I get the feeling that we're gonna see a lot more performative Dear Leader shit in the next several years. This is just the beginning.
The thing that bothers me the most about this stuff is that the politicians, corporations, administrators, etc. put out these messages to us, half the population believes them, but then the actions don't match the message (because the message was a lie to begin with). In this case, TikTok is bad because it's Chinese and China is bad and their government is using it to spy on us. The Us government wants to ban TikTok because it's a security risk. They want to keep us safe. Okay......so following that logic, why not ban it immediately to stop the risk? And, okay, it's finally banned.......but we have absolute zero news of changes the company has made........why would Trump want to un-ban it! It's not safe! Literally nothing has been done to make TikTok safe for the US and no message from the government had come out saying that research was done and it was found to be safe now so it's okay to use it.
Why does this not bother the people that believe this horseshit??? This kind of stuff blows my mind almost daily.
Another recent example is, when someone was searching a grant database at MIT, they discovered that the school received millions for doing research for the Israeli army. The school then suppressed the information and took down the entire tool for searching grant information. Like, THAT MAKES NO FUCKING SENSE! If the message is, we side with Israel, we are backing the good guys, anyone that says they are protesting the bombing of Gaza is actually antisemitic, and we will not tolerate our students or faculty protesting because, again, we support Israel and anybody protesting what they do is doing so because they hate Jewish people. That's the message universities have been giving, right? So then it follows, they should be proud to have received millions of dollars and done research for the Israeli army! Why are they not putting out press releases saying they helped the good guys?!! They should be proud to have contributed to something they believe is good and just and they should readily take credit for it! But, no, they quietly hid the information and scrapped the tools to find it. That MAKES NO SENSE!
Obviously nothing makes sense because it's all built on lies. The people in power know what they're doing. They know what's going on. Everyone else, though....? I absolutely hate to say this but there's just a huge lack of critical thinking and a very heavy reliance on faith. I see the commercials on Real America's Voice every damn day and think, how can you not be skeptical of all these politicians that are literally trying to sell you weird shit??? Right now, Matt Gaetz wants to sell you Ivermectin and all the other live saving drugs the evil democrats don't want you to have and you can get 15% off with the code #mattgaetz. (Not kidding. This is a real commercial I see everyday.) And you can get a patriotic Trump knife for free if you just pay shipping & handling fees. (Also real.) I.........this very clearly all looks like propaganda to me. Why are my parents and so many others so sincere about this stuff??? It's absolutely wild to me because literally none of the actions match the messages at this point and it's driving me nuts. I just want things to make sense.
This is such a good comment. Thank you! The MIT and Israel example absolutely hits the nail on the head and is something I have been saying forever (institutions and Gov here in Aus are doing the same shit).
Critical thinking is the most valuable thing I ever learned at university. I have always been skeptical and curious but actually being able to analyse content opened my mind so much. I can understand how dismantling your whole belief system is also terrifying which is why people don't and won't see reason or fact on these things.
I'm not even sure I learned critical thinking at uni even though it was one of the hallmarks of my undergrad program. And I certainly didn't learn media literacy in school, which I am hoping is actually a very big thing in schools now...??? (Please tell me children learn about media literacy in every grade and every class in college now. Please.)
Thinking about it now, I think some of my critical thinking is just the way my brain has always worked and the rest is from a lot of connections I've made, mostly online, mostly via Twitter in the last 18 years. I'll keep the childhood stories to myself but before all the hubub about "fake news", there was this history professor on Twitter named Mills Kelly that taught at my alma mater and he talked a lot about the intersection of history, digital media, and lies. If I remember correctly, he used to teach a whole course on this stuff and each class would put some information out there and try to fool people........which was amusing but made some people mad.
And, yes, as someone that grew up in the church and also in a town where it was assumed you were conservative, learning new things -- particularly learning new people -- was extremely painful for me. I cried a lot, lol. I would never take back those experiences, though.
