After Elon Musk purchased Twitter, the platform quickly became a more powerful amplifier of extremist, antisemitic, and pro-Russian narratives. TikTok, the Chinese-built platform, remains a potent and badly understood source of misinformation, not least because it is entirely untransparent. If it is being used to shape U.S. politics, or to collect data from users, we don’t know how. The American far right has meanwhile shifted the legitimate political debate about online platform regulation into an argument about “bans” and “free speech,” attacking the academics and other researchers who seek
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