[HN Gopher] Here comes the first TikTok war
___________________________________________________________________
Here comes the first TikTok war
Author : CrankyBear
Score : 82 points
Date : 2022-02-24 21:45 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (mikeelgan.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (mikeelgan.substack.com)
| ISL wrote:
| I'm not sure that I'd call it a TikTok war, but rather the first
| major-power smartphone war.
|
| The world will bear witness to the consequences of this conflict
| in ways it never has before. It is no longer up to the editors of
| major news outlets to decide what is shared [1].
|
| [1]
| https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/08/th...
| rapind wrote:
| Brace yourself for Putin "flooding the zone with shit". Bannon
| didn't invent it.
| psyc wrote:
| Instead it's up to the social media companies, who we know are
| invested in controlling content on their platforms. And [what I
| perceive as] a majority of HN users have been arguing all along
| that it's wholly their prerogative to censor whatever they
| choose to. What kind of "change" is that? These behemoths are
| the new establishment, are they not?
|
| I checked the #ukraine tag on TikTok and found zero raw on the
| ground videos of conflict. Looks totally sanitized to me. Maybe
| I didn't look hard enough. Maybe it's merely hard to find.
| Maybe it isn't allowed.
| cwkoss wrote:
| It was incredibly surreal last night to be scrolling through
| `#ukraine` videos of bombings that occurred within the past
| couple hours, with many of them accompanied by cutesy pop music.
|
| Intermixed with various teenage influencers impotently insulting
| Putin.
| londons_explore wrote:
| Why didn't this happen in fairly recent wars in Sudan, Syria,
| Libya, Egypt, etc?
|
| It seems while those populations have smartphones and the
| internet, they failed to capture the attention of western media
| and western populations with their plight.
| jedberg wrote:
| The openness of the raw video is great, but comes at a cost as
| well. For one, it will be hard to authenticate which videos are
| real and which are fake.
|
| While the curation of the news allowed the US to cherry pick only
| the "good stuff", it also let professional journalists vet the
| sources, and while they sometimes got it wrong, they were right
| far more often than a layperson.
| renewiltord wrote:
| > _...while they sometimes got it wrong, they were right far
| more often than a layperson._
|
| You're right about the layperson, but that's a low bar, the p50
| of the population.
|
| What measures did you take to avoid Gell-Mann Amnesia on this
| point? This seems to be one of those things that everyone takes
| to be true, but which I have frequently found to be false on
| manual inspection. Here are examples where I tested this by
| chasing to the primary source in areas not of my expertise:
|
| - California Prop 22 reporting. Universally wrong about the
| significance of the 7/8ths rule. Actually, I found it very hard
| to find a mainstream reporter who got this correct considering
| the text of the bill.
|
| - Indian Railways budget reporting. This was Bloomberg, and it
| was re-reported elsewhere. The numbers were wrong. This
| informed decisions I made in the next case.
|
| - SuperMicro spychips. Bloomberg again, but rebroadcast by
| other media outlets. This was one of my directional trades. I
| bought SMCI calls off the fact that Bloomberg was poorly
| informed and that reporters were mostly low-grade GPT-3 copy-
| machines off each other.
|
| In my experience, if you ask a random SF Bay startup software
| engineer or medical doctor to spend 30 mins on research they
| will outperform a professional journalist over the same period
| of time. This makes sense: it isn't that journalists are better
| at news; it's that they are the ones who aren't good at
| anything specific and are therefore doing news.
|
| So, yes, better than the layperson, but not better than the
| average techie I know. And this yields a data pipeline problem:
| if you have a lossy compressor in your pipeline, the loss cost
| can overwhelm the compression advantage. I think for anyone
| reasonably intelligent, news has passed that point.
| nonameiguess wrote:
| There are two pieces to this.
|
| First, past wars involved journalists directly embedded into
| forward units. If they said 7 rockets were fired into City X
| because they were present and witnessed it, then what they
| were reporting was correct. It doesn't require expertise in
| anything to correctly report that. The vetting was on the
| part of the news organizations themselves, not hiring war
| correspondents who were blatantly making things up. Now that
| everyone has access to publish their claims to directly
| witness something, there is no longer any sort of filter on
| whether they're even actually there.
|
| So if you're watching video taken by a professional reporter
| sent to a theater of combat by a reputable news organization,
| you can at least be reasonably sure they're not fabricating
| the video. If your source of videos is TikTok, you no longer
| have much in the way of assurance that what you're seeing is
| even real video footage.
|
| The second part is what you're talking about, whether the
| "expert" opinions of pundits writing in professional news
| outlets are any better at interpreting events than a
| layperson. This is much more of an open question.
