People clearly realize that these algorithms are suppressing dissidents and freedom of speech. Why do they continue to subject themselves to these hacky workarounds and self-censorship?
this post was submitted on 21 Aug 2025
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because there are no viable alternatives for large outreach.
Sounds like a job for the Fediverse...
the fediverse is microscopic and the people you want to get involved politically probably stay away from it.
The reality is that apps like TikTok, Twitter, Instagram, etc.. have marketing teams and entire institutions practically advocating for their use across the planet. In some parts of Asia and South America, you literally cannot get by without WhatsApp in more urbanized areas, for example.
This is the result of US imperialism. They have just enough data centers and server capacity to run hundreds of Instagrams if they wanted to, unlike the Global South (excl. China).
Yes! Loops exists, which is a federated tiktok app. Doesn't have the same content or algo, but it has the infrastructure we all want.
only influencers and advertisers need the large outreach; a huge majority of people just passively use it.
If you want your movement or important information to reach a bunch of people, you need to go to a platform that has a bunch of people.
And compromise on purity ?
No way José
All my homies
are on I R C
that's still an influencer thing
passive users don't care about suppression and censorship
as well as having no good reason for being on those platforms.
They should just train a bunch of pigeons to drop leaflets around town
The headline writer did not read the story. Protests are being called music festivals, not raids.
Yeah and if you go on tiktok and search la music festivals or music festivals, it just shows you people saying protest coverage is now labelled this, they're still censoring the actual footage of the protests. And they're censoring different things for different countries.
US libs: "PEOPLE IN COMMUNIST CHINA ARE FORCED TO USE SLANG WHEN TALKING ABOUT CHINESE ATROCITIES TO GET PAST CENSORSHIP!!"
Also US libs: "Unalive" "Music Festival" Bleeping out Palestine "This is fine and way better than communist China"
Also interesting how Tiktok only started doing this after they were forcibly sold off from the Chinese parent company and was forced to conform to "Western values" eh?
Unalive started being widely used 2020-2021.
Idiots will do anything just so they dont have to learn how Email works.
do you really expect to be CC'd along with hundreds or thousands of others about ICE raids, never mind about literally any event involving injustice? And how about footage of said event? Where's that going to be stored? As an attachment? Google Drive link?
When censorship of one of its worst kind is unfolding in front of you, where genocide is referred to as "water slide", you instead blame the people for self-censoring? Get real.