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Hello lovely Patrons

A new episode of Philosophy Tube drops tonight at 7pm British time. I'll be in the live chat from 6.30pm, I hope you can join me!

Abi XXx

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TikTok Vs Democracy

See Dracula’s Ex-Girlfriend: https://go.nebula.tv/dex?ref=philosophytube Support the show on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/PhilosophyTube Original track ‘Witches’ Whispers’ by Nina Richards: https://www.ninarichards.co.uk/ BIBLIOGRAPHY: - Elizabeth Anderson, “The Epistemology of Democracy,” in Episteme - Erica Benner, “What The West Forgot About Democracy,” in Democracy - James Broughel, “TikTok is A Beacon of Democracy in the Social Media Landscape,” in Forbes - Carol Cadwalladr, “Inciting Rioters in Britain was a test run for Elon Musk. Just see what he plans for America,” in The Guardian - Chung-hong Chan & King-wa Fu, “The Relationship Between Cyberbalkanization and Opinion Polarisation...” in Journal of Computer Mediated Communication - Nic Cheeseman et al., “Social Media Disruption: Nigeria's WhatsApp Politics,” in Journal of Democracy - Dan Davies, The Unaccountability Machine - Ronald Deibert, “The Road to Digital Unfreedom: Three Painful Truths About Social Media,” in Journal of Democracy - Gil Duran, “Where J.D. Vance Gets His Weird, Terrifying Techno-Authoritatian Ideas,” in The New Republic - Federico Finchelstein, The Wannabe Fascists - Klint Finley, “Geeks for Monarchy: The Rise of Neoreactionaries,” in Tech Crunch - Francis Fukuyama, “Making the Internet Safe for Democracy,” in Journal of Democracy - Francis Fukuyama et al., “Middleware for Dominant Digital Platforms: A Technological Solution to a Threat to Democracy,” Stanford Cyber Policy Center - Lia Haberman, “Inside The First White House Creator Economy Conference,” ICYMI - Fredrick Hayek, Law, Legislation, and Liberty - Shaun Heap et al., The Theory of Choice: A Critical Guide - John Herrman, “TikTok is Shaping Politics, But How?” in The New York Times - Adel Iskandar, “Egyptian Youth’s Dissent,” in Journal of Democracy - Kaja Kallas, “On Democracy,” in Democracy - Garry Kasparov, “Trump, Putin, and the Dangers of Fake News,” in The Parallax View - Daphne Keller, “The Future of Platform Power: Making Middleware Work,” in Journal of Democracy - Gary King, Jennifer Pan, & Margaret Roberts, “How the Chinese government fabricates social media posts for strategic distraction, not engaged argument,” in American Political Science Review - Aynne Kokas, “Why TikTok is A Threat to Democracy,” in Journal of Democracy - Rachel Leingang, “Elon’s Politics: how Musk became a driver of elections misinformation,” in The Guardian - Noam Lupu, Mariana Ramírez Bustamante, & Elizabeth Zechmeister, “Social Media Disruption: Messaging Mistrust in Latin America,” in Journal of Democracy - Ahmed Maati et al., “Information, Doubt, and Democracy: How Digitisation Spurs Democratic Decay,” in Democratization - Sapna Maheswari, “Love, Hate, or Fear It: TikTok Has Changed America,” in The New York Times - Nathalie Maréchal, “The Future of Platform Power: Fixing The Business Model,” in Journal of Democracy - Colleen McClain, Monica Anderson, & Risa Gelles-Watnick, “How Americans Navigate Politics on TikTok, X, Facebook and Instagram,” in Pew Research - Joseph Medina, The Epistemology of Resistance - Cade Metz, “Silicon Valley’s Safe Space,” in The New York Times - Carl Miller, “Directing Responses Against Illicit Influence Operations” - An Xiao Mina, Memes to Movements - Never Post, “Memeing the News” - Erik Nisbet & Olga Kamenchuk, “Russian News Media, Digital Media, Informational Learned Helplessness, and Belief in COVID-19 Misinformation,” in International Journal of Public Opinion Research - Whitney Phillips, “Putting the Folklore in Fake News,” in Culture Digitally - Adela Raz, “Why Democracy Failed in Afghanistan,” in Democracy - Ben Rhodes, “American Descent,” in The New York Review of Books - John Samples, “Social Media and the Appearance of Corruption,” American Enterprise Institute - Robert Smith, Rage Inside the Machine - Tante, “AI and Democracy” - Tante, “Inevitable” - Tante, “Liberty, an iPhone, and the Refusal to Think Politically” - TrashFuture, “The Sulla of Suburbia” - Joshua Tucker et al., “From Liberation to Turmoil: Social Media and Democracy,” in Journal of Democracy - Zeynep Tufekci, “Capabilities of Movements and Affordances of Digital Media: Paradoxes of Empowerment” - Peter Paul Verbeek, Moralising Technology - Silvio Waisbord, “Why Populism is Troubling for Democratic Communication,” in Communication, Culture, and Critique - Yuan Yang, “Why We Should Join Things,” in Democracy - Shoshana Zuboff, “Big Other: Surveillance Capitalism and the Prospects of an Information Civilization,” in Journal of Information Technology #election #vote #information

