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I have a feeling the ban is likely the result of "special interest" groups as opposed to a "classified briefing"


"major major major generational problem … We have a TikTok problem, we have a Gen-Z problem." https://www.liberationnews.org/israels-pinkwashing-task-forc...


Circa 1968 America:

We have a TV problem, more specifically, lots of coffins on TV problem.

Circa 2003 America:

We have TV problem, a media problem, specifically coffins all over the media problem


Worth noting: > In a phone call leaked by the Tehran Times


It's a recorded audio file, not an opinion or hearsay, so I don't think the leaking organization matters.

Would you feel better if an anonymous user uploaded it to Reddit/Twitter/Tiktok?


I don't doubt he said it, because I think it's pretty plain to see it's a correct analysis - antisemitism is rife with the new generation to a degree that, to me at least, is quite scary. I just think it's quite instructive that a hostile state is trying to use this to sow discord.


> antisemitism is rife with the new generation

Is there an example one could provide of this which shows members of the new generation criticizing Jewish people for being Jewish? Surely it wouldn’t be examples of people voicing criticism of the actions of people who happen to be Jewish.


Oh sweetheart. Just search twitter for “jews”.


Yeah but what was the prevalence of anti-Israeli sentiment prior to the 40k civilian massacre?

I wasn’t even paying attention to the news one day and CNN was casually interviewing a Palestinian father holding a dead baby corpse in his hands, with the head covered in a blood soaked bag. On CNN, at 10am.

You don’t have to be particularly impressionable to be affected by this.

History is going to be unmerciful in its documenting of this, no one is going to forget the sin here.


Yeah, fair enough; it was a mistake to ask for examples, I realize that now. One could probably go to twitter and search “chemtrails” and find a lot of words written seemingly without preceding critical thought. I don’t think many people would assert that chemtrail conspiracy theories are rife with the new generation, however.


Sure, it's an old trope to sit back and ask for examples, pretending your epistemic standard is whether someone on a forum can muster up the examples, and then when nobody does or you wave them away, you've proved that something isn't happening. You've done the investigation.

https://www.newsweek.com/gen-z-infected-antisemitism-spreadi...


There's an extent to which that word was used to mean criticism of the previous administration's foreign policy. Politicians are generally not known for their honor, and will try to hide behind anything, no matter how sacrosanct.


Anyone who actually cares the tiniest bit about antisemitism would have the decoupling of Israel and the Jewish identity as the first order of business. Nothing comes even close.

A state consistently using Jews to excuse its actions, behavior which is validated by US policymakers, it's just orders of magnitude worse than anything else, Israel has promoted antisemitism more in a year than every other group in the last 50 years put together.


I would.

10 years ago, no. Today? An audiofile is really easy to make with or even just a couple people in a studio.


It's also really easy for Greenblatt to issue a denial.

That is, of course, unless it is true.

A denial wouldnt necessarily indicate that it is false (he has every reason to deny it, but lying is a risk) but the lack of a denial is very strong evidence that it is, in fact, true.

There is a very low cost to denying lies, so the absence of a denial (unlike its presence) is a very good indicator.


"No rumour is true until it's categorically denied" -- Otto Von Bismarck.

> There is a very low cost to denying lies.

So people can just lie.

See: Clinton and Lewinski, the Profumo affair, Russian troop buildup on the Ukraine border 2022, Russian attacks on Ukraine 2014+, claims by NSA execs prior to the Snowden leaks, etc.


NYT, WaPo, etc would disclose whether they had been able to verify the source or authenticity of the recording in some way.

A state-controlled newspaper in an autocratic county? It could be something they did verify as true and just happens to align with their agenda - or it could be nonsense and they know it. Or they couldn't just shrugged and said "makes the US look bad, run it."

I think most people don't appreciate the levels of internal review and fact-checking that go on when a national paper in the US ends up with a big story in its lap.


> Schwartz said as much in an interview with Israeli Army Radio on December 31. “The New York Times said, ‘Let’s do an investigation into sexual violence’ — it was more a case of them having to convince me,” she said. Her host cut her off: “It was a proposal of The New York Times, the entire thing?”

> The bigger scandal may be the reporting itself, the process that allowed it into print, and the life-altering impact the reporting had for thousands of Palestinians whose deaths were justified by the alleged systematic sexual violence orchestrated by Hamas the paper claimed to have exposed

https://theintercept.com/2024/02/28/new-york-times-anat-schw...

