TikTok pushed far-right AfD party on young voters in Germany
(arstechnica.com)
from misk@sopuli.xyz to technology@lemmy.world on 17 Jul 2024 16:01
https://sopuli.xyz/post/14914637
from misk@sopuli.xyz to technology@lemmy.world on 17 Jul 2024 16:01
https://sopuli.xyz/post/14914637
cross-posted from: sopuli.xyz/post/14914636
threaded - newest
šÆšššš š¶ššššššššššššššš ššš ššš š°ššššššš ššš šššššššššššššš šÆšššššššššš
Auf reddit hats besser funktioniert
tja
kann man nix machenā¦
Und da fragt man sich, ja woran es jelegen hat. ĀÆ\_(ć)_/ĀÆ
Bin ich
hƤ wieso
They maybe the only major party who talk what youth might want. Most other party almost ignore youth.
But then AFD basically reviving the āHitlerjugendā (hitler youth), so that is that.
A pure aryan skull shape?
Oohhhhh noooooooooo The Youth arenāt getting what they Waaaaaant! Politics is bad!
Ooooh the Huge Manatee!!
That is such a bullshit point. āThe youthā doesnāt want one homogeneous thing. The youth is just as diverse in opinions as other cohorts, maybe even more so. It is also more likely to be on more radikal Sides of the political spectrum.
Yes, they do not want one thing. But that is what they appeal to.
Talking to the emotion of teen, completely contradicting themself, just to get some popularity point. I think this is called popularism, but not sure.
Also afd is extremely radical, so that fit.
While I guess thatās true and itās often surprising that the AfD is polling that well in the younger cohorts letās not overstate their success. There are also a lot of people in that cohort very vehemently disagreeing with the AfD.
Not saying they successful. They just seem like only party that actually try to talk to teen on their level. Still complete bullshit though.
I hope other party start taking teen more seriously.
Also, is this another example of ā90% of the people who voted AfD were men,ā and then opposite them youāll have the far left getting 90% women?
Not in this specific age group. Overall men are overrepresented, not by 90% but they are, but less so in younger people
Chinese company bytedance tries to fragilise western democracies episode 1937392
Logically the number should be higher than the previous comments (just sayinā).
No no, this is a parallel show running right after the one before.
American company meta tries to fragilise western democracies and personal freedoms episode 1937392
You know two things can be true, right?
Of course and they are. My point is people hate in tiktok all the time because itās Chinese and because they harvest data while ignoring the fact Facebook/Instagram snapchat etc are all doing the same stuff and they donāt get met with a ban.
Because one is domestic and one is not. Itās pretty simple to understand. Geopolitics is still a thing.
One is domestic. Who stills sells that data to China š
They should, and the EU should logically ban both if theyāre unwilling to moderate the hate-speech and lies that infest their platforms.
Exactly I completely agree. But itās an obvious move to fill the pockets of politicians because they own stocks in Meta and meta has been lobbying against tiktok for years.
I assure you I have hated Facebook long before TikTok
Itās not China actively manipulating things. Itās the algorithm that was getting gamed by the right wing. Itās not like the Cambridge Analytica scandal where Facebook was working directly with companies that were trying to get Trump elected. Itās more like the pipeline on YouTube, where itās just algorithms funneling people into whatās popular ends up being gamed by conservative people. In the US, Tik Tok was known for helping the āwoke leftā, so obviously itās not the same big conspiracy controlling both.
The thing is, it can also be used for good in that it can show people things like whatās happening in Palestine without being censored by the US, like other US controlled social media has been.
archive.is/55KY3
In my experience Tiktok isnāt pushing it, YouTube shorts however very much is. For me at least
They push whoever uses more bots and pay better advertisement.
Da
I am a fairly radical leftist and a pacifist and you wouldnāt believe the amount of hoo-ra military, toxic masculinity, explosions and people dying, gun-lover bullshit the YouTube algorithm has attempted to force down my throat in the past year. I block every single channel that they recommend yet I am still inundated.
Now, with shorts, itās like they reset their whole algorithm entirely and put it into sensationalist overdrive to compete with TikTok.
I really want to know why their algorithm varies so wildly from person to person, this isnāt the first time Iāve seen people say this about YT.
But in comparison, their algorithm seems to be fairly good in recommending what Iām actually interested in and none of all that other crap people always say. And when it does recommend something Iām not interested in, itās usually something benign, like a video on knitting or something.
None of this out of nowhere far right BS gets pushed to me and a lot of it I can tell why itās recommending me it.
For example my feed is starting to show some lawn care/landscaping videos and I know itās likely related to the fact I was looking up videos on how to restring my weed trimmer.
