After years of hyperventilation about TikTok’s impact on privacy, propaganda, and national security, TikTok is likely being sold to a bunch of Trump’s billionaire technofascist buddies …
Turning it into another X would be the dumbest strategy. Their best strategy is to shadowban both liberal and fascist rhetoric, and amplify the “apolitical” noise that everyone already uses it for. Make them feel like it’s a platform connecting them, but don’t let any real conversation happen. They have the power, now all they need is bread and circuses, and they will pay for them using oppression they keep hidden.
TikTok already doesn’t that kind of low-key suppression of content. I remember there was a big hubbub a few years back when it came out that TikTok had been actively suppressing content from disabled creators (as well as other groups). They apologised, and I think they said they would no longer do it, but I frequently hear people who continue to say that whenever they make posts that involve their disabilities, it feels like TikTok is still actively suppressing those posts.
In some cases, it appears to me that there isn’t much evidence to support their suspicion — aside from the fact that we know for a fact that TikTok used to do this, and we have little reason to trust what TikTok claim when they are incredibly opaque at the best of times. It unnerves me that I don’t know what to believe. Pretty much all big social media are terrible for transparency though, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Yeah, that’s basically what I was getting at. Tiktok can just be the same slop farm it already is, be as useful as the right need it to be, and remain just as successful. The decision to drive Twitter into the ground was made by an individual whose intelligence is an extreme outlier. We shouldn’t assume they’ll make the same blunder with Tiktok.
Turning it into another X would be the dumbest strategy. Their best strategy is to shadowban both liberal and fascist rhetoric, and amplify the “apolitical” noise that everyone already uses it for. Make them feel like it’s a platform connecting them, but don’t let any real conversation happen. They have the power, now all they need is bread and circuses, and they will pay for them using oppression they keep hidden.
TikTok already doesn’t that kind of low-key suppression of content. I remember there was a big hubbub a few years back when it came out that TikTok had been actively suppressing content from disabled creators (as well as other groups). They apologised, and I think they said they would no longer do it, but I frequently hear people who continue to say that whenever they make posts that involve their disabilities, it feels like TikTok is still actively suppressing those posts.
In some cases, it appears to me that there isn’t much evidence to support their suspicion — aside from the fact that we know for a fact that TikTok used to do this, and we have little reason to trust what TikTok claim when they are incredibly opaque at the best of times. It unnerves me that I don’t know what to believe. Pretty much all big social media are terrible for transparency though, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Yeah, that’s basically what I was getting at. Tiktok can just be the same slop farm it already is, be as useful as the right need it to be, and remain just as successful. The decision to drive Twitter into the ground was made by an individual whose intelligence is an extreme outlier. We shouldn’t assume they’ll make the same blunder with Tiktok.