Surely the NYT would verify, right?

And of course the WaPo has no conflicts of interest being owned by Bezos either


NYT, WaPo, etc aren't very likely to publish it. It'd be in the same bucket as Jeff Epstein - politically toxic and the majors aren't going to take the lead drawing attention to it even if it is plausible. Facts would need to be in the public sphere for a while and gaining traction before they pick it up.

It might be the Iranians making stuff up, although realistically that sort of activity is what should be expected without any leaks at all. It has been obvious since around 2016 that the corporate media doesn't have the ability to single-handily dominate the narrative any more and that will impact national security propaganda because, you know, what military would be stupid enough to leave that sort of messaging to chance?


> NYT, WaPo, etc would disclose whether they had been able to verify the source or authenticity

Oh yeah, like the verification of their stories of the oven babies

If anything, this whole ordeal has shown that all media is at some level censored and controlled by special interests behind the scenes

We’ve been living in a post-truth world for a long time, way before AI


Who lived in a world with no lies, Adam?


Great point. Ever since we’ve had language, we’ve had lies

My comment just points to the naïveté of thinking that somehow big media are big sources of unbiased truth that we can all trust


So you’re admitting that the call was real, we should just ignore it because it’s inconvenient to your beliefs?


You shouldn't ignore it, you should listen carefully, and you should ponder why an enemy state wants it to outrage you.


They know their argument is bolstered by the truth being widely known in this case, so it benefits them to leak it.

Why is it so important to you that the truth is suppressed?


Only worth noting if Greenblatt has denied the phone call.

E.g when Russia stopped denying the presence of North Korean troops, it was pretty much cast iron proof that Ukraine's recent videos of the prisoners were not fakes.

A denial wouldnt necessarily mean it wasn't true, but the lack of a denial is very strong evidence that it is.


Whenever the Russian government denies something like you're suggesting, I take it to be an admission. I'm usually right.

You're naive and wrong.


[flagged]


Why are you conflating Jews and Israel?

That's extremely antisemitic given that Jewish groups have been some of the most public and vocal opponents of Israel's genocidal actions.


Israel is the only Jewish state globally, and its efforts to counter Iran-backed proxy groups have contributed to broader regional and global security. While there are some Jewish groups that dissent, they represent a minority. The majority of Americans, Israelis, and Jewish communities support Israel's actions against Hamas, Hezbollah, and other Iranian proxies.


Your 3 other posts were flagged and removed for glorifying genocide, and now you're back for a 4th attempt with a softer tone.

I already mentioned this in your other comment, but these Hasbara talking points come off like they're written by a corporate PR department and are getting stale.


[flagged]


ooo what a fun game! Good guess on my age.

Now estimate the age of the International Court of justice, the United Nations, and dozens of international aid organizations who have called Israel's actions as a genocide? lol or do you consider them to be Iranian proxies too?


[flagged]


You seem to operate solely in terms of propaganda: iranian, russian, israeli. The inability to see beyond a few narratives and denying agency to other people make it impossible to have a conversation

It's like talking to a finite state machine that emits duckspeak


Yawn.. Same old Hasbara talking points. You guys really need to update your guide books to include some more creative talking points. These ones are overused and stale.


[flagged]


Your last two replies here were flagged (most likely for glorifying war and genocide), so you have deleted them and tried again with a softer message. Hasbara is out in force this morning!


Please don't conflate Jewish people with this genocidal state. Thank you.


It’s very telling that the TT ban was not a standalone bill, but rather just one item of a bill that included $26 billion in aid for Israel, $13b for Ukraine and $8b for Taiwan

Congress can’t even agree on the federal govt budget, but they can almost unanimously agree to support war, and banning TT


If ByteDance's interest in TikTok was purely commercial, they would have made the commercial decision to spin out the US market into a US-listed public company or sold it to a US buyer.

The fact that they chose to shut down instead, strongly suggests, that they have interests in TikTok beyond financial.


Google also opted to pull out of China instead of selling their Chinese operations to a domestic company. Does it imply that Google had interests beyond financial when operating in China?

I think it's more likely that they don't want the brand name dilution that comes from having a separate TikTok US that's probably going to be a shittier version of the original since it doesn't have the original algorithm (which isn't allowed to be exported) or the original TikTok engineers working on it.


> Google also opted to pull out of China instead of selling their Chinese operations to a domestic company. Does it imply that Google had interests beyond financial when operating in China?

