That's certainly easier than sitting down and questioning your own decisions over the last couple of decades and wondering why people are voting in ways you don't like
(For the record I'm not a Tiktok user and I think it's a net negative to society)
In this specific case of the first round of Romanian presidential election the traditional candidates from the bigger parties (PNL/PSD which have a government coalition at the moment) have both admitted to understanding why they lost and that the people's vote was against their policies. Both of these leaders have quit their leadership positions in their respective parties.
There is still a very serious discussion going on about potential foreign powers (China) getting involved in our electoral process with platforms like TikTok, see my other comment in this thread about this.
Read the article - This is not the EU commission or some bigwig requesting a hearing or an investigation.
Rather there was one delegate from one of the many political groups in the EU Parliament (which has very little authority and power) who made a statement .
In analogy to the US political system: This is not Mark Zuckerberg summoned to a Senate hearing. Rather this is someone of the House of Representatives making some weird proposal or claim.
Maybe I am oversimplifying here, but you get the idea.
For from me to defend any politician but denying the role of social media in shifting public opinion is like sticking your head deep in the sand.
The real culpability of politicians and governments the world over is that they have endorsed this freak development for decades.
They are all present on social media, they are advertising both directly and indirectly, by placing links and "follow us on xyz" on every damn government website.
They have made a faustian pact with the devil and now the devil is extracting his pound of flesh.
So you think amplified disinformation and misinformation, with high frequency per user, play no role in people's perception of reality and their decision-making process?
I agree that politicians in a good chunk of Europe have let their constituents down one one too many times, that the breach has gotten too wide and that protest voting makes perfect sense for a lot of people. But two things can be right at the same time: I also believe it's true that dictators are sabotaging democracies everywhere and that social networks (not just TikTok) are both addictive and a major source of misinformation.
I'm constantly reminded of this bit from [1] (which is a great read):
> Later, when I ask Chase whether he’s ever heard about the QAnon conspiracy, he says no, but explains that the video must be legit because “it’s gotten deleted multiple times off the internet, which is insane.” Epistemologically, this is where we are as a country: when content gets expurgated because of blatant misinformation, it is taken as a sure sign of that source’s truthfulness.
I certainly want more politicians to be afraid of the people they claim to represent, but I also want social networks to stop throwing their hands in the air and pretend they're not responsible for spreading misinformation at an unprecedent scale.
It’s well known that TikTok uses human curation and weighting to a far greater extent than other social media platforms. The others primarily try to hide and remove unwanted content, but TikTok actively picks what gets shown.
(Twitter apparently now has a patchwork of hacks like the famous “author_is_elon” multiplier that slipped into their public source code release, but that’s nothing like TikTok’s meticulous selection process for algorithmic boosting.)
It would be good to have more visibility into this process because it wields massive influence among the 13-28 demographic, roughly.
A bit of context: the presidential candidate in question was predicted below 1% on all polls days before the election. He declared a campaign budget of absolute zero. He had no posters, no tents, no apparitions on TV, absolutely nothing. After a massive presence on TikTok in the last couple of weeks he won 23% of the votes, placing him first and wining a spot in the final elections where just the first two placed candidates run.
Currently the elections in Romania are in an total chaos. The Romanian Constitutional Court ordered an unprecedented recount of the votes, even though the count was sanctioned by all the parties through their observers. Also the country's Defense Council declared they have proof of cybernetic attacks which influenced the elections.
That sounds like either the pollsters or the people running the election have significantly bigger problems than whatever that candidate might or might not have done. How did they not find any of the people swayed by TikTok? Why are they even looking at TikTok at that point?
> Many of Georgescu’s voters admit to not knowing too much about him.
There seems to be a greater problem than Social Media abuse, to me there's a lack of education around the candidates and the actual meaning & process of voting. That said, everyone can vote for whoever they want so I'm not really sure what can be done.
I'm Romanian, and to add some more context here's what TikTok sent Romanian authorities about the situation:
> The company that it found no evidence of a covert influence operation on the TikTok platform in recent weeks related to the Romanian presidential election and no evidence of external influence.
