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Comment by DebtDeflation | Hacker News Reader

You're missing the point. It's not about what content users in a country are uploading to the platform or wanting to consume on the platform, it's which content the algorithm promotes/mutes in a given country based on the wishes of the Chinese government.

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If you go to https://www.douyin.com/discover it looks like the same mindless entertainment we see but Chinese people. Maybe they're trying to promote more virtuous content but I'm not seeing it on Chinese TikTok's front page. I scrolled through a few pages and I didn't see anything that would be similar to helping the elderly or job skills. It's certainly not "all" virtuous content like originally claimed.

Are you viewing this from China? The obvious answer seems to be they're just running different filters and scoring based on the location of the device.

No. Are you? Can you screenshot it for me?

No. I don't know whether or not the difference in content is real. All I'm saying that if it were, it would obviously be done by geolocation, and in that case you would still see west-targeted content when visiting Douyin or TikTok; this invalidates the counterpoint I responded to.

Your "obvious" claim seems more like a strong assumption, that you know the not only the behavior but the mechanism of douyin based on... Obviousness?

I agree GP should have been a lot more humble in their claim and is not acknowledging the level to which they are speculating, but aside from the untactful approach, location does seem an important point especially for a company as data hungry and adept at mining/using that data as bytedance.

Except that the Douyin operates only in China, you even need a Chinese phone number to register in the page. The Douyin do not aim for consumers outside China. Therefore, why would a website care to create a customized "discover" page for different countries when it have users only from a single country?

Frankly, nowadays it seems like we're just reviving McCarthyism when we talk about China.

This would be an interesting test, although I don't think even a VPN exit node in China is good enough unless your device also feeds bogus GPS coords that show you are in China. I used to do with the Xposed all the time (because apps have no business knowing where I am) but now that Android is so hostile toward root and power users, I don't know how doable it is anymore (though I'd love to hear if someone does).

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