Yes. At the time Larry & Sergey still ran the place and did have a somewhat idealist approach to running Google. When it turned out that it was impossible to bring an uncensored search engine to China, they shut it down.


The TikTok branding and user base are already firewalled from ByteDance's Chinese operations.

Their Chinese variant of TikTok is called Douyin, so there wouldn't be any brand dilution from spinning TikTok off.

I also have doubts that the technology behind TikTok would be difficult for a western engineer to understand. It's a relatively straigtforward algorithm, and it's details have been shared in a public paper.


Could it be that the straight forward algorithm which empowers the user is exactly the problem with tiktok in the US?


Douyin has the exact same logo - how is that "firewalled?"


Douyin isn't available outside China.

TikTok isn't available within China.

There's no risk of brand dilution.


I just watched Douyin yesterday on their site for numerous hours without a login to try and understand the differences.

Douyin is very much "available."


That doesn't follow. A third option is: shut down, wait for the pushback and for things to return to how they were before. And it might just be working.


There's no guarantee that will happen, and even if it does, TikTok will likely have lost marketshare by being unavailable for a period of time.

A financially motivated actor would have avoided the damage by spinning it out. They likely could have even kept a large minority share.


Alternatively, it's a single national security bill.

But actually, it is a standalone peice of legislation - the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act.


Thanks, I hate it


Of course. TT is to China as WMDs were to Iraq

No real anything presented to the American public, just handwaving and finger pointing

It just barely needs to make sense and it becomes the center of the conversation, derailing any meaningful or real discussion

Very effective propaganda


If what you say is true then we should've expected a buyer to come forward, or at least signal some interest in buying the platform, surely?


Not sure why it would imply that

However, there’s been a lot of people not just signaling but openly announcing they are vying for the purchase. Like Kevin O’Leary, who said he’s offering $20b in cash to buy TT


The new president is populist. Once the rage of the TikTokrs is overwhelming, he's going to find a way to reinstate it.


He is populist second, and transactional first and foremost. He always has put himself, namely his vanity, first.


I don't know how you think other politicians operate, but their self-interest always comes before the interests of their constituents (maybe there is the odd exception).


Vanity first, then wallet.


And loves being the hero. When the app was taken down, there was a generic message about the ban. Then 1 hour later, it was changed to include:

“We are fortunate that President Trump has indicated that he will work with us on a solution to reinstate TikTok once he takes office. Please stay tuned!”

I wonder what happened behind the scenes. This gives me flashbacks of the signed stimulus checks


Carter, Reagan, and some hostages, for example.


Not familiar with that. Could you elaborate?

It seems to imply he’s not the only one who’s done something like that. In that case, I totally agree, political figures are masters of political posturing and taking credit

And that goes for any party and probably every country in the world


Look up Iran hostage situation and how unelected presidential candidate undermined an active president.


A special interest group called Meta.


[flagged]


That is certainly tipping the scales in this case


Special interest groups that spend a huge amount of money to unseat representatives who go against their interests: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/aug/16/cong...


It's obvious the app is being banned because for once we had unbiased news about Israel/Palestine and the ongoing genocide.

A media outlet not easy to censor is unacceptable to the Israeli lobby, and therefore unacceptable to our politicians.


It baffles me that people can seem to comprehend that only the United States government has interests in its media outlets, and the authoritarian second to the US in the global stage don’t. 1. TikTok in the westernized form is banned in China. 2. When some people tried to move to rednote (the in the open Chinese app), they were getting banned in the first few hours for being gay and other ideas that came with them, so it’s very entirely plausible that also TikTok is heavily regulated from the officials of a foreign actor.


US is the only state that pretends to champion absolute freedom of speech, to the point of citing violations of it when imposing sanctions on other nations.


There's plenty of openly gay Chinese RedNote influencers, as there have been for years now [1]. I don't know why you're pushing disinformation. The Americans getting banned probably just violated their ToS, since they were in Chinese and they couldn't understand them.

[1] https://www.xiaohongshu.com/search_result?keyword=gay (requires log-in)


He’s not pushing disinformation.


For those who don't know, Mitt Romney said this.

"Some wonder why there was such overwhelming support for us to shut down potentially TikTok or other entities of that nature. If you look at the postings on TikTok and the number of mentions of Palestinians, relative to other social media sites — it's overwhelmingly so among TikTok broadcasts."


Sure. Everyone reads the 100 page TOS for every site and app they use, right?