| jedberg wrote:
| You seem to be suffering from the belief that techies are
| smarter than everyone else, which is not only offensive but
| just wrong. While techies spent four years in college
| learning math and CS theory, journalists spent four years
| learning how to suss truth from fiction. That is in fact
| their main skill -- finding truth amongst unreliable sources.
|
| > California Prop 22 reporting. Universally wrong about the
| significance of the 7/8ths rule. Actually, I found it very
| hard to find a mainstream reporter who got this correct
| considering the text of the bill.
|
| I am however quite curious about this one. I followed this
| closely and did not see the bias you claim. What was it that
| all the journalists got wrong about the 7/8s rule?
| ethbr0 wrote:
| Has anyone worked on a standard for authentication /
| attestation of video?
|
| I was mulling it in the context of deepfakes, and there's
| enough money in it that someone has to be working on the
| problem.
|
| E.g. Something that signs metadata (time, geolocation) at time
| of capture in a verifiable manner
| ISL wrote:
| Yes, but to my knowledge nobody has found a trusted solution.
|
| My guess is the best we can do is keychains of trust and the
| reputation that comes with them. Trustless authentication
| seems very difficult indeed.
| r1b wrote:
| Yes, see https://contentauthenticity.org/
| terr-dav wrote:
| An expert's criticisms:
|
| https://www.hackerfactor.com/blog/index.php?/archives/919-C
| l... https://www.hackerfactor.com/blog/index.php?/archives/
| 920-An...
| XorNot wrote:
| It occurs to me this is the sort of problem the satellite
| internet constellations could help solve.
|
| The issue of authenticity is getting some third party to
| attest that video happened at a particular date and time - at
| least part of that solution could be getting the various low
| orbit constellations to provide a simple timestamping service
| for hashes. Since the orbits are known, and position can be
| triangulated, any 3 satellites signatures would at least
| prove you _transmitted_ a particular hash for attestation at
| a given date and time.
|
| This obviously doesn't help with someone traveling there and
| sending junk, or using local repeaters to send junk, but it
| ups the difficulty level a notch.
| Grimburger wrote:
| > at a given date and time
|
| *after a given date and time
|
| There's nothing stopping people forging the data later with
| already broadcast cryptographic signatures
| iKlsR wrote:
| Yh there was an ARMA 3 gameplay video making the rounds on
| twitter this morning that hoodwinked a lot of people.
|
| https://twitter.com/schoolboyefr/status/1496827604422348807
| sterlind wrote:
| Jesus those graphics are realistic. the long horizon, the way
| explosions light up scenery like it's saturating the sensor
| of a low-budget camera.. I really couldn't tell this is fake.
| Sebb767 wrote:
| Same here. The house in the beginning looks a bit strange,
| but nothing that couldn't be caused by a potato camera. I'd
| fallen for this, too (though the plane does not look like a
| Russian one).
| AS37 wrote:
| > though the plane does not look like a Russian one
|
| A-10 "Warthog", only flown by the USA.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairchild_Republic_A-10_Thu
| nde...
| chasd00 wrote:
| well, for one, i dont think the russian airforce fly A10
| Thunderbolts. Secondly, i dont think Ukraine has any Phalanx
| CWIS systems. surely, anyone who was hoodwinked wasn't for
| very long.
| iKlsR wrote:
| I'm assuming you're being sarcastic, if not you're VERY
| generous with your assumption that the average twitter user
| can recognize the silhouette of an aircraft and identify
| weapon systems by sound.
| mhitza wrote:
| Something looks sketchy in the video but couldn't point to it
| exactly. Maybe the light effects when explosions happen,
| maybe the unnatural velocity of projectiles that enter from
| the left side of the screen.
|
| But out of context, it could have fooled me too.
| Grimburger wrote:
| > unnatural velocity of projectiles
|
| Unless it's been modded you'll find the Arma games have an
| absurd level of accuracy in their physics, they have the
| correct speed of bullets down to decimal points and other
| real world interactions like gravity and air resistance.
|
| The entire engine is built around simulating the real world
| as far as technically feasible and the other half of the
| game studio uses it to sell war simulations to militaries
| around the world.
| ianlevesque wrote:
| Quite concerning to me is that this was seemingly coordinated
| between Putin and Xi, and TikTok is controlled by China. So Putin
| could very easily control what gets prioritized and goes viral or
| what quietly disappears from the narrative due to lack of reach,
| with just a call to his buddy.
| keewee7 wrote:
| There is no way that hundreds of Russian soldiers posted
| TikToks on the same morning revealing their locations and
| movements.
