A Tale of Two Algorithms

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.

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