Just to add on:

I don’t imagine discussion of what’s happening to the Uyghurs is getting much traction in TikTok either.

Movement against TikTok started started with the Trump admin well before Oct 7, 2023 [1].

I think this is less Israel / Palestine and a better explanation lies elsewhere. Namely, that anti-China sentiment has been growing for a while now and Meta has plenty of money to burn (on the Metaverse, Lobbyists, etc.)

The actual law was passed after accounts of spying on Hong Kong citizens were made public [2].

———

1 — https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/presidential-actions/ex...

2 — https://apnews.com/article/tiktok-china-bytedance-user-data-...


The effort to ban tiktok stalled for a few years due to public backlash.

Only after the strong shift in sentiment by younger Americans on Israel's genocidal actions did the effort renew with vigor.


This reminds me of the Al Jazeera America (“AJAM”) news channel. They weren’t banned per sé, but it’s obvious they were doomed from the start. An Arab news network operating in the United States… if you think TikTok had a target painted on its back for being Chinese-owned… https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Jazeera_America


They arent "just" an arab media. They are financed and controlled by the dictatorship of qatar. That is like claiming Russia Today was domed because it was a "slavic" network. No it was domed because it is propaganda financed and controlled by a dictatorship.


Technically the BBC is a state broadcasting service subject to King Charles who, AFAIK, nobody voted for.

State run propaganda networks are actually a pretty good source of information; they are well resourced and have a vested interest in being perceived as high-credibility so they can tip the scale on a small number of issues critical to the state. And good propaganda is mostly done by omission and careful fact selection, although a lot of the bit-player dictatorships aren't competent enough to handle good propaganda.


It always rub me the wrong way that YouTube puts a "this is a state actor" disclaimer on a video uploaded by the well-known public media corporation of a western democracy, but put zero disclaimer whatsoever on a random video uploaded by an anonymous account created 2 minutes ago.


I thought it was normal to take media with whatever slant it had and look for evidence supressed by others, check a few opposing outlets and piece together a narrative as close as possible to neutral. When thise outlets aren’t available we’re likely to get a much more distorted story.


UK is millions of times better than Qatar but BBC is not too great. Somethings are great with BBC not everything. Fox news? Qatar doesn't micromanage everything.


And Al Arabiya isnt banned because...?


TikTok wasn't banned. It was required to be sold but ByteDance refused to do so, probably because the CCP won't let them.


Even the Palestinian authority banned Al Jazeera

https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/palestinian-authority-...


Because they were leaned on by Israel.


Citation needed.

The Palestinian Authority and Hamas are not exactly friends, they don't need much convincing to ban Al Jazeera.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatah%E2%80%93Hamas_conflict


The process to ban it was started years earlier.


It was, but why did the ban only succeed now?

Edit: to be honest, it is an honest question.

My guess is that the uniparty can’t afford a popular platform they don’t fully control and where there is significant dissent.

On Russia-Ukraine, the voices against US propaganda didn’t gain enough traction for them to worry about it. With Israel-Palestine, the opposition was for the first time reaching people who they previously never could.


> It was, but why did the ban only succeed now?

This has been going on for years now. The Navy banned TikTok because of security concerns in 2019.

Then in 2020, the US announced it was considering banning them. ByteDance planned to divest by selling to an American company. The Chinese government disagreed.

TikTok sued and that took a while to go through the courts.

Then TikTok tried negotiating to avoid having to divest for a couple years by placing all private user data in the US, but later leaked recordings made it clear that Chinese employees still had access.

A law to ban TikTok on US government devices was then passed.

Then a law to ban TikTok unless they divest was drafted, but it took a couple years to pass and then that had to wind its way through the courts.


because the election campaign has already ended?


"unbiased" as in: maximally biased to serve Chinese interests.


I'll go against my better judgment and ask: What are China's relations to Palestine and Israel? I genuinely do not have the slightest clue about that dynamic.


For that matter, what are China's interests regarding Russia/US? It seems like China would lose a lot of money in the event of America taking a major dive, but they could be preparing to make the case that they are a more stable regime with a more stable currency. I feel like that would be aligned with China's interests.


> For that matter, what are China's interests regarding Russia/US?

"If these two get into a fight, we can move on with our Taiwan agenda."

That's why Trump is pushing the EU to properly finance their defense, so the US can concentrate on Asia Pacific. He signalled this during his Notre Dame meeting with Macron, France being the only European NATO ally with a reliable army and interests in the region. To Trump, China is the new US rival, Russia is merely a bigger Iran with nukes and more advanced tech. I don't see him giving Tiktok a break.