|
| This is coordinated propaganda. It's meant to both misdirect
| from actual large-scale Russian movements and to lower
| Ukrainian morale: "Look how easy and fun it is for us to invade
| you".
| slg wrote:
| The use of "TikTok" in that phrase is just a synecdoche for
| "social media that allows people to easily share video they
| filmed on their phones". If you can't see this video on TikTok,
| you can still see it on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Reddit...
| mrtksn wrote:
| It's not true that we have raw footage stream of the war, What we
| have is a curated stream that is optimised for engagement(until
| the content is found to be unhelpful with the official agenda,
| then it is censored).
|
| Actually, most of the raw footage comes from instant
| messaging(WhatsApp or Telegram, mostly), shared in groups with an
| agenda. Then it is shared on TikTok, Twitter etc. to a wider
| audience where it is curated and censored by algorithm that
| optimise for something(engagement, impression, revenue, agenda
| and so on).
|
| Which means, instead of getting our news from journalists on the
| ground who know the context(at least the good ones) we get a
| snapshot of the event curated by people the way the analytics
| told them to.
| nathanaldensr wrote:
| I agree. It's like suddenly everyone's forgetting the power
| these media giants have to control their platforms. This isn't
| the YouTube of the early 2000s, everyone. Always treat
| unsourced and unverified information with skepticism,
| especially if the truthfulness of the content doesn't
| immediately affect you. Always ask yourself "why would they not
| censor this video but censor these others?"
| Invictus0 wrote:
| The first rule of decentralization is that it will eventually
| become centralized. We're already seeing version 0 of this with
| this morning's poorly implemented twitter livemap. I have no
| doubt that there are already defense contractors and private
| companies working to compile and package OSINT more reliably,
| completely, searchably, etc.
| [deleted]
| agumonkey wrote:
| It's quite surreal. Watching people being invaded. Jets, choppers
| taken down. Missiles hitting housing. And yet being powerless ..
| super weird.
|
| Even with the potential for fake news, it seems this might change
| the war dynamics. At the same time Ukrainians are fighting for
| their lives you can see Russian people protesting against this
| invasion. The real time loop could break military reality
| distortion field.. if you're a Russian soldier and you see people
| in your city walking the streets against what you've been ordered
| to do.. it might cause deep conflict in your head.
| not2b wrote:
| A lot of what is being shared is fake. Careful what you believe.
| Gizmodo has some examples:
|
| https://gizmodo.com/10-photos-and-videos-from-russias-invasi...
| paxys wrote:
| The problem with "open source intelligence" is that there is too
| much of it from every side. Fact checkers are already working
| overtime debunking all the Tweets showing footage from previous
| wars or even video games (https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/fac
| tcheck/2022/02/21/fac...).
|
| The author is also majorly discounting the role of intelligence
| services in debunking Putin's false flag operations. Weeks worth
| of updates on Russia's exact plans and motivations haven't come
| from TikTok but rather the US government and its allies. There is
| no substitute for spies and satellites.
| gzer0 wrote:
| _" The Russian invasion of Ukraine will be the first war to fully
| play out on social media. There will be no possibility of
| controlling the information."_
|
| I disagree with this statement. The Chinese government has taken
| a controlling stake in Bytedance [1], which is the subsidiary
| that owns TikTok. It could perhaps, then be possible, that China
| would "alter" the algorithm of TikTok users worldwide to sway
| public opinion? Push certain videos that fit a given narrative,
| and hide others that don't?
|
| Tiktok collects and shares your data more than any other social
| media app, and it is unclear where it goes [2]. This could become
| a dangerous tool.
|
| [1]
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/08/17/chinese...
|
| [2] https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/08/tiktok-shares-your-data-
| more...
| dustymcp wrote:
| This war is absolutely televised, there was some disgusting
| scenes on r/ukraine, i was pretty amazed about following it all
| in real time..
| webmobdev wrote:
| And on the other side we have US BigTech, who will act under
| the orders of the US. Apart from that, the social media
| propagandist of the intelligence division of every country will
| also be involved to sway opinions.
| slg wrote:
| People here are focusing too much on the "TikTok" in the title.
| This is not about Tiktok. This is about everyone having a
| device in their pocket in which they can immediately record
| video and post it to social media. The platform is irrelevant.
| If TikTok manipulates content that video can go to Twitter,
| Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, Reddit...
| nomel wrote:
| > The platform is irrelevant.
|
| I understand your point, but I think the platform is
| relevant. There are four platforms that have a considerable
| number of users (TikTok, Youtube, Twitter,
| Facebook/Instagram), and they _all_ have provenly effective
| censorship, especially optimized over the past couple of
| years. If it 's one of those four, it does matter.
