 day ago (1 children)

And Tiktok isn't the only place for that exact type of content.

People are already jumping ship to other platforms.

[–] Tollana1234567@lemmy.today 1 points 22 hours ago

youtube seems to be peddle what tiktok is doing.

[–] rayyy@piefed.social 2 points 1 day ago (2 children)
[–] mic_check_one_two@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 20 hours ago* (last edited 20 hours ago)

Saw “no censorship” in the description, and had suspicions because it’s a common dogwhistle for “we’ll allow the most vile people as long as they’re not technically breaking the law”. Got the app, and immediately scrolled past a “Jews secretly run the world” post followed shortly by a “Hitler was right about the Jews” post. Yeah, the problem with “no censorship” is that it inevitably falls prey to the Nazi bar problem.

[–] Zoot@reddthat.com 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Or Loops? The federated, no special interests version of TikTok. You're already on lemmy, why advocate for yet another corporate social media company?

[–] Wispy2891@lemmy.world 3 points 21 hours ago

I like the idea of a federated version of that, but there are many problems:

  1. When people scroll, they need an algorithm to choose content for them.
  2. 99% of average TikTok content is low quality shit and it's the algorithm to find and promote what works
  3. All that 99% of shit is occupying exabytes on bytedance servers. Users are uploading terabytes of shit every hour, it's impossibile for a federated instance to keep all this shit on disk. Look how Lemmy is designed for example. I upload an image and then it's stored forever in hundreds of instances. For videos is untenable. Only companies that are profiting from this (for example using such videos for training ai models, or using this videos to hook people and serve them highly personalized ads) can host a TikTok clone