Thank you for your perspective as a user and creator Rachel. I realised I have liked a bunch of your content before:) I think a lot of people who don't use tiktok don't understand it because they only hear the absolute worst (chinese spies! vacuous influencers! corrupting kids!) and don't realise it is just a another social media platform designed to make money. It has good and bad. The cat content is also top tier!
Aw shucks! Thanks so much. Completely agree — like many things there are good and bad parts of TikTok just like all social media platforms, but I think the consensus with my peers is that TikTok was at least tipped a *little bit* more in favor of the good. How things go from here is yet to be seen!
A stunt which depends on the stupidity and short memories of a hell of a lot of Americans, who are unfortunately so damn easy to dupe. Why do we have so many stupid people and how have they gotten to be in charge of all of us? It's hard not to feel hopeless about it.
Another way to think about it is that the system in which we exist was designed to keep our memories short. I referenced it briefly but I don't blame people for forgetting that Trump started this whole mess — it felt like 10 lifetimes ago in this country! Unfortunately I think even when you acknowledge this, it can still feel hopeless :-/
Of course it was. I'm only shocked that they didn't have to offer Trump a nakedly corrupt gift of, I dunno, $5M in Bytedance shares or something first before he waved it through. Maybe just the opportunity to pretend to be the hero was enough.
Im not American and not particularly attached to tiktok but this last week leading up to tiktok going dark has raised a lot of dread inside me. Because it all seems like a "lesser evil" situation. Do I want meta to control tiktok too and have monipoly on social media? Or have trump have his grubby fingers there? Or do americans want their data given to china (and ours too if we are users on tiktok). I think all in all this an absolute distraction to something else.. while your average citizens will care to have their doom scroll back (and be grateful to the orange man for it 🤮) ... it definitely is a cover for all the other things happening or coming soon. I honestly am wanting to step away from social media entirely. I just need the courage to because I am chronically online (my husband hasnt had any social media for the last 10 years).
Oh and a lot of my dread is for the wider tech/data war and ai we have going on around us. Its actually really grim the kinds of things happening to which im oblivious to because the tech stuff usually goes over my head.
I was working on my computer and I got the usual pop up for an email arriving which said "Why the TikTok ban was just a stunt by David Farrier" which I read to mean the ban was a stunt by David Farrier! Certainly an eye catching headline and one I could somehow imagine you using ironically, or something! OR maybe you were repeating something one of your haters said. Or something! The whole topic is weird and that experience added another layer of weird, and then a giggle at myself!!
No doubt it’s a stunt. I’m ready for the MAGA crowd to champion Trump for saving Tik Tok. This, along with the Greenland, Canada and Panama comments, is the foreshadowing to what the next 4 years are going to be. Buckle up, the next season of America is about to start.
It could be my personal TikTok bubble, but all of the US creators I follow seem to be perfectly aware that it was all a stunt and most likely a case of propaganda and some kind of tech company corporate merger (likely Meta - a lot of US politicians quickly bought up shares in the past week or so) combined. They're happy to take it for now, because it means they get their audience and income back. But most of them are continuing to ridicule Trump.
Time will tell I guess. But I think that while there are an element that swallow the propaganda, a lot of American people, especially young people, are not as stupid as they think.
As a TikToker myself, I think that's exactly it — the bubble! Remember that Donald Trump has almost 15M followers on the platform and has garnered many millions (maybe even billions?) of views/impressions during the election — much of which probably never hit my FYP or yours. Plus, the flip side of this is that I'm seeing a lot of conspiracy theories (as mentioned in the piece I have some serious doubts about Meta's involvement in the shutdown beyond any sort of political handwaving) which can distract from the basic truth of it: Trump is a narcissist and all parts of our government + corporate actors are willing to back him up.
This is very true and the scary thing is there is a HUGE censorship issue now. You can’t say anything negative about trump, musk, zuck without your comments being auto-deleted and tons of words and phrases are auto-flagged now. Comments auto-delete if they don’t pass the censors and content is being automatically taken down for the same reasons.
