A Tale of Two Algorithms

Diabolical Lies

Katie Gatti Tassin & Caro Claire Burke

Society & Culture, News

4.8 • 607 Ratings

🗓️ 26 January 2025

⏱️ 93 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

A few days ago, shortly after the TikTok ban was lifted, we recorded this conversation about the dueling algorithmic histories of TikTok and Facebook, the strange mirror world they provide for us to understand US vs. China sentiment, and the crack-in-the-universe moment that RedNote offered the world.

In the time since we recorded, a few major news stories have broken:

* TikTok users are reporting that TikTok is now removing comments including #freepalestine and labeling them as “hate speech”

* Meta is under fire for allegedly requiring people to follow the POTUS and VP Instagram accounts, as well as blurring images that relate to abortion care resources

* A new trend on TikTok called “cute winter boots” is being utilized to share information on how to resist the Trump administration (the admin’s anti-immigration efforts in particular)

* A Chinese start-up, DeepSeek, released an insanely advanced open source AI model that 1) absolutely trounces American AI efforts across all benchmarks, 2) was funded on a fraction of the resources that American companies claim to require, and 3) flies directly in the face of extensive US efforts to limit Chinese competition in the space via chip export restrictions

Fortunately for our new audio engineer (and unfortunately for just, like, the general state of America right now), these new developments did not require any last-minute edits—if anything, they reinforce the arguments underpinning this conversation.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.diabolicalliespod.com/subscribe

Transcript

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0:00.0	All right, today's episode was brought to you by FaceMash, musically, the anger emoji,
0:07.7	young college women everywhere who refused to sleep with the creepiest guy at the party.
0:12.0	The freaks who heard about META's decision to let users call gay people mentally ill and thought,
0:17.3	yay, my freedom of speech has been protected.
0:20.4	Tom from MySpace, because that's the last social media founder we had,
0:23.6	who wasn't a lizard wearing a human costume, and Elon Musk's Nazi salute.
0:29.0	Congratulations, Katie.
0:30.2	We started at the bottom, and now we are living in the trapdoor cellar of a serial killer
0:33.7	who screams at us occasionally to put the lotion in the basket.
0:37.2	Welcome to America
0:38.8	the Beautiful. If by beautiful, you meet an oligarchy state run by a small handful of tech founders
0:43.2	who are richer than God and yet somehow inexplicably dumber than the dumbest person you've ever
0:47.4	met. But hey, at least now we will be able to go to Mars and frack the fuck out of Alaska and get
0:52.5	rich by investing in Donald Trump's
0:54.2	meme coin in the next 18 hours or whatever the fuck your most annoying friend is saying to you
0:59.0	right now. Thank you. I'm so happy to be here, question mark. So happy to have you. Okay, Katie,
1:07.1	today we are not talking about the inauguration. We are talking about the
1:10.9	algorithmic war being waged over the soul of America. We are talking about TikTok and Facebook
1:16.5	and Red Note and the very important lesson we can learn from what has happened over the last
1:20.3	few weeks. So I have basically read in the last week everything I could get my hands on
1:26.1	regarding the TikTok ban.
1:29.1	And I'm going to put my cards on the table here.
	...

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