> my accounts are all on USA servers
Keep telling yourself that ;)
No idea how you could know this. I have never seen any concrete evidence that there are propaganda videos interlaced into people’s feeds. Everything I have heard is hypothetical. “China could” do this or that. If there were anything more than conjecture it would be huge news.
Casey Newton said on Hard Fork that he started a new account recently as an experiment and didn’t mention anything about China propaganda videos.
The app's design is to get you to mindlessly doomscroll and not really think too hard about what it's showing you. If it shows you something insane occasionally it's no big deal, it's just the algorithm trying something new right?
It's very difficult to show any concrete evidence for how a secretive algorithm controlled by an adversary behaves. In an ideal world the burden should be on the platforms to prove that their algorithms are fair and not biasing towards certain viewpoints, but that might never happen.
I opened a new account in Canada last night due to the ban. I saw a lot of Canadian memes, and a ton of wildly incomprehensible foreign material from every corner of the globe as the algo tried to figure me out. But none of it looked remotely political or ideological in any way.
If there is propaganda it is very covert. Compared with X where my feed is maybe 80% overt propaganda, including from the owner of the platform himself.
I did once see a cat that was named "Chairman Meow" in one video, which might have been very subtle CCP reprogramming now that I think on it.
Usually it is about behavior shifts and/or emotions. E.g. if I’d be watching videos with cute penguins and then seen a politician „adopting” penguins at zoo, that’d be a political propaganda.
Political ads have to be marked clearly but if politician is sympathetic to the platform and platform owner has a stake in keeping good relations then it’s just another penguins video, right?
And it’s omnipresent, so you stop paying attention. It’s not only China who is doing that. That’s why Paris Syndrome exists, car manufacturers don’t allow game makers to show their models in a destroyed form or why actresses don’t like to show their nostrils.
The problem with China (as far as I understand) is lack of the symmetry. They will sell you everything, but refuse to let your merchants in.
And I’d describe message shown to American users as a propaganda.
I have been using TikTok for months and I didn't see any propaganda at all. I only get content about my interests (3d printing, game dev, tech stuff). Sometimes it shows random stuff like animals and camping and funny videos or something but nothing like heavy politics at all.
I guess if I started engaging with "slightly political stuff" and started searching for it, it may be possible to get that kind of content, but yeah it's definitely not shown to me.
I expect that to stay unless I start to show intentions to the algorithm that I care about that kind of content.