Comments

William Frank

Watched this on Nebula. A wonderful discussion of the topic, as always, and I LOVE the single cut format for this one. Bravo!!

enchantedsleeper

I never see these on Nebula, I rely on Patreon to give me new episode notifications 😆

Rachel Anne

You've expressed concern about your Patreon support. Are you sure that releasing on Nebula two weeks before releasing on Patreon doesn't have anything to do with it? Personally, I find it disconcerting to a "new" video here that I saw on Nebula two weeks ago. Never feels right.

Peggy Jaeger

You're tired? Imagine what it's like for us in the U.S.! It's exhausting . And I don't even have social media. I don't get anything from Nebula.Maybe I signed up wrong or something. I had a hard time doing it ,too. I tried to use your link but it wouldn't let me. I have to look it up to watch anything on it and get 0 notifications .

רועי סיני

Well done! This one really has some good takes about the state of the world nowadays. The following paragraphs are a copy of a comment I also posted on YouTube. If you see this please remember that we live in the same reality and so discussion is possible, and reply, either here or in your post mortem stream (which I'm gonna watch for a change, hopefully I'll catch it in time but if not then I'll watch the recording). Also, if you prefer to reply on stream but the comment is too long to be croppable it'll also be fine with me if you only show and respond to only some of the paragraphs. I'm a nice person who believes in second chances and in informing people before hurting them and not after, so I inform you now that if you don't reply to my comments (either to this one or to the one on the video about Butler, which is still the second newest one on Patreon) and I see you keep posting videos that contain what I consider BS claims againt Israel, like the one about Butler and the one about death, I'll have to conclude I've failed to reach you and will stop supporting you immediately, as I don't want to support that kind of content. I have several points to make about this video and the last one, which I didn't watch until very recently. First, about illicit influence campaigns, you should extend that logic not only to the videos that try to influence elections, but also to the ones about the war between Israel and the terrorist organizations around it. You should make sure you haven't selective exposure-d yourself into an online community about hating the so called genocide that happens in Gaza, which fulfills some psychological need for you (which you probably have). In fact, many of the "horrors in Gaza" videos on social media actually show things that happened in Syria, not in Gaza, see this for example https://factly.in/an-old-video-of-syria-has-been-falsely-shared-as-a-recent-incident-from-israel/ and many of this kind of videos circling around on social media were actually generated by AI: https://apnews.com/article/artificial-intelligence-hamas-israel-misinformation-ai-gaza-a1bb303b637ffbbb9cbc3aa1e000db47 This also ties into the point in your previous video about "the people it [the war] is ranged against", which are strongly implied to be the civilians in Gaza, but this is obviously not true. Israel has nothing against the civilians in Gaza, only against Hamas, so why are civilians killed there anyway? To answer this question I usually use the concept of "human shields", and this is what I mean by it: Of course civilian death is something bad that the world was better if avoided, but the circumstances didn't allow the IDF to kill the terrorists it targeted without also killing some civilians. Why is that? Because Hamas, as you said, although not literally "hiding behind" civilians, puts their bases and rocket launchers in schools, mosques and hospitals, places that are full of civilians (a serious war crime in and of itself), in order to use Judeo-Christian morality as a defensive weapon, telling the world to have mercy for the little children that are killed, while they themselves have no mercy for children like them, not in Israel (look at the hundreds of children massacred in the Nova festival on October 7th, for example) and not in Gaza either. Also, it is obvious that the IDF rejected and still rejects some combat tactics and operations