cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/3758180
Chinese social media giant TikTok is “more dangerous” to Ukraine in terms of spreading Russian propaganda and disinformation than the Russia-founded messaging app Telegram, according to Alina Aleksieeva, the deputy head of Ukraine’s State Center for Countering Disinformation (CPD).
[…]
“We often perceive Telegram as the primary culprit, given its abundance of anonymous Russian channels and the impersonation of Ukrainian ones,” said Svitlana Slipchenko, deputy executive director of the data analytics platform Vox Ukraine.
“But the problem extends beyond Telegram — fake news is widespread on TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, and Threads,” she added. “The danger is focusing too narrowly on one platform while Russian propaganda continues to thrive across the entire digital landscape.”
Earlier this year, the CPD published a list of over 80 TikTok accounts used for Russian disinformation. The list includes official accounts of Russian state media, such as TASS, Sputnik, and RIA Novosti.
[…]
Ukraine has previously considered banning TikTok. The app’s future in the U.S. is uncertain due to concerns that ByteDance may have ties to the Chinese government. U.S. authorities have also accused the app of spreading harmful content and misinformation and posing privacy risks.
[…]
Ukraine has been paying close attention to foreign social media apps due to the risks they pose to its users amid the ongoing war. Earlier in September, Ukraine banned Telegram on official devices used by state and security officials, military personnel, and employees of critical infrastructure facilities.
[…]
Wow who would’ve thought that the chinese app would spread propaganda about its ally’s enemy1?1??1
There is quite literally zero evidence that Tiktok “spreads propaganda” relating to the Russia-Ukraine war of its own volition. There are literally millions of pro-Russia users around the world - i.e India where a huge percent of users come from and where the population is split on which side of the war is to blame - who are responsible.
There’s quite literally zero evidence you aren’t Boris in St. Petersburg getting paid to spread lies for your murderous leader.
Regardless, I’m pretty sure it’s a case of bullshit in, bullshit out and there’s a lot of that on tiktok… Or here too actually
Yeah, lots of propaganda on Lemmy. Not shocking since its relatively unmoderated, but I hoped it was small enough to avoid it.
That’s always a rational and logical place to take the conversation - viscious McCarthyist paranoia! Who knows, I could even be Xi himself, trying to make you lower your guard so I can feed you an ad for my dastardly electric car companies while you scroll past memes and tits.
There’s abundant evidence the Kremlin is doing exactly what I’m implying. Your condescending, facetious attitude doesn’t make your perspective convincing.
The article is about China and TikTok’s behavior, not “the Kremlin”, and the behavior described in the article is mundane ad-buying. You can quite literally sift through the TikTok ad library yourself to confirm this. Instead you rely on vagueries and call people secret Kremlin agents who are very invested in changing your perspective, like a schizophrenic.
McCarthyism is about the Kremlin, this post is about the Kremlin’s disinformation. Thanks for insulting me though, that part was very convincing.
McCarthyism hasn’t been exlusively about the Kremlin since… well since way before McCarthy even died. And it’s a moot task for me to try to convince a paranoiac who eschews facts.
In Germany, it was found that it’s very very very easy to fall down an AfD propaganda hole when browsing TikTok – and the way that was fixed was by other parties, non-party actors etc. starting to give a fuck about the platform.
I’m not saying there’s no Chinese shennanigans going on on TikTok, there probably are at least low-key and they’re keeping it around as an asset they can use more intensively, push come to shove. But that doesn’t mean that everything bad on TikTok is a Chinese plot, it could be, you know, just our own societies dropping the ball. Shocking, I know, how would that ever happen. Algorithm-wise TikTok didn’t prefer AfD content the AfD just figured out how to use it effectively.
Well yeah, Telegram is basically intended for one on one or group discussion, there’s pretty much no content filtering. TikTok is about curating a content stream. There are a lot more opportunities to mess with what content you see on TikTok vs Telegram.
So a social media app like TikTok, Facebook, etc will have a lot more say in what gets presented compared to a communication platform like Telegram.
Comparing Telegram to TikTok is nonsensical.
Addition:
TikTok Has Pushed Chinese Propaganda Ads To Millions Across Europe – ( July 2024, updated September 2024)
According to TikTok’s newly public advertising library, ads from China’s largest state media outlets touting everything from China Covid lockdowns to tourism in the troubled Xinjiang region have been broadcast to millions of the platform’s European users.
TikTok Ads Paid for by Chinese Media Target European Users – (August 2023)
Chinese media sponsored over a thousand ads on TikTok targeting European audiences. Additionally, accounts that carefully obscure their connections to China may pose further risks in coordinated information manipulation campaigns.
This are just two examples, there is much more across the web.
The articles simply describe Chinese media firms buying ads on Tiktok. You can literally search through the ad library and find media firms from basically every country that can afford it.
Omg they’re buying ads for…tourism? ?
… So a short form video platform is more dangerous than a dubitably secure group chat app?
That’s comparing apricots to ocelots
Can we stop blaming platforms for what their users post on them?
It’s not TikTok, Telegram, Twitter, Mastodon, Lemmy spreading misinformation (or correct information for that matter), it is their users. People used to understand this, somehow they don’t anymore.
