And the guardian has removed their copy of the letter, it seems. I guess the media doesn't trust the public to have any information they haven't predigested.
This is interesting because it highlights just how fast propaganda can propagate… I don’t know how we are going to fight the onslaught of disinformation we are about to get not to mention the weaponization of AI generated disinformation.
Maybe advertisers are the solution.. they won’t want to be associated with disinformation.
I hate TikTok as much as the next guy, but this feels like a manufactured controversy. You can always find a small minority of people advocating for extremism on any social media platform, and I don't see any evidence to suggest that TikTok has some major Al-Qaeda problem that the other platforms don't. A lot of this feels like The Guardian trying to cover their asses, since they were the ones that published the letter and only took it down yesterday. It would be pretty infuriating if this sparks some massive censorship campaign while mainstream companies get off scot-free.
Noam Chomsky argues the United States is a leading terrorist state. Does that mean TikTok is going to take down anything related to US foreign policy?
Are regular people not allowed to read or share content created by anyone the US government doesn’t like? Are people not allowed to form their own opinions?
What a joke. The “free” democratic west where communication is limited by a handful of large corporate interests and a murderous government that pressures them to censor content they don’t like.
TikTok may be owned by a Chinese company but there is no doubt in my mind they are being pressured by US authorities to control what is disseminated on their platform. I don’t think congress just forgot about wanting to ban TikTok, I think it’s likely they were able to rein in control of the platform.
What Osama Bin Laden did in 2001 isn’t justifiable but neither is decades of US interventionist foreign policy that has left millions of innocent people dead or living in poverty and continues to the present day.
Usually advertising partners are pretty chill about their $320,000 branded hashtag campaigns promoting Al Qaeda content, concerning to see this.