The bill had no traction, "until Oct. 7. The attack that day in Israel by Hamas and the ensuing conflict in Gaza became a turning point in the push against TikTok, Helberg said. People who historically hadn’t taken a position on TikTok became concerned with how Israel was portrayed in the videos and what they saw as an increase in antisemitic content posted to the app."
Here's Mitt Romney explaining that "the number of mentions of Palestinians" was the reason why "there was such overwhelming support for us to shut down (potentially) TikTok": https://x.com/wideofthepost/status/1787104142982283587
> Additionally, if you're defending TikTok because it allowed them to amplify support for the Palestinian cause, it's interesting that TikTok themselves claim that you are wrong, as they said to the US Supreme court that "allegations that TikTok has amplified support for either side of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are unfounded". Are they lying here? If so, why should we trust them with control over mass social media? If they're not lying, you are wrong.
The sentence that you quoted from that Wikipedia page came at the end of this paragraph:
Several officials subsequently cited alleged pro-Palestinian bias on the app. While advocating for a ban, Representative Mike Gallagher alleged "rampant pro-Hamas propaganda on the app". Senators Mitt Romney, Josh Hawley, Representative Mike Lawler, and other Republicans have also alleged that TikTok had a pro-Palestine bias, with Lawler even alleging that TikTok was being manipulated during pro-Palestinian protests at colleges. In a filing to the Supreme Court, TikTok's attorneys said, "Allegations that TikTok has amplified support for either side of the Israeli- Palestinian conflict are unfounded."
There's no contradiction if TikTok was telling the truth about its neutrality: not amplifying support for Israel was reason enough to get banned by the United States government, and immediately after Trump's first reprieve a year ago TikTok began flagging and removing "Free Palestine" posts as hate speech (https://www.msn.com/en-us/travel/news/tiktok-labels-free-pal...).
The conspiracy here is the idea that the only reason someone might want TikTok in the US to be under US control is to suppress information about Gaza. The best reason is to have the media that people in the US consume not be controlled by geopolitical rivals through opaque algorithms!
I think there’s a difference between leaving a CP site up for two weeks so you can track the users, versus actively posting CP on legal websites for the purpose of blackmailing third parties into blocking them (“The Bardfinn Method”).
"The Justice Department said in court filings that agents did not post any child pornography to the site themselves"
"The FBI kept Playpen online for 13 days"
"There was no other way we could identify as many players"
I think the normal person would think this is worth while to catch more pedophiles, hence why this would work politically. However, you can read by the tone of the article that even this drew a lot of rage.
Imagine the FBI agents collecting CSAM, uploading it to websites for the purpose of... preventing copyright infringement
In the pilot episode of Banshee (2013), a character has transparent monitors (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8PiIhMs4k88) which never showed up again. They seemed higher tech than anything else in the series and I was never able to find information on them.
When I first read Asimov's Foundation, I thought the decline and loss of knowledge in the Galactic Empire within a few generations was unrealistically quick. It's been eye-opening to witness new parents who not only don't know that they're supposed to teach their children to read, but wouldn't know how to do so.
Late GenXer here. I went from a place with pretty good schools to one with with pretty bad schools and a strong religious/honor culture background. I went from a humans can accomplish anything to one of we are damned at a pretty young age. It seems so many people are fact resistant from a young age.
The people who need to find out aren't curious and aren't looking for proof that counters what they're inclined to believe. They won't check what locals are saying and the videos of nothing-much-happening they're posting. They watch the same handful of shocking crime videos on Facebook and are sure the cities are overrun with rampant lawlessness (and apparently the residents are just persistently too stupid, over decades, to do anything about it, voting-wise, and need the Federal Government to step in despite their protestations and save them? It's a puzzling world view if you think about it for even a second), watch Fox News showing b-roll of fire and violence from one city block on one night for weeks on end (or from another city and year entirely) and claiming that's the whole city all the time, see news sites doing the same (one infamously put a photo of early '90s LA riots at the top of one of these articles recently, JFC)
You can trace right-wing propaganda in the US painting cities as worse and more violent (and, specifically, overrun over by criminally-inclined immigrants who refuse to assimilate...) back to at least the early 20th century. The rhetoric from back then is uncannily familiar, as are the proposed solutions. But of course nobody who needs to realize that the "good old days of the good old days" were full of the exact same complaints (and we're all still here, everything turned out OK) will be curious & interested enough to find that out.
You are technically correct! Alphabets (ABC) are for phonemes, syllabaries are for syllables (hiragana, Cherokee), logograms are for words (chinese characters). Of course, some writing systems are very much hybrids (like Chinese, or hieroglyphics, or even the humble ampersand).
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