this post was submitted on 29 Nov 2024
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The article even start with "He spends much of his free time on TikTok, and was swept up in Georgescu’s rhetoric. TikTok’s algorithm fed him a steady stream of short, stirring videos..." and then ignores reality again to spin a story of how it's all just protest voting from people felt let down by politics.
Again. For the 100000th time it's not brain-washing by social media but purely "protest voting", with social media as an innocent bystander just concidentally being there and pouring bullshit into people's brains 24/7 every single time.
@Ooops
Social media - and Tiktok is no exemption, of course - is not an "innocent bystander". Their algorithms deliberately surveill and manipulate users, and pursue a commercial and/or political agenda. In case of Tiktok, this agenda serves the goal of the regime in China (and their allies).
There is ample evidence for Tiktok and (almost) all other social media platforms pursuing a purpose. For the Romanian election case, there is an analysis by the European Media Observatory on the Romanian election -- (Archived link).
On 'TikTok's role in Romanian politics' and the 'Candidate Performance Metrics', it says, among others:
The analysis also says:
Emphasis mine.
[Edit typo.]
I reckon there’s gotta be a typo (or satire) in Oooops’ 2nd paragraph. It doesn’t fit to the first and I am relatively sure his POV is pretty similar to yours.
I on the other hand would suggest to be careful to assume everybody’s just brainwashed and by that questioning ever more election results and trying to revert them if unwanted. People voting for fascists is not a thing brought upon us by foreign actors. It comes from within and we got to fight it here much more vigorously.
@bungalowtill@lemmy.dbzer0.com Yah, I forget surveillance algorithms are only bad when they come from the West, right? (/s, just to be safe)
In other related news:
Romania orders election recount after TikTok bias claims
Weird answer.
But yeah, I know about the recount. And I wonder: How can a recount change anything if the voters were already manipulated when they cast their votes?
How a little-known far-right candidate manipulated TikTok to rise to the top in the Romanian election
It's such a classic problem, the Latin phrase has a Wikipedia page:
The world wants to be deceived.
It explains why this guys father ended up voting against his interests. But it also explains why this guy reporting on it ends up completely missing the point, and why the masses reading his article will probably agree with him.
They want to be deceived. They want to keep using social media, even knowing it's rotting their brains away. Social media users are like any other addicts, except that your neighbourhood heroinists don't spend their days gobbling up misinformation and hot takes.
That's the main reason what we're doing on the social web is so radical. Sure, we're not on a platform that can be owned by billionaires, and that's of course cool enough. But much more than that, we don't take part in the attention economy at all. We accept the problem for what it is and we're willing to commit to an alternative.
And that's why I don't give a fuck if everyone is on Bluesky. I'm sticking to Mastodon precisely because it's not a fucking high precision attention magnet designed to suck in the masses. Anyone who doesn't see the fundamental problem of the attention economy at this point wants to be deceived, and they're dragging us all down with them.
Thanks for coming to my ted talk and all that.
People are stupid. The length to which people can be influenced by propaganda is directly related to how stupid they are.
Unlike me, I'm immune to propaganda because this test I took in preschool said I'm smart and will always be smart.