alt Hacker News"Hate brings views": Confessions of a London fake news TikToker
Comments
Seems to be an extension of something we are dealing with across multiple parts of many societies. Monetary pursuit has become a guiding principle for alot of people, and its been revealed that such thinking is leading to major societal consequences.
The current Technocratic idealization of efficiency by those in powerful positions is missing the second order consequences of financializing everything, and it appears to me that we are sacrificing societal necessities like trustworthiness and collective responsbility in favor of more efficient markets. If no corrective action is taken, we can expect increasing issues.
There's a huge problem with the media landscape. It's similar to the junk-food problem, or gambling, or addiction to drugs.
We've made a society where "number goes up" is the only measure of success. We don't care whether what makes the number go up is good, and that leads to exploiting the irrationality of consumers.
People know they aren't supposed to eat chips all day. They know they aren't likely to win their bet. They know it's not a good idea to watch the most exciting news.
But they can't help themselves, so they get exploited, and the exploiters are wealthy enough to write it into law that they aren't responsible.
Point this out, and inevitably someone says "who are you to decide what's good for other people", and yes, I used to think this way. Well, one thing is that I'm straight up taking it from the people who are being used. Who wants to be fat? Virtually everyone is eating more than they should. Are we supposed to think this is the revealed, rational preference of everyone? The other thing that changed is that I'm a parent. I have to make choices for my kids, and doing that makes me recognize that people their age aren't the only children. Paternalistic much? Sure. Eat your vegetables!
Who wants to be uninformed? Yet we are. People can just look up the crime statistics in London and see which way it has been going the past couple of decades.
I don't have a solution, I'm afraid, just a diagnosis. We're living in a society that is being abused under the pretense of personal freedom.
Someone better read than me has probably written an essay or two about this, please link. I don't know the best keywords for such a search.
I know a lot of people who watch this kind of garbage and find it very convincing. The minute you add a video component, it tricks people into thinking they are seeing something raw and firsthand.
We're all so worried about the effects of AI generated video (with good reason), but the truth is that DIP (Deceptive imagery persuasion) is unbelievably easy and cheap to do anywhere. You can take an innocuous video of a tank from anywhere, and then add a fake caption that says "this is a Venezuela drug cartel" and an average person has almost no defense mechanisms against it.
It's also not something platforms could even police. If anything, nation state actors are already taking this to their advantage.
As a sidenote, Jim Waterson is doing amazing work at London Centric, single-handedly doing the kind of investigative journalism week after week via Substack funding that traditional media has abandoned. I highly recommend subscribing if you are in the London area.
> He’d previously run a TikTok account that had amassed 24,000 followers. One night, he was astonished to find, he received his first payout from TikTok’s creator scheme.
> His head was turned by the substantial sum of money: “I told my wife, wow, it’s £1,000.”
I’m not familiar with TikTok’s payout rate. Is it really so high that an account with 24K followers can start getting checks that large?
there is a also a very strong anti india sentiment on twitter / x just search for #india or look at the comments of posts made by people like vivek ramaswamy , nikki haley, and any other politician and you ll see it. I wonder if this is some kinda state sponsored campaign for objectives that are not clear to me
I feel like the huge and obvious problems with social media hide a small and subtle, but insidious problem: How do I show that I care about you?
I feel like there is a range that might be described:
I don't care very much about you one way or another. (Small/no signal on social media, very unlikely to be boosted)
I care enough to fight for you. (Big Signal on social media, likely to be boosted)
I care enough to calmly discuss the problem. (Small signal on social media, unlikely to be boosted, likely to be trolled, unsatisfying in the face of active fighting words)
"How do I show that I care about you?" might also be called "virtue signaling". Unfortunately "virtue signaling" has taken on such a negative meaning that it is no longer useful for communication.
It's fascinating how he has fully outsourced his conscience to the TikTok content guidelines. With all of the discussion about what restrictions should exist on platforms it never ever occurred to me that people would start to view them as moral authorities.
TikTok should be sowed with salt like Carthage back then...along with these hate-influencers. We need new social media now.
> “My first video got one million [views],” he says.
I hear this a LOT. It seems Tik Tok sets itself up to let a new person's first video go completely viral, not sure what the "trick" is, but I read it often enough it makes me believe that if your first videos good enough you really can hit over a million. Of course who knows if that million is inflated or what.
As for the rest of the article, this person seems to just not care about the consequences of their actions, its pretty disgusting.
I always remember this excellent sci-fi story about exactly such things: https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/30/sort-by-controversial/
Strong emotions drive engagement. There are rather few of them; simple joy / laughter (think cat videos) is one that's relatively easy to evoke, but hate is equally easy to evoke, and it's much stronger.
As long as there is a financial benefit to lying, there will always be people willing to do so.
I personally believe that many of these "influencers" do not believe any of the stuff they spew into the public space.
“This article is based on the opinion of one unnamed individual, and it is not representative of the positive and creative experience that millions enjoy every day on TikTok.”
I always love the response from TikTok: “It’s only ever one person, guys! It’s never our cackhanded (lack of) moderation!”
In one thread I am defending anonymity online from government mandated ID laws.
Then I think to the persistent, malevolent, destructive lies that people spread with complete impunity and with faked video and photo evidence. This is not what the first amendment was designed to protect.
Wary of making government the arbiter of truth, I don't know what society should do to combat this evil. In a fantasy world where I were king, the person who ran this tiktok would be in jail.
We are living thru the 'doctors prescribing cigarettes' era of lucrative fear-mongering.
I agree with this entire article, except that it's not just a right-wing phenomenon. Both sides distort the truth for financial gain and from a quantitative POV it's not a false equivalence.
The epitaph for civil society.
The devil's bargain for those on this site: a pleasant work environment and paycheck deriing from engagementmaxxing and the resultant surveillance this provides.
This is not sustainable.
It's a genuinely surprising feeling to live in a place, but see an absolute torrent of malevolent misinformation about it.
The "London has fallen" trope that has been prevalent on social media recently stank of some kind of deliberate manipulation. But increasingly—in part due to stories like this—I wonder if it is actually just all "for the views".
"While the social media revolution has come with extraordinary benefits..." curious what Khan would say those benefits are.
It's certainly something a lot of people find entertaining but I would not say there have been "extraordinary benefits" to society or individuals from the average UK adult spending 1h 37m a day[1] of their lives on social media platforms.
"While smoking cigarettes has come with extraordinary benefits, we've seen a surge in people misusing these products and getting sick due to a lack of guardrails, tobacco companies need to do much more to make their product healthy and discourage bad faith actors from developing cancer..."/s
Man what a PoS this guy was.
he started as a lame re-poster
>His head was turned by the substantial sum of money: “I told my wife, wow, it’s £1,000.” >Then, to his annoyance, TikTok immediately deleted his account because he was just stealing other people’s videos and reposting them.
and dove straight into fabricating hate, and worst of all after directly confronted seems to literally have no concept of what he was doing or that it was in any way wrong or distasteful.
>The man appears confused by the fuss his actions have caused. He gives the impression that he considered TikTok’s algorithm and the site’s content regulation policies to be the ultimate arbiter of whether a video crossed a line.
>It wasn’t racist,” the man says of his account. He argues that if the videos had really been racist, TikTok’s algorithm would have downgraded the content.
Seems to lack any internal moral compass, basically if the website lets him slander or lie it must be ok because he has no capacity to assess that value for himself.
Flippin scary people like that are out there.