I think it depends on the things you watch. For example, if you watch a lot of counter-apologetics targeted towards Christianity, YouTube will eventually try out sending you pro-Christian apologetics videos. Similarly, if you watch a lot of anti-Conservative commentary, YouTube will try sending you Conservative crap, because theyāre adjacent and share that āConservativeā thread.
Additionally, if you click on those videos and add a negative comment, the algorithm just knows you engaged with it, and it will then flood your feed with more.
It doesnāt care what your core interests are, it just aims for increasing your engagement by any means necessary.
Maybe it depends on what you watch. I use Youtube for music (only things that I search for) and sometimes live streams of an owl nest or something like that.
If I stick to that, the recommendations are sort of OK. Usually stuff I watched before. Little to no clickbait or random topics.
I clicked on one reaction video to a song I listened to just to see what would happen. The recommendations turned into like 90% reaction videos, plus a bunch of topics Iāve never shown any interest in. U.S. politics, the death penalty in Japan, gaming, Brexit, some Christian hymns, and brand new videos on random topics.
My shorts are full of cooking channels, āfun factā spiky hair guy, Greenland lady, Michael from vsauce and aviation content. Solid 6.5/10
I get all cooking, history, and movie reviews: Max Miller, Red Letter Media, Behind the Bastards, and four-hour history/archaeology documentaries
Shorts are pretty annoying in general, but Iāll be damned if theyāre not great for presenting a recipe in a very short amount of time. Like, you donāt need to see the chef dicing four whole onions in real time.
That does nothing for whatās recommended.
āNot Interestedā -> 'Tell us why -> āI donāt like the videoā is what works.
Same here. Iāve never watched anything like that, yet my recommendations are filled with far-right grifters, interspersed with tech and cooking videos that are more my jam.
YouTube seems to think I love Farage, US gun nuts, US free speech (to be racist) people, anti-LGBT (especially T) channels.
I keep saying Iām not interested, yet they keep trying to convert me. Like fuck off YouTube, no I donāt want to see Jordan Peterson completely OWNS female liberal using FACTS and LOGIC
Same here. No matter how many you block, or mark not interested, it just doesnāt stop
I gave up and used an extension to remove video recommendations, blocked shorts and auto redirect me to my subscriptions list away from the home page. Itās a lot more pleasant to use now.
The algorithm is just garbage at this point. I ultimately just watch YouTube exclusively through Invidious at this point, canāt imagine going back at this stage.
Donāt know about youtube, but I have a similar experience at twitter. I believe they probably see blocking, muting or reporting as āinteractionā and show more of the same as a result.
On youtube on the other hand, I never blocked a channel and almost never see militaristic or right wing stuff (despite following some gun nerds, because I think they are funny).
Sane here. I will just skip over them. At most I will block a video I actually already watched on another platform like Patreon.
Dunno what you watch but yt may thinks the videos are about similar topics (even if you think otherwise).
For myself I usually get recommended what I already watch: Tech, vtuber/anime, mechanical engineering, oddities (like Weird Explorer, Technology Connections).
I rarely get stuff outside of the bubble like gun videos (some creator recently modified a glock in the design of milwaukee tools), meme channels etc.
I highly suspect the videos you watch and interact heavily may feed back to yt in a different way than you think.
And remember: Negative feelings provoke interactions and increase the session time which is a plus for them.
I totally agree with you! I identify as a āprogressive liberalā and had to click on āDonāt show me ad by this advertiserā multiple times yet I was pushed ads by the far right on YouTube and other websites (Google Ads) until the day of the election. A lot of those ads involved hate speech, blatant lies, and were just full of propaganda. Itās a shame that these companies are able to force things down our throats and weāre not able to do much about it. And Iām someone who wouldnāt mind paying for something like āYouTube Premiumā to get rid of those ads but donāt do that out of principle because the thought of supporting a company thatās propagating all this disgusting stuff just doesnāt sit right with me.
Itās atleast good that my YouTube algorithm otherwise is dialed in that I donāt get video recommendations of the same disgusting things. Just the ads. And while people here might like to reply that ads also follow their own algorithm - the far right political parties in question had way too much money to blow to target the entire population than just a particular demographic(the right leaning or neutrals out there). On clicking āWhy am I seeing this advertā I was always met with āYour Locationā as the reason.
Saw crazy YouTube recommendations: <img alt="ghost gun tutorial " src="https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/db4e6ebd-fa01-4e2d-a623-5e5727494e38.png">
The same happened with the Finnish equivalent of the AfD, the Finns Party. Under 25ās are now more conservative than Millennials or iirc even Gen X which is pretty fucking wild
The children will defend tiktok with their lives, crying about how it doesnāt matter non-allied foreign powers can manipulate the algos and narratives.
