Jan. 6 Committee Experiment Found TikTok Went From Zero To Nazi in 75 Minutes

[Nevilledog]

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/tiktok-served-nazi-propaganda-jan-6-committee-found-1234656268/


No paywall
https://archive.ph/zDkje

WHEN THE JAN. 6 committee wanted to test how easy it was for TikTok users to wander down a far-right rabbit hole, they tried an experiment. They created Alice, a fictional 41-year-old from Acton, Massachusetts, gave her a TikTok account, and tracked what the social media app showed her.

To their surprise, it only took 75 minutes of scrolling — with no interaction or cues about her interests — for the platform to serve Alice videos featuring Nazi content, following a detour through clips on the Amber Heard-Johnny Depp defamation suit, Donald Trump, and other right-wing culture war flashpoints.

Staff described the exercise as “just one of the Committee’s experiments that further evidenced the power of TikTok’s recommendation algorithm in creating rabbit holes toward potentially harmful content.”

The experiment is detailed in a draft summary of investigative findings prepared by the committee’s social media team and obtained by Rolling Stone. The company mostly escaped notice in the public battles over the role of social media and moderation in combating extremism, including the kind that led to the Capitol attack. But the unpublished summary sheds new light on how the TikTok has grappled with the challenge of “how to moderate misleading content without attracting accusations of censorship,” in particular when “the mis- and disinformation benefitted the political right,” according to staffers.

*snip*

[Initech]

1. I'm shocked, shocked! Well... not that shocked.

Social media platforms need to do a better job of moderating content, and Elon's "no moderation" platform is a grossly failed experiment gone wrong.

Hell I remember back in the early days of the Trump admin, Microsoft debuted a self-help chat bot and it didn't take long before hackers got a hold of it and turned it into a suicidal teenage chain smoking Nazi. Yikes.

[cilla4progress]

2. Fascinating.

Maybe this is how humanity ends.

Nihilism.

[Funtatlaguy]

3. Humanity deserves to end. Evil has won. We're just running out the clock now.

[Genki Hikari]

4. Gee...What a surprise

v

[usajumpedtheshark]

5. Another example of Godwin's law of Nazi analogies

First formulated in the 1990's regarding Usenet news discussions, it is the tech version of Reductio ad Hitlerum

[Caliman73]

6. Conservatism is a bankrupt ideology, yet it retains power...

why? because the richest people in the world continue to believe in and promote the fairy tale, and unfortunately, they own the media outlets which feed the fairy tale to everyone else.

Same reason (though obviously less extreme) is how Republicans get the majority of media coverage whether they are in the majority or the minority. Same reason coverage of their ideas (lack of ideas, more aptly) get equal considerations to Liberal ACTUAL IDEAS for making people's lives better.

I can argue for hours about how Liberalism is insufficient and imperfect, but the reality is that at least Liberalism is based on what closest resembles our shared reality. Conservatism longs for the days of absolute monarchy and aristocratic rules. Kings, Queens, and lords bullshit!

However, as I said, the wealthy control both the means of production and the means of mass communication. We all have, in our minds, at very least, bits and pieces of the propaganda that "wealth endows people with virtue and we should give them deference" While Nazism is one of the most extreme forms of right wing ideology, substituting Nationalism, Race, and Mythology for the typical Conservative ideas of Wealth and semi-aristocratic leanings, it nonetheless serves to move, or to keep the Overton window to the right.

Conservatives have always sought (and often failed) to harness the power of extremism to maintain their power. It typically ends in ruin for them, but because the ideology (Conservatism) is never fully eradicated, they always come back.

They retain most of their wealth and a lot of their power. What did Prescott Bush and his "Business Plot" buddies lose when they tried to stage a right wing coup against FDR? What did the Senators and Representatives in the 1930's and 1940's really lose when they worked with the actual Nazis. What did Nixon lose for his part in scuttling the 1968 Peace conference with Vietnam to hurt Humphrey? What did Reagan lose when he made the dirty deal with Iran to keep the hostages longer to hurt Carter, then sold them weapons illegally?

Unfortunately, Conservatives seem to control the narrative and until we find a way to defeat that, it will remain so, and people will be fed the standard Conservative lie AND more extreme ideologies from the right wing.