> "Although it has been alleged that there were 5,000 fake accounts involved in election interference, our investigations have found no evidence to support these allegations," the company said in its letter, which notes that it is "still investigating."
> From September through the beginning of this week, the company has removed more than 66,000 fake accounts, 7 million fake likes and 10 million fake followers from the platform, TikTok says in its letter. The figures refer to posts and activity in English. Note that it does not specify whether they were electoral or in favor of a specific candidate.
> TikTok also says it has prevented 40 million likes and blocked more than 216,000 "spam accounts" before they went online.
It's a bit of "we've investigated ourselves and found nothing wrong".
There's been a huge uproar about this candidate which was polling below 5% reaching the 1st spot in the 1st round of the presidential election in Romania. The candidates need to report spending to a state organization overseeing elections and this guy reported that he spent nothing on his election campaign, which is a bit impossible as there have also been flyers with his name on them, so there's definitely something fishy going on.
There are also a lot of TikTok influencers that have come forward claiming to have received payments through a third party company to present the candidate in a positive light, and the issue is that these videos should have been tagged correctly as "electoral ads" according to Romanian law, which did not happen.
Purely from an observation perspective there has been a huge amount of spam activity on Romanian tiktok, with accounts spamming random videos with copy paste messages similar to "We're massively voting for Calin Georgescu" which led a lot of people to believing there was a massive bot campaign promoting this guy.
A criminal investigation has been requested by The Supreme Council of National Defence, which is the autonomous administrative authority in Romania invested by the Constitution with the task of organising and coordinating, by unanimous decisions, the activities related to the country's defence and national security.
So if we say in almost every country that social media is bad and oh my people are using it wrong and we should change people to better handle social media, could it not be the case that maybe people are not wrong but social media is?
Why do we have to do such amount of change to accommodate the way our current social media works? Could it be that people are using it wrong or that social media is a negative influence and we should fix that.
the situation is simple: the guy that got 1st place with 22% (after being invisible until just 2 weeks before the elections) posted a shitstorm of content (without labelling it as political content), via some obscure hashtags, paid micro influencers to share and post and then sent a lot of bots to comment, share and broadcast. all while the other candidates were not allowed to post anything.
the guy took advantage of tiktok algorithms and manipulated micro influencers into reaching his audience.. everything in 1-2 weeks.
tiktok is not to blame, but it wasn't real democracy.
Not being a US citizen or living in the US I can still understand how the upcoming president was elected - regardless of how one feels politically about if they should or should not have been.
Reddit has become an extreme echo chamber of a particular ideology to the point I find myself even with agreement on many points leaning the other way out of the exhaustion of the echo chamber. It feels like some amount embrace, get off on the echo chamber and then there are others (myself?) who get so sick of the constant echo chamber end up being just opposed to engaging even in things we normally would support.
It's not a perfect analogy, but it reminds me of kids who left to their own free will, will eat boat loads of candy to the point of being sick of candy and don't want it anymore even though they did/do enjoy candy they're simply maxed out on having it.
The information warfare situation is highly asymmetric, and we seem to just let it fester on.
The west doesn't have ubiquitous mind control devices deployed behind the great firewall. That this situation persists is a signal, to me, that our leaders aren't well equipped to deal with the realities of tech in 2024.
It's a travesty that western countries have moved from trying to gain their people's support by improving their living conditions to trying to gain their people's support by lying to them, such that unrestricted discussion of the facts is such a threat to the governments in power.
I cannot believe that people are calling for the ban of TikTok or X or any other social platform. It's just a gut feeling but it feels to me as though the more the economic situation in Europe deteriorates the more the continent descends into totalitarianism.
Most countries have laws on TV and radio time per political parties to regulate these things, why not do it on social medias?
Democracy isn't just about voting every X years, it's also about being able to make well informed decisions, which is not the case when a foreign state agent employs bot farms to skew the story. I'm not saying the current system is perfect but clearly sprinkling it with foreign influence isn't going to make it better.