Our Dear Leader and his pack of oligarch cronies implemented some nice new policies and cute little algorithmic tweaks to aid their propaganda machine when they “saved” tiktok. There are tons of terms you can no longer look up on the content search pages and videos railing against it, spreading active current news, etc, aren’t being spread to people the way tiktok’s algorithm normally works.
Wild how the right is so adamant about freedom of speech and yet they support a fascist regime actively suppressing speech and the sharing of information.
Tiktok isn’t the freeform, weird little place it once was, and it sadly never will be again in the U.S.
I hate to say this, but TikTok has never been a "freeform" place of any kind. Censorship has been REALLY intense on it right from the beginning - look at all the "code" words that have sprung up over the years. I've had endless innocuous, though political, comments removed over the years. I know heaps of people who have been deplatformed, demonetised and shadow-banned long before all this stuff started happening. The only difference was the rules were made by it's Chinese connections, now they're being made by the US as well.
I actually think the censorship is stronger inside the US now than it is outside though. I am hearing a lot of US people say they can't search keywords or mention topics in their posts or comments, yet it seems fine using it here in NZ. Or at least no different to it was before.
This is a great point. I think those are things I’m used to in a certain sense. Instagram & (especially) tiktok are not 18+ spaces, so certain topics needing their own terms to get around censorship made sense to me on the grounds of protecting a somewhat (and albeit problematic in its own right) teen-friendly space. To me I saw it as keeping things PG and PG-13 at most (U.S. movie censorship category ratings) rather than R.
But you’re def right. Shadow banning and censorship had already been a big issue on the app. I’ve never been a creator and I’ve never looked back at comments I’ve dropped to see if they’d been hidden or deleted for any reason so the impact it had on my life was pretty non-existent until now
Yep, feeling pretty ill about this whole thing. To me, it is a reminder of how *in control* governments are of social media. They're designed so that you feel free on the apps, but that could not be further from the truth. Tik tok is the ultimate brain washing tool -- and we lap it up! Who knows what kind of deals Trump could have made with tik tok to adjust the algorithms... I feel it is getting unsafer all the time. I know this and yet my tik tok screen time is still over 8 hours a week!! It is so hard to break the addiction. Seeing it for what it really is does help though, so thanks David and Rachel.
It's a conundrum I battle with daily! Social media, like most things, has its good and its bad. The "invisibility" of the algorithms on all social apps is definitely unsettling and I'm curious if/when we'll start to notice a change on TikTok.
It’s all a bit Scientology, isn’t it? Incidentally the incoming Attorney General, Pam Bondi, has ties to Scientology. Scary times ahead. I feel for the many millions in America who want no part in this madness.
I am looking forward to sharing this - thank you so much for putting all of this together. I'm a Canadian but feel very connected to Americans and feel ill thinking about what the next 4 years are going to look like.
I increasingly want to check out of this world and just focus on my daughter and family. So I just tune out of most politics, news etc.. which is perhaps to my detriment. It’s actually foul that this is so clearly a stunt and people are so easily fooled. My heart hurts.
I know this matters to a lot of people, but I abandoned the social media a while back and....there was a gap for a while and I filled it with hard news (which has added a lot of soft entertainment stuff) and I have come to rely on a few sources like webworm to keep me up to date on how crappy and and exactly how, as in by which means, social media is crappy. I'm seeing so much rage bait crap and true crap coming through today with the handover and I'm thinking about just checking out for a bit. I know a lot of people don't have that choice, and I hope that they can channel their energies to uncovering and sharing the crap that is about to go down. I'll come back and consume that content, and wait for that pile of content to get large enough to stimulate change, or revolution. I'm here, ready to vote for imposition of carbon costs and application of restrictions on conflict of interest. Also, steeply progressive tax curves and flat out limits to wealth accumulation. Maybe some hard nosed limits on inheritance. There are many ways to fix our problems, people just need to get scared enough to talk about them, and angry enough to vote for them. Meanwhile, Trump will be the attention-seeking ass that he is, and he will forever fall short of getting respected.
