Who do you think is responsible for the current moral panic around social media?
That shit didn't just happen. Social media only became ontologically evil once it presented a threat to the status quo by allowing the underclasses to organize and establish political power, and when it started to undermine mainstream propaganda narratives.
It's no coincidence that TikTok is being described as a CCP weapon of war and indoctrination when it starts leading people to question their government's foreign policy and capitalism. Can't have that.
>>a threat to the status quo by allowing the underclasses to organize and establish political power
All the organising I'm seeing is of people who are convinced the earth is flat and that vaccines cause autism. I'd love to see an actual political group that's not just "Britain First" appear in my social media ever.
I find Tiktok an easy way to surface very specific demographic and political views- much easier than Meta-owned media.
It was super interesting to watch, for instance, the discussions between liberal and leftist black women around Harris, Gaza, and the 2024 election. If you just swipe out of videos that aren't things you're okay with pretty quickly, then it will change your feed dramatically in a short time.
So your theory is that a single, coherent actor ("deep state"?) is responsible for current public sentiment that is both somewhat critical of social media and specifically foreign control of that media? I disagree on that.
In a democracy, if you gave full control over local media to a foreign nation, do you see how that could lead to problems, or would you be fine with that?
TikTok being owned by a Chinese company didn't represent "giving full control over local media to a foreign nation."
And it's weird that you mistrust the influence of something as banal as TikTok but apparently believe the moral panic around social media and TikTok specifically is entirely organic. Because I guess there is no such thing as propaganda or influence operations on Western social media?
If you're worried about foreign influence on social media literally every Western platform is being aggressively manipulated by both foreign and Western intelligence. It just got revealed that most of the MAGA accounts on Twitter were foreign, likely Russian-based networks. The platform that serves as the de facto psychological operations and communications channel for the current Presidental administration.
But it's just TikTok and the Chinese mind control we should worry about?
I'm absolutely not saying that there is no western propaganda. But giving control over your media to any single actor (especially sovereign ones) is basically suicide for a democracy because it allows those actors to "democratically" achieve results against voter interests.
Politicians having control over media is always a problem, but it got much worse thanks to inherent centralization of modern media, so more regulatory pushback is needed now than in the newspaper age. I'd also argue that foreigners having media control is typically worse because incentives are even less aligned with voters.
>But giving control over your media to any single actor (especially sovereign ones) is basically suicide for a democracy because it allows those actors to "democratically" achieve results against voter interests.
There's plenty of evidence of Russian influence operations affecting Western elections on Facebook and Twitter.
Where is the evidence that the CCP is controlling people's minds and rigging Western elections through TikTok?
This isn't some tin foiled hat wearing nonsense, every person I talk to seems think that ending anonymity online would be a good thing, until I explain the democracy protecting use cases,i.e. whistle blowers.
That shit didn't just happen. Social media only became ontologically evil once it presented a threat to the status quo by allowing the underclasses to organize and establish political power, and when it started to undermine mainstream propaganda narratives.
It's no coincidence that TikTok is being described as a CCP weapon of war and indoctrination when it starts leading people to question their government's foreign policy and capitalism. Can't have that.