Social medias are the only thing that are still mostly unregulated black boxes, the government knows about the secret recipe of coca cola, or the secret recipe of KFC spices, &c. But the algos of TikTok, Instagram, &co aren't discussed anywhere
If RussCola sold bottles of soda with mercury in Germany would you say it would be totalitarian to ban them? If people want mercury in their cola who are we to judge?
Given the scale of Europe's economic problems, gaslighting people is the path of least resistance for governments there, as solving the economic issues would be extremely difficult, especially given Europe's demographic crisis/aging population.
switch007|1 year ago
(For the record I'm not a Tiktok user and I think it's a net negative to society)
cbg0|1 year ago
There is still a very serious discussion going on about potential foreign powers (China) getting involved in our electoral process with platforms like TikTok, see my other comment in this thread about this.
knbknb|1 year ago
Rather there was one delegate from one of the many political groups in the EU Parliament (which has very little authority and power) who made a statement .
In analogy to the US political system: This is not Mark Zuckerberg summoned to a Senate hearing. Rather this is someone of the House of Representatives making some weird proposal or claim.
Maybe I am oversimplifying here, but you get the idea.
rdm_blackhole|1 year ago
To me it looks like the EU wants to become an auditor of the elections of the EU members and is taking sides.
And here I thought that the EU wanted to promote democracy and the will of the people.
consumer451|1 year ago
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8116821/
pmezard|1 year ago
openrisk|1 year ago
The real culpability of politicians and governments the world over is that they have endorsed this freak development for decades.
They are all present on social media, they are advertising both directly and indirectly, by placing links and "follow us on xyz" on every damn government website.
They have made a faustian pact with the devil and now the devil is extracting his pound of flesh.
naiv|1 year ago
This would never have happened if it would have been a left wing politician obeying to the EU elites.
libertine|1 year ago
probably_wrong|1 year ago
I'm constantly reminded of this bit from [1] (which is a great read):
> Later, when I ask Chase whether he’s ever heard about the QAnon conspiracy, he says no, but explains that the video must be legit because “it’s gotten deleted multiple times off the internet, which is insane.” Epistemologically, this is where we are as a country: when content gets expurgated because of blatant misinformation, it is taken as a sure sign of that source’s truthfulness.
I certainly want more politicians to be afraid of the people they claim to represent, but I also want social networks to stop throwing their hands in the air and pretend they're not responsible for spreading misinformation at an unprecedent scale.
[1] https://harpers.org/archive/2021/06/tiktok-house-collab-hous...
pavlov|1 year ago
(Twitter apparently now has a patchwork of hacks like the famous “author_is_elon” multiplier that slipped into their public source code release, but that’s nothing like TikTok’s meticulous selection process for algorithmic boosting.)
It would be good to have more visibility into this process because it wields massive influence among the 13-28 demographic, roughly.
arkh|1 year ago
So not really the people who vote.
trabant00|1 year ago
Currently the elections in Romania are in an total chaos. The Romanian Constitutional Court ordered an unprecedented recount of the votes, even though the count was sanctioned by all the parties through their observers. Also the country's Defense Council declared they have proof of cybernetic attacks which influenced the elections.
Izkata|1 year ago
bilekas|1 year ago
There seems to be a greater problem than Social Media abuse, to me there's a lack of education around the candidates and the actual meaning & process of voting. That said, everyone can vote for whoever they want so I'm not really sure what can be done.
cbg0|1 year ago
> The company that it found no evidence of a covert influence operation on the TikTok platform in recent weeks related to the Romanian presidential election and no evidence of external influence.
> "Although it has been alleged that there were 5,000 fake accounts involved in election interference, our investigations have found no evidence to support these allegations," the company said in its letter, which notes that it is "still investigating."
> From September through the beginning of this week, the company has removed more than 66,000 fake accounts, 7 million fake likes and 10 million fake followers from the platform, TikTok says in its letter. The figures refer to posts and activity in English. Note that it does not specify whether they were electoral or in favor of a specific candidate.
> TikTok also says it has prevented 40 million likes and blocked more than 216,000 "spam accounts" before they went online.
Translated with DeepL from https://www.paginademedia.ro/stiri-media/tiktok-scrisoare-au...