|
| I would also claim that the platform is only irrelevant if
| removing that platform results in a negligible reduction in
| views. Removing TikTok removes 1/4 of the services, and
| probably the vast majority of younger eyes.
| webmobdev wrote:
| The point is that the Platform matters as it allows certain
| countries to control the narration. Do you think US BigTechs
| don't take orders from the US government or act for US
| interests? China also has such platforms. The internet is now
| being cartelized into corporate platforms, and this is only
| going to increase and become worse (from a consumers point of
| view).
| joefife wrote:
| Only if they're aware that the information was manipulated.
| harry8 wrote:
| Imgur has large amounts of curated propaganda on its front page
| nowadays despite claiming to be social & voted etc. No
| republican is mentioned except to condemn them or agree with
| Democrat orthodoxy. Nothing criticising any mainstream democrat
| appears ever on the front page. You won't see something funny
| by a Sanders supporter criticising Hilary in any circumstances,
| for example. As long as there is no criticism of a Democrat
| there's a reasonable amount of very left wing supporting posts.
| eg "People deserve healthcare, rich don't pay tax, middle
| america has been robbed etc." The only exceptions are for the
| pariahs Sinema & Manchin - who opposed the mainstream. Plenty
| of vitriol there, which even if you think it's entirely
| justified underscores how there is none, zero, elsewhere.
|
| Imgur used to show currently viral images and was all about
| entertainment and filled a fairly similar niche to Tik Tok.
| Nowadays it has gone down the outrage engagement path(?)
| Politics seems like most of the content and it's so curated
| that it's feels like Pravda levels of blatant propaganda - even
| reading takes that seem to agree with what you were already
| thinking gives you pause that you must have missed something.
| I'm predicting there will be zero "anti-war" posts advocating
| that the US stay out of the Russia-Ukraine disaster. None. Such
| a position, right or wrong, is likely to be held by a
| signficant fraction of Imgur users and indeed Democrats.
|
| Imgur is so extreme as to be obvious especially in the light of
| how dramatically it changed, which is instructive for us as an
| example. How would we know if facebook and twitter were playing
| with their algorithms with just a little more subtlety than
| that? (And maybe in an utterly different, unpredictable and
| unexpected direction?)
| godelski wrote:
| While I think you're right that China has the power to shift
| the information dominance through TikTok I don't think it
| changes the author's main thesis about OSINT. There are other
| platforms. If information starts getting censored then people
| will jump to other platforms to share it.
|
| There is definitely a dangerous tool here too because there
| already has been a lot of fake images and videos appearing.
| It's unclear who is posting these but it certainty generates a
| lot of noise for OSINT. While the former situations had low
| noise but high bias in the current situation we may just have
| so much noise that it is impossible to figure out what is real
| or not. Though I think it still changes things since military
| analysts have better tools and know corroborating information
| to sort through this noise more easily. But fake news travels
| faster than truth.
| nomel wrote:
| > If information starts getting censored then people will
| jump to other platforms to share it.
|
| I imagine these hypothetical "other platforms" (could you
| name one?) will be deemed as "that bad place that platforms
| <insert scary thing here>", omitted from search engine
| results/feeds, advertisers blasted on twitter/pull out, and
| payment systems cancelled, with direct sharing being the only
| real way to propagate the videos. We've _clearly_ seen
| effective censorship like this over the last few years, with
| other unfavorable topics.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Sure, but real time info about military conflicts has been
| shared on the internet since the 1991 Gulf War, and perhaps
| earlier. TikTok is just the latest in a long series of
| platforms where such info has been shared, and as you say
| there's nothing really special about it, it's just the most
| popular right now.
| twoxproblematic wrote:
| qiskit wrote:
| > Unlike in the Iraq War, where the only cameras were controlled
| by a handful of journalists and the US military
|
| It was an interesting read, but the guy is about 10 years too
| late. Social media today is most definitely controlled by a few
| news companies and the state ( military/admin/etc ). Especially
| when it comes to important news events.
|
| > The Pentagon learned a lesson from that conflict, which was:
| Control the information and imagery at all costs. And they
| applied that lesson in the Iraq War.
|
| As if the pentagon didn't know before the vietnam war to control
| the information and imagery at all costs. Of course they did.
| They controlled all the information. It was the state that
| decided to end the war. Not journalists. Not the people.
|
| > And with social media, artificial intelligence and Internet-
| enabled crowd-sourcing, the intelligence will belong to the
| global public. And that changes everything.
|
| The state curated, censored and controlled social media changes
| everything? Don't think so.