I donāt see this as a China problem. Itās a lack of regulations and oversight problem. Allied foreign powers (or one specific power to be precise) push far right via social media onto Europe as well.
He doesnāt see that specific allied power interfering with European politics because he is from the US.
Itās both.
The companies who do this shit absolutely need to be regulated way more aggressively.
TikTok (ByteDance), being a Chinese company based in the PRC, is compelled to operate in partnership with the CCP by law, which gives the CCP an insane degree of visibility and control into their systems. I would be absolutely unsurprised to find that the CCP is compelling them to tweak their algorithms and push specific content to specific audiences, in addition to the data gathering theyāre surely engaged in. Source: I work for an oncology biotech, and we halted our Chinese efforts because there was apparently no legal way to square the circle with regard to data privacy/HIPAA considerations.
Iām neither a child nor defending tiktok but it doesnāt mater who manipulates it. No country," allied" or otherwise, should interfere in the democratic process of another country.
god i canāt imagine getting politics on tiktok i thank goddess every day iām well in the confines of booktok, piratetok, hazbintok, and cattok.
Did anyone actually read the whole article? These comments sorta read like the answer is no.
A better headline might have been āTikTok algorithm gamed by far-right AfD party in Germanyā, but I doubt that would drive as many clicks.
For more info, check out this article: Germanyās AfD on TikTok: The political battle for the youth
It doesnāt matter if it is intentional or not, only the result matters: TikTok gave them boost in the visibility. Whether it was āan algorithmā or any other aspect of the company is irrelevant.
Also knowing how scummy these social media companies are and how they operate inside, there could be some internal memo to the moderators to let the AfD reign free (happened with Twitter and Libs of Tiktok).
I wouldnāt just lump all āsocial mediaā companies together.
In this example an important difference is that Twitter is a porn site run by fascists.
That LoTT stuff was happening under the previous ownership of Twitter too, and most higher ups do instruct their moderation team to not curb far-right extremism at the same rate.
Weāll have to agree to disagree. I prefer nuance to oversimplification.
Ideas spread between humans. On systems designed to facilitate communications between people, these ideas will likewise spread. Did AfD exploit TikTokās algorithm or is right wing populism seeing a large growth worldwide?
When the printing press come out and certain news agencies starting āYellow Journalismā were they exploiting that system of communication for profit?
Did JFK and Nixon exploit TV for their own political purposes?
I believe wholeheartedly that every social media algorithm should be open source and transparent so the public can analyze what funny business is going on under the hood.
But is it any different from how TV channels pick what shows to play or what ads to run? Which articles get printed and the choice of words for a newspaper?
I think people are quick to jump on TikTok because of some unusual socially acceptable jingoism but I donāt see how at its core is fundamentally different from other forms of media, let alone other popular social media platforms.
It definitely matters. Thereās a huge difference between promoting nazis and writing an algorithm thatās gamed by nazis.
This headline is designed to mislead people by erasing that difference. And the motives of people who have been attacking tiktok are generally trash.
But being so big and influential as these platforms are, they should not have the option of āoops, sorry, didnāt think about thatā. (I am aware Iām being idealistic)
Terrible headline.
2004: The Internet will lead to a utopian society without gatekeepers, without censorship, where we get our information from each other and primary sources, not media companies!
2024: The Internet is based on algorithmic attention. Those who control the algorithms control what parts of the immeasurably large pile of data will get attention and which not. Yet they are protected by the same intermediary liability laws as if they were traditional web forums, blog hosters, wikis with no personalized algorithm (for which those laws are very good and necessary).
lemmy.world/comment/11235801
Stop using this to push your agenda about censorship and whatever. Censorship has never lead to anything good. Read the history books.
Did you reply to the wrong comment? Where did I defend censorship?
They are confusing censorship with manipulation. The algorithm is working.
To be fair, the comment mentioned censorship but not manipulation.
Iām a bit confused where you made out it was about manipulation when it was really about the rage algorithms.
But obviously the commenter misread the comment completely and thought OP was advocating for censorship when in reality it was his description of Internet utopia.
WTF cares? Why the fk is the left so hell bent on censorship and controlling of all narratives?
āWhy are leftists so concerned over foreign authoritarian governments directly influencing the elections in their countries???ā
Unless thereās a clear violation of elections, like ballot stuffing and fraudulent votes by non-citizens and dead citizensā¦ I could give a fk less. People have a right to speak their mind whether intelligent or psycho babbles.
You are either incredibly naive or speak in bad faith. Pushing propaganda to misled the public in elections is much more dangerous than stuffing a few ballots into the box.
Thatās richā¦ let NBC and MSNBC know how you feel as a Dem/Progressive/Leftist etcā¦