Cancel Culture-Stan: Does Extremism on TikTok have any meaning? Should anyone care?

Ah yes, TikTok. I’ve written about TikTok before. In the Summer of 2019, I was a bit perturbed at how intrusive the permissions requests were for sharing content from the iOS app to Twitter. I actually (nerd alert) went so far as to craft an email and then send it to their privacy division.

To their credit, TikTok reversed the privacy settings, and replied to the email.

That was in 2019. In 2020 I worked with a friend of mine on another head-scratcher of an issue that was taking place with the TikTok app. The TikTok app was one of the only apps in the world that labeled the Russian-occupied Georgian territories of South Ossetia and Abkhazia and distinct geo-political “regions” inside of the app.

Tweet from May of 2020 about the labeling of Abkhazia and South Ossetia as distinct geo-political regions. The TikTok app was knowingly (and openly) collecting the mobile numbers of users from those two regions for purposes of generating advertising revenue. This (the wholesale collection of these numbers) appeared unique, and it was mostly certainly a violation of E.U. and U.S. sanctions in regards to the 2008 war between Russia and Georgia.

The app also went out of the way to openly collect South Ossetian and Abkhazian mobile numbers during account creation. Considering that mobile numbers are collected from teenagers and young adults for the specific reason of generating revenue via advertising, I believed that on some level the specific language used by TikTok in the app was most likely in violation of U.S. and E.U. sanctions on Russia stemming from the 2008 war.

A media-figure friend of mine, Zviad Adzinbaia, really took up the cause of this issue. Including writing a blog post, crafting press releases, and making television appearances about the issue.

https://medium.com/@zvioadzinbaia/tik-tok-disregards-ethnic-cleansing-in-georgia-41dd72b73bb1

After some back and forth, including an official complaint filed by the Georgian Foreign Ministry with the Chinese government, TikTok also stopped labeling South Ossetia and Abkhazia as distinct geo-political regions.

Now, TikTok wasn’t changing privacy settings out of the goodness of the company’s heart. Nor was it engaging in semantic arguments involving the vocabulary of the “frozen conflicts” in the former Soviet Union because of the company’s strong belief in supporting the sanctity of sovereign states in the face of Putin’s mid-life crisis driven, Russian Revanchism.

No, not likely.

TikTok is a Chinese company with a major (and mysterious) development office in Moscow. In 2019 and 2020 the company was concerned about the Trump administration’s heavy-handed intervention into the affairs of the company. There was a lot of problems piling up for the company, and they were (and still likely are) keen on avoiding any issues which might incur additional regulatory oversight.

Remember when a bunch of TikTok users trolled the Trump campaign? Remember how they encouraged TikTok users to falsely apply for tickets to that COVID superspreader event in Tulsa that killed Herman Cain? It seems like just yesterday.

Remember also how the use of TikTok to organize a disruption of a Trump campaign event so infuriated Trump that he (metaphorically) stuck his tiny little fingers into the minutiae of the company and ordered the American division of the company to divest itself of any connections with the Chinese portion?

Nilay Patel: “I do not think, for one second, we should pretend that the (Trump) White House has a logical or consistent policy for using CFIUS to evaluate these things.”

Remember when later, after Trump tried a ham-handed attempt at a shakedown in order to “cut Treasury in on the deal,” he totally caved in a way that few other Presidents ever had.

Good times. It’s easy to see why the Russians were so desperate to keep Trump in power. His fingers aren’t just tiny, they’re soft.

Anyways, enough nostalgia about 2020. History, as always, moves forward. The fascist coup attempt failed and the neighbor kid jumped off the roof in front of you on the same day. Suicide weather, my friends. This COVID is getting to everyone, I tell you.

The long and the short of it is that TikTok is likely sensitive to the fact that it is under the watchful eye of both European and American (and Indian and Pakistani!) regulators. All of the social media companies enjoyed a free reign during the Obama administration. And truth be told, no one benefited more from the absolute chaos of mis and dis-information than Trump. It’s highly likely that both the Biden administration, and the European Union, will be taking a look at the regulatory framework regarding privacy and content moderation.

And, fair or not, a Chinese owned company will likely inspire even regulatory oversight. Especially since the Chinese government uses Orwellian methods to ban other European and U.S. companies from even being used in mainland China.

Last night, while on TikTok, I was randomly scrolling through the videos recommended to me. Whether anyone wants it or not, TikTok’s algorithms serve up a huge amount of both Russian language videos, and videos tagged with Cyrillic hashtags.

Inserted inside of the videos of cars drifting, of teenage girls jiggling their breasts, or the reactions of puppies to being given the finger, I spotted something odd…

Fascism videos!

“Huh, that’s odd.” I thought.

Why would TikTok’s much venerated algorithms be serving-up healthy doses of white nationalism, Euro-Nationalism and odes to Radovan Karadzic?

While scrolling through TikTok videos aimed at teenagers, it is totally normal to come across laudatory videos of convicted war criminals, right?

It seemed odd, so I decided to dig in!

I was puzzled as to why I was recommended a video featuring a crowd chanting slogans, and giving what appeared to be Nazi-salutes.

The odd video had 9389 likes, 1370 comments, and 152,000 views.

Here’s a link to the video:

This initial video piqued my interest, and I started digging into other content that was shared by the @menefrego88 account.

One of the videos that I found was a speech by a George Lincoln Rockwell. I tweeted about this video to members of TikTok’s Content Advisory Board on Twitter:

Within about an hour after Tweeting this, the video by George Lincoln Rockwell was pulled from the service. The other videos are still up.

I soon found out that “menefrego” is a term popularized by Mussolini and used by Italian fascists.

By running a Google search for “Menefrego88” I quickly find that user name has been used by white nationalists for some time.

An account using the “Menefrego88” account name also appears in the Iron March leak.

The “MeneFrego88” handle looks to have been used by one person on multiple platforms. Keep an eye on the email address above…

I decided to look and see if I could determine any kind of digital trail between the “MeNeFrego88” in the Iron March leak and the “@MeNeFrego88” TikTok account.

Here’s what I found. Admittedly it’s not much, but I spotted something else that could be the start of something else interesting.

The leaked MeNeFrego88 messages are revealing, and are extremely similar to something else I found.

The email address of the MeNeFrego88 account from the Iron March leak is especially strange. I looked at it, and decided to space it out as a search term:

On Gab, of course. A Roman fetish (of course).

I decided to look into the cached version of Gab, featuring a mention of the words from the email account:

So, now there’s a second handle “@Johnny_Fash” tied to “Marcus Quinctius Caudinus” and the “MeNeFrego88” account.

And, here we go! The content posted by this Disqus account is nearly identical to the stuff posted by the MeNeFrego88 account in the Iron March leak.

So, there’s a connection between several accounts peddling alt-right shit online. There’s some evidence of who this person is, which I wont be posting, but I will be diving into.

I’ll wrap all of this into a more concise email that i’ll send to TikTok if i’m comfortable with it.

Does it matter much. Does anyone really care? Hard to know.

Should I have even written this disjointed a post about it? I’ve never been very good with spreadsheets, and I feel like taking the time to even help a major corporation with content moderation is a fool’s errand.

They’re billion dollar corporations who cop-out of their civic responsibility by adding a tiny “report me” feature to posts. After everything I’ve been through, you know that these companies will only acknowledge there responsibility if they fear regulatory oversight.

So, yeah. That’s about it.