EU Summons TikTok CEO After Romanian Election Shocker(romania-insider.com) |
EU Summons TikTok CEO After Romanian Election Shocker(romania-insider.com) |
(For the record I'm not a Tiktok user and I think it's a net negative to society)
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.
EDIT: And may be that is why there is huge distrust against media. It is quite disturbing that tea-party has became the new hippie movement.
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.
The way I see it, it's a parliamentary member from France from the Renew group in the EU parliament who is not happy with the results and thinks that the democracy needs to be saved because the results do not align with their expectations.
The decent thing to do would be to take this vote into account and accept that not everyone wants the same thing.
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.
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.
This would never have happened if it would have been a left wing politician obeying to the EU elites.
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...
(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.
So not really the people who vote.
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.
If TikTok (or any other platform) can have this kind of real impact then other political forces should consider using it as well.
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.
> 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.
Does Facebook et all promote / filter political contents different from TikTok?
> Georgescu based his campaign on TikTok
It’s not “singling out” if that’s the principal hub.
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 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 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.
This makes us vulnerable and we have to adapt. But hopefully not by banning these things, but by educating ourselves about the risks and gains of using addictive technology. At least that's the theory, I guess.
TikTok should be handled like an addictive substance. It and things just like it should be heavily regulated and watched over (e.g. by protecting and educating our youth).
This is all from my personal experience reporting egregious fake information (the kind you can check with the first google result) on social media sites and the content still exists.
But sure, keep an eye on it anyway. It's not magically good by virtue of which country owns it.
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.
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?
"Freedom from, not freedom to", to paraphrase a recent video I've seen by US migrants to France.
This is a problem for all developed nations, is it not?
> Turnout among young people in Romania is generally lower than the turnout of elder people.
Is that so, what about Chat Control then? is that law upholding freedom of expression? I guess I was not aware that automated reports to the EU cops of "suspicious" messages could be seen as maintaining freedom of expression in the EU.
Have we crossed the Rubicon here? War is peace, freedom is slavery and freedom of expression is 24/7 monitoring of your private conversations.
Teenagers are educated by these platforms instead, as people around have limited free time, while algorithms have all of it.
I agree that misinformation is spreading on social media, but let's not forget that the mainstream media has been caught lying deliberately or by omission more times than I can count.
Lets analyze a bit just on the top of our heads what kind of content goes viral on social media?
I so far almost (I write here almost just in case I missed one case) NEVER saw any rational, sensible discussion.
So no, not all parties or arguments get the same amount of exposure even if they use TiKTok. Only the simplest (as in ignoring the complexity of situations), conspirationist, false and sometimes stupid challenges ones go viral.
edit: Were you perhaps replying to someone else?
What is the substance?
I know some Romanians, and they ain't no papa laptes.
Which part of this guy's platform do you think people voted for? In a staunchly pro-EU and pro-NATO country that has centuries of bad blood with Russia, with a walking and talking unstable living proof of it (Moldova), a pro-Russian Eurosceptic sounds like a weird choice
That’s no longer an assumption, we’ve seen that happening for years now. For crying out loud, the CEO of a major platform regularly repeats every bullshit he reads on his own network, as long as it conforms to his world view.
https://www.techdirt.com/2024/10/25/lies-damned-lies-and-elo...
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/27/technology/elon-musk-x-po...
Yes, it does. It matters very much. The difference between a governmental body ordering you to do something and a single employee making one comment is tremendous. Maybe the latter can lead to the former, maybe, but they’re very far from being the same thing.
Your argument is that we should not pay attention because whoever the MP who made this comments is, she is not part of the EU commission and she is not a big wig as you put it. So we could assume that whatever she says does not carry much weight.
But the website reporting this news does not agree with you here, otherwise, why report it in the first place? To them, it matters and it is important because she is part of the Renew group. The Renew group is staunchly opposed to the far-right and pro NATO and pro Ukraine, that is to say the complete opposite to this Romanian candidate.
Furthermore, the MP in question is a close ally of the French president which means she could have the means to convince other MPs to join her and maybe get some support from Macron to jump start some kind of investigation into this matter.
Macron is/was the de facto leading figure in Europe (before becoming a lame duck in the last election) and his words still carry a lot of weight at the EU level.
If she was a random MP in a small fringe party on the sidelines of the EU parliament, I would have agreed with you but not in this case.
Maybe you are right and nothing will come out of it but to me this is not nothing and it should not be dismissed as easily as you think.
No, that was not my argument at all. I didn’t call anyone a bigwig. You’re not replying to the same person and are starting from an entirely false and incorrect premise, thus reaching a wrong conclusion.
I don’t think this should be dismissed, nor have I claimed it. My sole point is that the difference as it exists is meaningful. One is a certainty, the other is a possibility. Possibilities may be avoided, with different degrees of probability.