Possibly none. But the logic goes like this - China sees that amplifying positive Palestinian stories serve to destabilize US discourse so they put their thumb on the scale to push those over positive Israeli stories.

And we know this type of thing works because we see it everyday with US internal propaganda. The last thing the US needs is an adversary with a direct line to the US populace controlling what they see. Also, I'm not even talking about misinformation, just pushing what stories are seen and not seen. Once you add in misinformation and bots it's pretty wild how easy it appears to control the population.


Ok but doesn’t that cancel out with other platforms that push the thumb in the other direction of the scale? What just happend reeks of supression of information to me.


TikTok already suppresses information in ways that furthers Chinese interests. Those interests can be as direct as promoting China or as nuanced as simply making people in the US dislike each other.


> Ok but doesn’t that cancel out with other platforms that push the thumb in the other direction of the scale?

The point is not to push Americans towards Israel or Palestinians, the point is to push Americans apart from each other, so that each half of the political divide sees the other as supporting baby-murderers, as people you cannot be friends with, compromise with and shouldn't even try to talk to.

I am not exaggerating, each of these things I have seen being explicitly pushed.


Any power, worth its salt (and China is most certainly one of those), will be acutely aware of conflict which involve opposing powers.

If something can be done through the Israeli/Palestinian conflict which damages the US, you can be sure China is working on it.


What evidence do you have that preexisting news coverage was biased regarding Israel/Palestine? From many Israeli perspective, much of MSM is biased against Israel! And funny enough, I can see that repeating pattern for every interest group. Left-Wingers say MSM is all Right-Wing and biased against them, Right-Wingers say MSM is taken over by the Woke Mob.

There are dozens of contradictory narratives depending on who you ask, what makes your paticular narrative more compelling than the competing narratives?


People will downvote you for revealing this, but it's the truth. I saw it on TikTok, after all.


Leading politicians said it explicitly. It's been discussed in the news since the conflict started.


It’s not. The effort started earlier. It’s just a convenient narrative.


Based on what do you say it's not? How is it a convenient narrative?

The ban both could have started earlier and been pushed to completion based on more recent factors.

Lawmakers talked about propaganda potential relating to Palestine directly, multiple times.

https://theintercept.com/2025/01/09/tiktok-ban-israel-palest...


The whole TikTok legislation was not created to suppress Palestinian views, even if that may have been a side effect of it, and repeating that does not make it true.

It’s a convenient narrative because it sounds like „the government“ or „they“ want to conceal the truth, and suppress the honest rebels. It’s a trope.

Again, it may well be that some parts of the government feel like the side effects are beneficial, and I’m not commenting on that. But spinning the story to say this was the whole purpose of the law is simply not the truth, and instead pushing a certain narrative.


The choice doesn't have to be binary. There can be multiple factors, which should all be discussed.

Dismissing a frequently reported on factor that mentioned by officials requires a higher burden than vague commentary on narrative shaping. Trying to minimize it despite factual statements is its own narrative.


I don't disagree with you, and I don't dismiss any factor, but oppose the altered storyline of events offered by GP, which is simply not factually true. Subtly twisting history into a more convenient version may be presidential territory now, but that doesn't mean we should let a proper discussion devolve into shallow, black-and-white stories just because those are easier to understand.


In the second paragraph of the link you posted this is said:

> But in the wake of Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel, conservatives have become hyper fixated on policing pro-Palestinian messages on the app, accusing TikTok of influencing young Americans to “support Hamas” and favoring pro-Palestinian content.

If you follow the link attached to "influencing young Americans", you'll find Palestine isn't mentioned once, but Hamas is.

Of course there's bias everywhere, and we should have by now ways to follows stories to their source automagically by now. But anyhow.


The article and the poll it is based on is wild. Questions like, "do you think all Palistinians are anti-Semitic or just the Hamas terrorists" and similar push poll style nonsense offering limiting answers to slanted questions.

However at least one question is about whether the attacks on Israel...

Can be justified by the grievance of Palestinians

So while most questions force them to pick sides between Hamas and Israel with no option to say they support Palestinians they do get at least one chance to say whether they think the Palestinian people have legitimate grievances (though still only in context of supporting an attack).

And the Intercept article is very clear when they link that they think Palestinian and Hamas support are being intentionally conflated, just as you've tried to do again here.




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