because they would lead to more civilians killed—it's much easier to just bomb wherever you think terrorists might be than to wait until you can be very confident you won't kill more civilians than terrorists, which is what the IDF does. In short, the IDF tries to keep civilians safe, obviously in Israel, but also in Gaza, while Hamas prefers their deaths, obviously in Israel, but also in Gaza. Furthermore, your claim that cutting the power in Gaza was against international law is false, or at least controversial, as is concluded here: https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/article-768005 Furthermore, your claim that operation Cast Lead "resulted in the deaths of somewhere between 1100 and 1400 Palestinians, mostly civilians" is also most probably false. The IDF identified 709 of them (which is already a majority of even the higher estimate of 1400) as "Hamas terror operatives": https://jpost.com/israel/idf-releases-cast-lead-casualty-numbers I tend to trust the IDF's numbers because for their successful operation they had to collect a lot of information about who is a terrorist and who isn't, but even if you don't trust them, Hamas also admitted that between 600 and 700 of its members were killed: https://www.haaretz.com/2010-11-09/ty-article/hamas-admits-600-700-of-its-men-were-killed-in-cast-lead/0000017f-ee02-ddba-a37f-ee6edc3f0000 While this number is indeed lower, it is still a majority of the lower estimate of 1100, and Hamas is known to under-report these kind of numbers, exactly to make Israel look worse than it is. In addition, I admit this is a bit of a stretch but if you add to this estimate 30% (which I've taken from one of the comments on that article) you get that the number is between 780 and 910, a range which includes 871, the number cited on Hebrew Wikipedia: https://he.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D7%9E%D7%91%D7%A6%D7%A2_%D7%A2%D7%95%D7%A4%D7%A8%D7%AA_%D7%99%D7%A6%D7%95%D7%A7%D7%94 Back to this video, I hope you see now, if you haven't intended it all along, that your claim that currently on social media "humanity is sidelined for war and profit", although can be seen as a criticism of Israel, is actually more related to the tactics Hamas and its supporters in Russia and Iran are using, as Israel actually tries to put humanity and the safety of civilians, both inside its borders and around the terrorist organizations it attacks, first, and its goals in the war are only second to that. In summary, when you think what to do with the information and resources you have and how you can "use those gifts to help other people", please make sure you actually help the right people in the right way and support the people who try to stay humane and follow the laws and not the war criminals they are fighting against.

Richard Gilbert

Hello! I don't know if this is the right place for this, but I had a suggestion for a show. I have been really intrigued by Naomi Klein's book, Doppleganger (about her being confused for Naomi Wolf, ugh!) She has some really interesting stuff to say about "personal branding" and electronic doubles and identity. I would love to hear your take on those ideas. Or, if not a show, and you haven't read it, just a reading recommendation of something you might enjoy! Love your work!

Lauren Shear

I absolutely loved Naomi Klein's "Doppelganger" too! As a fellow disillusioned North American and antizionist Jewish activist (both things she and I share), it really spoke to me. Though I think it covers a lot of themes and subject matter Abi has already covered, there's so much there that could be relevant to something Abi has yet to cover. Perhaps something on how both queer and Jewish identity has been used by the mainstream to manufacture consent for certain horrific world events and to gin up fear of foreign "others"? I just finished the book "Bad Gays" and it's very interesting how the perception of other cultures' supposed intolerance has been used as an excuse to dehumanize them (this was a popular argument from the wildly Islamophobic Dutch politician/edgelord Pim Fortuyn). As a queer Jewish activist I've been told by zionists "they'd __ you in Gaza" more times than I can count, but every dear, lovely Palestinian friend I've made is a living testament to the opposite.