I've never in my life used TikTok. Can you please point to a specific article, news source, journal, any piece of information that is legal in the United States that I don't have easy access to so I can see what I'm missing?

Whataboutism. You presumably know full well what the parent was describing, but if not:

TikTok presents users with feeds of videos. For many users, this is their primary news source.

An American oligarch and party loyalist now has de facto control of the app. Therefore, the regime has the capability to shape the narrative by boosting or hiding videos from the feed (whether or not they are doing so is an open question).

Could users still hypothetically find the same information elsewhere? Sure. But if this app is their primary source of information, would they even know they should bother doing so?

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ericmay 8 hours ago | parent [-]

> For many users, this is their primary news source.

That's their problem. You can't make blanket claims saying Americans now don't have easy access to information when there are other sources, ranging from the NYT to the Intercept, to anything you want to read being written and translated right on your computer from the EU or Japan or anywhere else you want to read.

> An American oligarch and party loyalist now has de facto control of the app.

Chinese oligarch, American oligarch. Either way someone without your best intentions in mind owns your platform. Maybe you should stop using it.

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JeremyNT 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Goalpost moving, this one.

The post you were replying to stated:

> hiding information from the US public

They didn't say "Americans now don't have easy access to information" (your words). They said this sort of manipulation would be to hide information from the American public.

Many people in the American public only see news on TikTok. If information is suppressed within TikTok, it is hidden to them.

If TikTok stops showing content, can they find it some other way? Yes, if they know to look. It's not blocked or destroyed, but it's hidden.

Is that a problem? Yes. TikTok's dominance was and is a problem in and of itself. But that isn't an excuse to abuse its dominance for propaganda purposes.

As X has shown, these platforms are crucial to the information ecosystem, and their selective curation can warp the views of an entire population.

	▲	ericmay 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Nope, didn't move the goalpost, let's set that aside. > The post you were replying to stated: Now you're cherry-picking what the OP wrote. > But that isn't an excuse to abuse its dominance for propaganda purposes. I didn't suggest that any of that was an "excuse" for anything - instead I called out that regardless of how TikTok operates you still have access to whatever information you want. If you choose to silo yourself, whether that's TikTok or FoxNews, that doesn't change the fact that you still have access to information. Reminder of the OP: > The forced US hosted tik-tok sale is all about hiding information from the US public that most people in the rest of the world have easy access to. If what you are suggesting is true, than OP's claim is untrue because all governments and all social media platforms regardless of where they exist or who owns them curate content to some degree and are thus "hiding information from the public". You can't have it both ways here.