It's a bit of "we've investigated ourselves and found nothing wrong".
There's been a huge uproar about this candidate which was polling below 5% reaching the 1st spot in the 1st round of the presidential election in Romania. The candidates need to report spending to a state organization overseeing elections and this guy reported that he spent nothing on his election campaign, which is a bit impossible as there have also been flyers with his name on them, so there's definitely something fishy going on.
There are also a lot of TikTok influencers that have come forward claiming to have received payments through a third party company to present the candidate in a positive light, and the issue is that these videos should have been tagged correctly as "electoral ads" according to Romanian law, which did not happen.
Purely from an observation perspective there has been a huge amount of spam activity on Romanian tiktok, with accounts spamming random videos with copy paste messages similar to "We're massively voting for Calin Georgescu" which led a lot of people to believing there was a massive bot campaign promoting this guy.
A criminal investigation has been requested by The Supreme Council of National Defence, which is the autonomous administrative authority in Romania invested by the Constitution with the task of organising and coordinating, by unanimous decisions, the activities related to the country's defence and national security.
chvid|1 year ago
Does Facebook et all promote / filter political contents different from TikTok?
latexr|1 year ago
> Georgescu based his campaign on TikTok
It’s not “singling out” if that’s the principal hub.
gls2ro|1 year ago
So if we say in almost every country that social media is bad and oh my people are using it wrong and we should change people to better handle social media, could it not be the case that maybe people are not wrong but social media is?
Why do we have to do such amount of change to accommodate the way our current social media works? Could it be that people are using it wrong or that social media is a negative influence and we should fix that.
Caius-Cosades|1 year ago
unknown|1 year ago
[deleted]
bgdnpn|1 year ago
the guy took advantage of tiktok algorithms and manipulated micro influencers into reaching his audience.. everything in 1-2 weeks.
tiktok is not to blame, but it wasn't real democracy.
ckdarby|1 year ago
Not being a US citizen or living in the US I can still understand how the upcoming president was elected - regardless of how one feels politically about if they should or should not have been.
Reddit has become an extreme echo chamber of a particular ideology to the point I find myself even with agreement on many points leaning the other way out of the exhaustion of the echo chamber. It feels like some amount embrace, get off on the echo chamber and then there are others (myself?) who get so sick of the constant echo chamber end up being just opposed to engaging even in things we normally would support.
It's not a perfect analogy, but it reminds me of kids who left to their own free will, will eat boat loads of candy to the point of being sick of candy and don't want it anymore even though they did/do enjoy candy they're simply maxed out on having it.
suraci|1 year ago
cokeandpepsi|1 year ago
[deleted]
infotainment|1 year ago
isoprophlex|1 year ago
The west doesn't have ubiquitous mind control devices deployed behind the great firewall. That this situation persists is a signal, to me, that our leaders aren't well equipped to deal with the realities of tech in 2024.
logicchains|1 year ago
jumping_frog|1 year ago
bugtodiffer|1 year ago
macronitis|1 year ago
[deleted]
sofixa|1 year ago
Anyone comparing the EU to the USSR cannon be taken seriously.
consumer451|1 year ago
There appears to be no such threat regarding TikTok.
This is a test of the EU. If TikTok is not banned quickly, it's not a good sign.
dauertewigkeit|1 year ago
lm28469|1 year ago
Democracy isn't just about voting every X years, it's also about being able to make well informed decisions, which is not the case when a foreign state agent employs bot farms to skew the story. I'm not saying the current system is perfect but clearly sprinkling it with foreign influence isn't going to make it better.
Social medias are the only thing that are still mostly unregulated black boxes, the government knows about the secret recipe of coca cola, or the secret recipe of KFC spices, &c. But the algos of TikTok, Instagram, &co aren't discussed anywhere
If RussCola sold bottles of soda with mercury in Germany would you say it would be totalitarian to ban them? If people want mercury in their cola who are we to judge?
ben_w|1 year ago
"Freedom from, not freedom to", to paraphrase a recent video I've seen by US migrants to France.
logicchains|1 year ago