[trafficante]

Remember about a decade ago, when you’d read about YouTube’s algorithm creating an “alt-right pipeline”?

Without making any judgments on the alt-right label, it was absolutely a real thing. Many documented cases showing how a fresh account could go from “Sesame Street, cooking videos, and CNN” on the default feed - and, within ~10 relatively innocuous clicks down the suggested video rabbit hole, the home feed would be full of Alex Jones tier stuff.

TikTok is heavily reminiscent of the old YouTube. Just taking a few steps down the Free Palestine recommendation road will get you into “Happy Birthday, Uncle Adolf” videos (hyperbolic, but only slightly).

I don’t blame certain parties for getting rather nervous over that. But I wish we could have some honesty from elected officials about why TikTok is suddenly such a pressing issue again.

Whatever happens, I hope they’ve learned from YouTube’s earlier mistakes. In trying to break the alt-right pipeline, they ended up breaking the entire recommendation engine for years (tbf it’s a lot better now).

[Aloha]

I think the short form content inherent to TikTok - in some ways makes it worse than old YouTube was, because its multitudes of different people making the same or similar points - its more reinforcing.

That said I otherwise agree with you 100% - I saw folks get sucked down you YouTube pipeline then, and I've watched people get sucked down the TikTok one now, I got one person in my life to switch to FB reels, because I would correct the purported facts in each video and they found that annoying.

Agree (even if it is hyperbolic) on the yellow brick road model of radicalization.

[nashashmi]

Do you remember the bin laden reactions that surfaced on tiktok? That was radicalization that the US attempted to suppress after 9/11.