I get the feeling that we're gonna see a lot more performative Dear Leader shit in the next several years. This is just the beginning.
The thing that bothers me the most about this stuff is that the politicians, corporations, administrators, etc. put out these messages to us, half the population believes them, but then the actions don't match the message (because the message was a lie to begin with). In this case, TikTok is bad because it's Chinese and China is bad and their government is using it to spy on us. The Us government wants to ban TikTok because it's a security risk. They want to keep us safe. Okay......so following that logic, why not ban it immediately to stop the risk? And, okay, it's finally banned.......but we have absolute zero news of changes the company has made........why would Trump want to un-ban it! It's not safe! Literally nothing has been done to make TikTok safe for the US and no message from the government had come out saying that research was done and it was found to be safe now so it's okay to use it.
Why does this not bother the people that believe this horseshit??? This kind of stuff blows my mind almost daily.
Another recent example is, when someone was searching a grant database at MIT, they discovered that the school received millions for doing research for the Israeli army. The school then suppressed the information and took down the entire tool for searching grant information. Like, THAT MAKES NO FUCKING SENSE! If the message is, we side with Israel, we are backing the good guys, anyone that says they are protesting the bombing of Gaza is actually antisemitic, and we will not tolerate our students or faculty protesting because, again, we support Israel and anybody protesting what they do is doing so because they hate Jewish people. That's the message universities have been giving, right? So then it follows, they should be proud to have received millions of dollars and done research for the Israeli army! Why are they not putting out press releases saying they helped the good guys?!! They should be proud to have contributed to something they believe is good and just and they should readily take credit for it! But, no, they quietly hid the information and scrapped the tools to find it. That MAKES NO SENSE!
Obviously nothing makes sense because it's all built on lies. The people in power know what they're doing. They know what's going on. Everyone else, though....? I absolutely hate to say this but there's just a huge lack of critical thinking and a very heavy reliance on faith. I see the commercials on Real America's Voice every damn day and think, how can you not be skeptical of all these politicians that are literally trying to sell you weird shit??? Right now, Matt Gaetz wants to sell you Ivermectin and all the other live saving drugs the evil democrats don't want you to have and you can get 15% off with the code #mattgaetz. (Not kidding. This is a real commercial I see everyday.) And you can get a patriotic Trump knife for free if you just pay shipping & handling fees. (Also real.) I.........this very clearly all looks like propaganda to me. Why are my parents and so many others so sincere about this stuff??? It's absolutely wild to me because literally none of the actions match the messages at this point and it's driving me nuts. I just want things to make sense.
Pinning this. Thanks, Sam. Also, say hi to the cats from me!
I have no cats of my own so I can only assume that you mean the next time I see one in passing to tell it David said hi. I will do that.
This is such a good comment. Thank you! The MIT and Israel example absolutely hits the nail on the head and is something I have been saying forever (institutions and Gov here in Aus are doing the same shit).
Critical thinking is the most valuable thing I ever learned at university. I have always been skeptical and curious but actually being able to analyse content opened my mind so much. I can understand how dismantling your whole belief system is also terrifying which is why people don't and won't see reason or fact on these things.
I'm not even sure I learned critical thinking at uni even though it was one of the hallmarks of my undergrad program. And I certainly didn't learn media literacy in school, which I am hoping is actually a very big thing in schools now...??? (Please tell me children learn about media literacy in every grade and every class in college now. Please.)
Thinking about it now, I think some of my critical thinking is just the way my brain has always worked and the rest is from a lot of connections I've made, mostly online, mostly via Twitter in the last 18 years. I'll keep the childhood stories to myself but before all the hubub about "fake news", there was this history professor on Twitter named Mills Kelly that taught at my alma mater and he talked a lot about the intersection of history, digital media, and lies. If I remember correctly, he used to teach a whole course on this stuff and each class would put some information out there and try to fool people........which was amusing but made some people mad.
