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WASHINGTON (JTA) — The committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the U.S. Capitol wished to check how briskly it took social media to get to radical content material. The reply, when it got here to TikTok and Nazis, was simply over an hour.
It took TikTok 75 minutes to ship Nazi content material to a brand new consumer who didn’t search it, the committee discovered, in line with a report Thursday in Rolling Stone. The journal is certainly one of a variety of publications reviewing the committee’s remaining launch of paperwork because the U.S. Home of Representatives transitions from Democratic to Republican management.
Committee staffers have been testing a principle that social media giants have been reluctant to police right-wing extremist content material partially due to pushback from then-President Donald Trump and his supporters who argue that such controls inhibit conservative speech.
The Jan. 6 riot, which resulted in a number of deaths, was carried out by supporters of Trump who believed his false declare that he had received the 2020 election. That lie unfold on social media, the place right-wing accounts have been a number of the most seen in the course of the interval between the election and Jan. 6, after which a number of social media giants, together with Twitter, banned Trump.
The staffers on the committee’s social media staff invented Alice, a 41-year-old girl from Acton, Massachusetts. It took “Alice” 75 minutes of scrolling with out prompts or interactions to get to Nazi content material, the staffers reported.
The social media staff stated in a draft abstract that “Alice” was “simply one of many Committee’s experiments that additional evidenced the ability of TikTok’s advice algorithm in creating rabbit holes towards probably dangerous content material.”
The incoming Republican majority within the Home, which features a substantial portion of Trump backers, has indicated that it’ll search to bury as a lot of the findings of the Jan. 6 committee as it may possibly. In the meantime, legislators on either side of the aisle have stated they plan to scrutinize TikTok, which is owned by a Chinese language firm, due to its presentation of dangerous content material and its potential safety dangers.
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