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I guess you're someone familiar with programming and algorithms begin this is HN, so you must be able to understand that it would be trivial for TikTok to serve different kinds of content to people based on their geographical location and other attributes?

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They do. Like I know for a fact that I get different content in different cities. But it's algorithmic. I don't think anyone at TikTok is saying let's manipulate specific locations. They don't need to and it would be too risky and not worth the tech debt tbh. Besides, you can do it as a third party with bots.

So like whatever replaces it will get manipulated just the same. Facebook has had this problem for over a decade now and nobody's solved it. Let's just admit that national governments are stupid.

The thing is, if they wanted to influence an election they could easily do it. They could start to feed you content which is bias towards "their" candidate, and there is no way you could probe they did that intentionally because "it's just an algorithm".

They don't need to and it would be too risky and not worth the tech debt tbh.

lol, a targeted propaganda machine would be worth every bit of a tech debt for an authoritarian regime.

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