At this point I really feel like humanity would be better off if we just banned all corporate social media.
This is not a bug, but a feature. Tiktok operates on the behest of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
There's much evidence for this. See, for example, a study by the Network Contagion Research Institute and Rutgers University (pdf).
The report details how TikTok, owned by the Chinese-based ByteDance, amplifies and suppresses content based on whether it aligns with the geopolitical interest of the CCP.
The CCP's interest is, among others, to destroy democracy. It is supporting Germany's AfD -e.g., we saw several AfD staff arrested in Germany over suspicion of spying for China last year, and AfD head Alice Weidel has strong ties with China, she is fluent in Mandarin and lived in the country- as well as other right-wing politicians in Europe with Tiktok being a major tool for this.
As one report from July 2024 says:
Germany’s huge TikTok market is vulnerable to extremists’ tactics, which have gained major traction with young voters. Our cross-border investigation proved that you can easily buy virality on social networks.
In Romania, reporters showed that the social network was a key platform for emerging far-right political figures.
Similarly, in Poland, the TikTok champions of the European Parliament elections were the far-right, who are now heading to Brussels.
In Slovakia, TikTok served as a fertile ground for conspiracies about the attempted assassination of Prime Minister Robert Fico.
Meanwhile, in the Czech Republic, reporters found that the platform’s algorithm was pushing users into a bubble of disinformation.
Estonians were exposed to fear-mongering related to war that was propagated through TikTok.
In Hungary, Russian narratives flow to TikTok via public media.
It's time that Europe awakens. The Chinese government's dictatorial policy isn't good for the Chinese people, and neither for Europeans.
Wake up to what? The people in control of the media in Eurooe want this to happen. They need easy to manipulate idiots, because they don't have any solutions themselves. But what are they supposed to do? Stop producing brain-washed morons and accumulating money and power from exploiting those, just because someone else is exploiting them, too? Don't be rediculous.
Those clowns. You really can't make up how pathetic that is. This weekend will bring another big wave of demonstrations against AfD and will push the count of people who protested against them over 1 million. There are hundreds of additional demonstrations planned for the next week.
And then those AfD nazi clowns are generating fake videos with AI because no one is demonstrating for those cave trolls.
If you watch the explanation in the link, you can see that these videos are not even video edited, just changed audio. No AI required, just windows movie maker. How are people falling for this in 2025?
A year ago, AfD fans believed reporting about protests against the AfD were fake and reported inflated numbers because they (the AfD fans) don't understand optics and perspective.
(Ironically, Hamburg police later actually did have to correct numbers, but in the other direction. There were actually more participants at that rally than estimated initially.)
How are people falling for this in 2025?
There are people who are literally waiting for this. We can see this on Tiktok and all other platforms (including here on Lemmy). There is a community waiting for its propaganda and then just spreading it as long as it fits to certain narratives, no matter what bs this may be ("Ukraine started the war", "Covid is a hoax", "China is a democracy" - the list of these braindead claims is endless).
The EU needs to ban foreign social media now. Our institutions' commitment to the fediverse should be firm, decisive, sustained and comprehensive. I also think this should be a topic of debate and pressure from citizens right now.
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