| armchairhacker wrote:
| social media is controlled by a few companies but not
| completely. If someone uploads X and i search for X i'm not
| 100% guaranteed but very likely to find what they uploaded.
| Especially if X is common and popular.
|
| See: alt-right media being widespread on Twitter, Quora,
| Reddit, Google, and sometimes even YouTube. Not only is that
| stuff not censored, it's actively being shown to people who are
| not alt-right and aren't looking for alt-right content
| dirtyid wrote:
| Here comes the first TikTok war west care about.
|
| There's tons of TikTok content about Syrian or Yemeni war over
| the years, or the more recent Nagorno-Karabakh, with associated
| OSINT analysis and communities. It just does not get much
| attention. Queue geopolitical conflict that affects the west and
| much of western OSINT analysts have pivoted from their respective
| areas to Ukraine, something not seen other conflicts. I get it,
| it's a sexier conflict where a competent military power is going
| balls out. Of course there's also issues of race as seen in EU
| policy towards UKR refugees.
| Azsy wrote:
| The point is somewhat undermined by,
|
| A: using artificial intelligence when statistics would have been
| enough ( or a failure to explain what part made it AI )
|
| B: Using Chinese tiktok as the title.
|
| On a side note, Telegram is the nexus of raw information. For
| every video going viral on other sites, the other 99 stay on
| telegram and aren't very interesting for an outsider. Its going
| to be Russia's downfall if it doesn't have a way to control it.
| tomatotomato37 wrote:
| While the ability of the internet to debunk falseflag operations
| is great, I feel like this is overstating it's usefulness for
| tracking the chaos of actual war. Most of the civilian videos
| I've seen so far seem to be more visually exciting shots of
| distant explosions in urban areas over any attempt to focus on
| what is shooting or is getting shot at.
|
| Contrary to public belief, knowing an artillery shell landed
| somewhere near a preschool/hospital/whatever ranks pretty low in
| actual tactical significance.
| armchairhacker wrote:
| what's going to happen when people upload videos of violent
| deaths and war crimes committed in real time? If not graphic
| stuff, videos of missiles and invading forces?
|
| Will TikTok / Facebook / Twitter censor these videos? Probably,
| but will they succeed?
|
| Will people watch the videos? Will they leak into mainstream
| sites?
|
| Right now despite the internet being notorious for violent and
| serious content, i think most mainstream sites are good at hiding
| it and most people definitely aren't looking for it. But this is
| the first major conflict outside of the middle east / Africa (aka
| the first major conflict people are really paying attention to)
| where we have widespread social media and 4K video. If anything,
| i only hope that it will make the war more real and serious to
| people, so it will prevent further atrocities in this war and
| avoid wars in the future.
| jim-jim-jim wrote:
| The Syria war (and its spillover into Iraq) was incredibly well
| documented. Then the major platforms took a stance against
| "extremism" and "disinformation" and removed heaps of invaluable
| footage.
| z58 wrote:
| > The world was divided over who was telling the truth, and there
| was no way to tell (until "Baghdad Bob" fled).
|
| What? Nobody believed a word this man said.
| LandR wrote:
| Yeah, the guy was a running joke / meme.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| His press briefings were widely played on international media,
| so someone believed. Because there's always someone gullible
| out there.
| dtech wrote:
| It was mostly because everyone thought it was hilarious
| bena wrote:
| Yeah. That war was essentially broadcast on cable.
|
| And yeah, sure, access to the U.S. military came with caveats,
| but it was possible to be a non-affiliated reporter.
|
| But it's also not like the stories couldn't be cross-checked
| with, you know, reality. You could relatively trust the
| information coming from U.S. sources, because they coincided
| with reality. Iraq was doing their best to prevent information
| coming in and going out.
|
| That's why Baghdad Bob became a meme. Because his accounts were
| hilariously at odds with reality. He'd go on TV and claim the
| American forces were in full retreat while being frog marched
| out the studio by those forces.
|
| And it's also not like this is going to be the first conflict
| in the social media age.
| keewee7 wrote:
| Russian military videos on TikTok are coordinated propaganda and
| misinformation.
|
| There is no way that hundreds of Russian soldiers posted TikToks
| on the same morning revealing their locations and movements.
|
| The intention of this is to both misdirect from actual large-
| scale Russian movements and to lower Ukrainian morale: "Look how
| easy and fun it is for us to invade you".
| celticninja wrote:
| There is also a possibility that they did exactly this because
| they are green, conscripted troops, who have grown up in social
| media age. They don't assume they will be tracked as individual
| soldiers, but in aggregate they leak information die to
| unprofessionalism. They have been doing this since 2014 so why
| do we expect them to be fully professional overnight?
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