Tiktok is dead, long live tiktok.
"I owe the public nothing." - JP Morgan. 1901
I’ve never used TikTok. Occasionally people send me links to individual videos, and that’s the extent of my usage, I have no account. I’ve been cutting out most social media platforms one by one. And I’m deeply suspicious of even the ones people assume are somehow liberal and not right-wing, or are tricked into thinking that it’s less manipulated somehow. I think people should be protected from being exploited by all these tech giants, and having our data extracted and sold, and used by leveraging opaque systems. All the platforms with their black box manipulative algorithms are problematic. Singling out TikTok – something I believe was pushed by Republicans, was always dubious and seemed like a lot of hot air. However it’s bizarre how Donald Trump leveraged this whole stupid thing to do an absurd and ham handed version of Ronald Reagan's free the hostages op.
And now the platform is probably going to be manipulated for MAGA to cater to Donald Trump. How could it not be with such a deal being made? We know how this stuff works, we’re not so naive surely. And because the algorithm is a black box, you will never know if they’re shadow banning Tiananmen Square 1989 or J6 2021 or promoting anti-trans and anti-vax. A bunch of people have enjoyed mixing it up on RedNote (aka Little Red Book), the Chinese Instagram. Sadly, it doesn’t allow criticism of the Chinese government or even apparently rainbows that just might be associated with LGBTQ+ content. But even the so-called free speech absolutist tycoons running platforms like facebook and twitter, seem to be manipulating people all the damn time. Sometimes just by plain old making sure people are shown what they want to see and told what they want to hear because that’s a great way to get someone to buy into something, it’s a con artist’s magic trick.
National Security and the Third-Road Threat Toward a Comprehensive Theory of Information Warfare Daniel Morabito AIR & SPACE POWER JOURNAL FALL 2021 Filtering. Another problem of knowing emerges from the interaction between access to information and the heuristics that support cognition. Filtering occurs when a second party controls which information gets delivered to a person or when the information delivered to a person is ignored due to their heuristics. This problem is especially challenging because the information previously experienced by a person solidifies their heuristics. In turn, these heuristics can subconsciously filter out information that does not match preexisting mental models, a function of System 1 thinking also described as confirmation bias. Confirmation bias creates a reinforcement loop that continuously filters new information that does not match pre- existing bias until something occurs that does not match the preexisting mental model but that demands System 2’s attention.
As Matt Pearce pointed out, “Your right to speak through a medium is more directly connected to your ownership of that medium than to the First Amendment. When it comes to speech, most of us are mere tenants.”
Granovetter, M. S. (1973). The Strength of Weak Ties. American Journal of Sociology, 78(6), 1360–1380. doi:10.1086/225469 “Imagine, to begin with, a community completely partitioned into cliques, such that each person is tied to every other in his clique and to none outside. Community organization would be severely inhibited. Leafletting, radio announcements,or other methods could insure that everyone was aware of some nascent organization; but studies of diffusion and mass communication have shown that people rarely act on mass-media information unless it is also transmitted through personal ties (Katz and Lazarsfeld 1955; Rogers 1962)“ https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/225469
You can’t see what you don’t see.
The truth is that social media appears to be a trick that proves the strange beliefs on the earlier internet. Back in the day they would call what happened offline “in real life” (IRL), and I always thought that was strange to refer to interacting with other real people online to be “not real life”, and I’ve published rants about this over 20 years ago. But it’s almost as if people did hit upon a reality back then, about the fantasy virtual reality nature of the internet. That somehow publishing on the internet, while it can get you into trouble in real life, and in some cases unjustly — it doesn’t actually necessarily allow you to have a lot of actual control over anything in the world around you. It’s almost a diversion to actual action. A make believe step on the hedonic treadmill.
“The liberals were outraged at Trump. But they expressed their outrage in cyberspace so it had no effect. Because the algorithms made sure that they only spoke to people who already agreed with them. Instead ironically their waves of angry messages and tweets benefitted the large corporations who ran the social media platforms. one online analyst put it simply — angry people click. It meant that the radical fury that came like waves across the internet no longer had the power to change the world. Instead it became a fuel that fed the systems of power making them ever more powerful.” — Adam Curtis, Hypernormalisation, 2016
TikTok came back. Then I deleted the app. Looking for something to root for in the fight for TikTok. Matt Pearce Jan 19, 2025 The reason I had become a late adopter of TikTok, and the reason I never posted videos myself, was because I had never been able to dislodge the personal discomfort I’d gotten from the early-years reports of special moderation of topics sensitive to China, like the Tiananmen Square massacre. How much meddling was there, really? TikTok’s algorithm is so all-intrusive as a curator, and has just enough human manipulation, that you’d never know what you didn’t know. Eventually, I just gave up thinking about that so much. TikTok was fine, basically, and like many things in life, you can get away with a lot when you’re competent at what you do. I got complacent about seeing creators use words like “unalived” instead of “killed” or “murdered” to avoid potential censorship whenever talking about something that matters. Over time, what came to feel so oppressive wasn’t Chinese influence but the same algorithmic paternalism and absentee landlordism currently knitting itself across almost every surface of our internet.
If you want to exercise free speech, what you really want to do is talk to the people who actually control things — your elected representatives in government.
January 19, 2024 - Professor Delivers URGENT WARNING Before Inauguration | The Weekend Show - MeidasTouch Jennifer Mercieca: “Social media platforms are not public spaces they are not used by officials to make decisions about policies that are affecting the public, right there's no way for us to directly communicate to politicians where they are listening to us and we know that they are and to have you know the sort of give and take there's the illusion of that right there's the promise of that we were we were told we were going to get that out of you know the sort of techno optimism of the 90s and the early 2000s but that's not what it it became it became this algorithmically controlled outrage machine” Anthony Davis: “and a business as well I mean it's a profitable business” Jennifer Mercieca: “big business right and so we think we're doing democracy when we go onto these platforms and we express our opinions but it would be much better for us to go out into the street and do that, that would be the kind of protected speech that you know the Constitution First Amendment protects it would be the kind that people pay attention to um and that is meaningful right gathering with others to express ourselves what we do on social media it isn't - it isn't the same thing.”
This isn’t the end or the beginning of any cyber public square because no such thing exists today. We have tools, and we should use them. But we should also know their limitations.
Curmudgucation The End of the Public Cyber-Square Peter Greene Jan 08, 2025 It's hard to say how close we came to an internet public square. There were always limitations, the FOMO was always greater than what you were actually missing, and if twelve people sign up for an online community, the thirteenth person is going to be some kind of troll. But the dream is hard to release. There may be real benefits. Social media often gives us the feeling that by engaging in an on line debate about an issue, we were really Doing Something. If the collapse of the public cyber-square gets more folks to log off and Do Something in their own communities, that's probably a net win. Also, once the dream dies, we can make use of the tools we have.
But I guess in the end it’s only important that a whole swathe of young people will be forever in love with Donald Trump for giving them back some dopamine hits. Or in some cases jobs — because an entire swathe of non-unionized information gig workers are reliant on the platform for income.
In any case, “the tiktok generation” is now being pressured to drink the kool-aid — and it is orange.
Best wishes,
a GenXer