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
Would you feel better if an anonymous user uploaded it to Reddit/Twitter/Tiktok?
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.
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.
https://www.newsweek.com/gen-z-infected-antisemitism-spreadi...
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.
10 years ago, no. Today? An audiofile is really easy to make with or even just a couple people in a studio.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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
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?
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
Why is it so important to you that the truth is suppressed?
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.
You're naive and wrong.
That's extremely antisemitic given that Jewish groups have been some of the most public and vocal opponents of Israel's genocidal actions.
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.
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?
It's like talking to a finite state machine that emits duckspeak
Congress can’t even agree on the federal govt budget, but they can almost unanimously agree to support war, and banning TT
The fact that they chose to shut down instead, strongly suggests, that they have interests in TikTok beyond financial.
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.
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.
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.
A financially motivated actor would have avoided the damage by spinning it out. They likely could have even kept a large minority share.
But actually, it is a standalone peice of legislation - the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act.
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
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
“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
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
A media outlet not easy to censor is unacceptable to the Israeli lobby, and therefore unacceptable to our politicians.
[1] https://www.xiaohongshu.com/search_result?keyword=gay (requires log-in)
"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."
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-...
Only after the strong shift in sentiment by younger Americans on Israel's genocidal actions did the effort renew with vigor.
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.
https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/palestinian-authority-...
The Palestinian Authority and Hamas are not exactly friends, they don't need much convincing to ban Al Jazeera.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
If something can be done through the Israeli/Palestinian conflict which damages the US, you can be sure China is working on it.
There are dozens of contradictory narratives depending on who you ask, what makes your paticular narrative more compelling than the competing narratives?
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...
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.
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.
> 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.
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.