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TikTok disproportionately served anti-Democratic videos during the 2024 election
(psypost.org)
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by CharlesW
by CharlesW
There is a huge industry around political communications, which for some time now has been intensely focused on social media. You throw enough money at these platforms in the right way, and your message comes out louder.
Lots gets done quietly, often outside of formal campaigns by aligned actors.
I think a big part of 24, terrible Democrat candidates aside, was the large quantities of very tech-savvy money flowing into Republican campaigns at the national and state levels.
All this stuff can be and is bought.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_Party_(United_State...
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Scrolled homepage yesterday there is "pastor" raging on live stream, which is actor being passed as real. And Trump kissing a man's belly in the white house...
To much fake rage bait, and rage validation content
During the 2024 election people were banned from all major sub reddits for posting pro-trump/anti-kamala content, even democrats. Why would they go to tiktok instead? Mystery
Compared with reddit and yt shorts, tiktok algorithm seems way more healthy and organic
In short, anti democratic content was, on average, more entertaining or emotion provoking.
That doesn't have to hold a deeper meaning on the value of any particular political viewpoint, or require tiktok's thumb on the scales of the algorithm to explain things. I'm not even saying TikTok didn't/doesn't do such things, but that type of interference isn't required to explain this trend.
All I do know is that this person defends the cultural genocide against minorities in China, is totally okay with China invading Taiwan and thinks putin was justified in invading and annexing parts of Ukraine.
OH and also love shocking his dog.
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> "ideological imbalance occurs regardless of a user’s initial political interests"
But yeah, even in the absence of any kind of algorithmic bias, I'd still expect there to be an imbalance for the reason that you point out.
Is our society this simple?
The slur stems from how the Democratic Party campaigns on democratic principles and helping the people, but when in elected they end up not delivering and instead protecting donors & corporate interests. They also do not act democratic. The Democratic Party rigged the 2016 primary so Bernie Sanders would lose to Hillary Clinton. Then in 2020 they rigged the primary again so Joe Biden would win against Bernie Sanders. Then in 2024, they rigged it again so Kamala Harris became Democratic nominee without winning the primary. All of this was done to protect donor & corporate interests.
The Republican party is the same, there's nothing republican about them.
The awkwardness when trump won and the reddit home page was glitching, bots and people in confusion, and no celebrations of victory since they had already been banned or subreddits blocked from the front page
He hosts, he decides, he buys.
Are we so naive that one can think stakeholders are not involved in decision making?
He had more decision power than most shareholders ever will.
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Yes, I suppose, but without elaborating further that doesn't explain why you're taking it to be circular, because I could have given some other description of what trends & goes viral on TikTok and you still could have said "Anything can be can be turned into that."
If we take it in the more formal logic direction you're going though it's all very simple and straightforward, here's the p & q -> r of things:
Algorithms of this sort work a particular way in directing next-video selection towards options with some characteristics similar to what the user has engaged with before. I'll stipulate there are lots of ways that can be done, time horizons and methods of weighting different factors but that's the broad strokes. Take this as premise P.
There are certain things that trend more frequently than others and they share some common traits, it really doesn't even matter what those specific things are, we can take this as an axiom without it being controversial.
Therefore, if anti-democrat content is disproportionate to pro democrat or anti or pro GOP, it isn't automatically thumb-on-scale, it can simply be that anti-democratic content has more similarities to what typically trends than those others.
This isn't circular. It's trending content is similar, anti-democratic content trends more often, therefore anti-democratic content can simply have been more similar to other trending things.
You're correct of course about Occam, but then your bring up that aspect of things was merely expanding on what I explicitly stated in my original comment when I said it didn't mean TikTok didn't tip the scales, only that such a thing isn't the only possibility. In short, it was clearly not stated as an "IIF/if-and-only-if" argument.
Going on to your For "arguably the opposite" final statement:
I think that too needs more little explanation. As-is, it sounds as though you're saying essentially "the fact that simpler explanations can be wrong is potential evidence for deliberate interference". That's a line of thinking when, offered without expansion, steps somewhere just adjacent of conspiracy thinking of the "the evidence is in the lack of evidence", and I doubt that's your intent, but I'm not sure either where that's heading otherwise.