One does really not have to believe such things at all to be influenced by such platforms, especially if there is intent behind controlling its algorithm. Do you understand how recommendation systems work ans why them being black boxes is so dangerous on a big platform like TT?
In the West yes, people can obtain information on the internet… But will they?
With declining economy and increasing disinfo, we don’t have the time to sift through all the nonsense and obtain the actual facts. We might as well be living in China.
Did you follow what happened when a lot of American TikTok users made a trip to Rednote, a Chinese lifestyle app, to escape the looming ban earlier this year? The Americans discovered that a lot of what they knew about China was propaganda. The Chinese, to their horror, discovered what they knew about America, that they assumed to be propaganda, was correct…
I.e I disagree; free speech only exists if we specifically reject speech that aims to suppress free speech, while accepting speech we don’t like but that doesn’t aim to suppress.
Can we do that? Can we draw the line? Why do so many believe there is no line to be drawn here?
Popper’s paradox of tolerance gives in my view pretty clear guidelines on what to protect and what not to tolerate. I believe that if we held onto that, fascism would have a much harder time.
I am not an expert on political science, so I don’t know what the data tells us. The feeling I get from the world though is that the “impressionable” part is large enough to be consequential, in part because the “educated” part has already made up their minds.
It’s also not sufficient to talk specifically about ads in tiktok without considering them in the wider context of online messaging, all of which is going to be systemically tailored to feed into the same fears and shame.
What makes it tricky is, I think, that there are both kinds of voters so both viewpoints are kind of correct but piss the other side off with the implications. E: typo
Way to summarize a two party system