And, yes, as someone that grew up in the church and also in a town where it was assumed you were conservative, learning new things -- particularly learning new people -- was extremely painful for me. I cried a lot, lol. I would never take back those experiences, though.
Thank you for your perspective as a user and creator Rachel. I realised I have liked a bunch of your content before:) I think a lot of people who don't use tiktok don't understand it because they only hear the absolute worst (chinese spies! vacuous influencers! corrupting kids!) and don't realise it is just a another social media platform designed to make money. It has good and bad. The cat content is also top tier!
Aw shucks! Thanks so much. Completely agree — like many things there are good and bad parts of TikTok just like all social media platforms, but I think the consensus with my peers is that TikTok was at least tipped a *little bit* more in favor of the good. How things go from here is yet to be seen!
It's scary how it seems to have been a *successful* stunt, too.
THIS is what pisses me off the most. Well, besides that pandering message to Trump. It's vile.
A stunt which depends on the stupidity and short memories of a hell of a lot of Americans, who are unfortunately so damn easy to dupe. Why do we have so many stupid people and how have they gotten to be in charge of all of us? It's hard not to feel hopeless about it.
Another way to think about it is that the system in which we exist was designed to keep our memories short. I referenced it briefly but I don't blame people for forgetting that Trump started this whole mess — it felt like 10 lifetimes ago in this country! Unfortunately I think even when you acknowledge this, it can still feel hopeless :-/
"The TikTok Ban Was Just a Stunt"
Of course it was. I'm only shocked that they didn't have to offer Trump a nakedly corrupt gift of, I dunno, $5M in Bytedance shares or something first before he waved it through. Maybe just the opportunity to pretend to be the hero was enough.
Unfortunately it was a successful stunt.
How do we know that there was no quid pro quo? Trump's agreements are ALWAYS transactional.
Im not American and not particularly attached to tiktok but this last week leading up to tiktok going dark has raised a lot of dread inside me. Because it all seems like a "lesser evil" situation. Do I want meta to control tiktok too and have monipoly on social media? Or have trump have his grubby fingers there? Or do americans want their data given to china (and ours too if we are users on tiktok). I think all in all this an absolute distraction to something else.. while your average citizens will care to have their doom scroll back (and be grateful to the orange man for it 🤮) ... it definitely is a cover for all the other things happening or coming soon. I honestly am wanting to step away from social media entirely. I just need the courage to because I am chronically online (my husband hasnt had any social media for the last 10 years).
I think the piece clarifies a little what is going on: A lot of distraction from what really matters - with a healthy dose of xenophobia!
Oh and a lot of my dread is for the wider tech/data war and ai we have going on around us. Its actually really grim the kinds of things happening to which im oblivious to because the tech stuff usually goes over my head.
I was working on my computer and I got the usual pop up for an email arriving which said "Why the TikTok ban was just a stunt by David Farrier" which I read to mean the ban was a stunt by David Farrier! Certainly an eye catching headline and one I could somehow imagine you using ironically, or something! OR maybe you were repeating something one of your haters said. Or something! The whole topic is weird and that experience added another layer of weird, and then a giggle at myself!!
David Farrier, the actual Wizard of Oz! He is behind the curtain pulling the strings!!
It's not Elmo or Zuck but Farrier we must be wary of.
It’s true, he punches way above his weight.
No doubt it’s a stunt. I’m ready for the MAGA crowd to champion Trump for saving Tik Tok. This, along with the Greenland, Canada and Panama comments, is the foreshadowing to what the next 4 years are going to be. Buckle up, the next season of America is about to start.
As one “sluttymayo@jorts.horse” said on Mastodon:
“a grateful nation turns its eyes to racism man from tv for giving them app back”
It could be my personal TikTok bubble, but all of the US creators I follow seem to be perfectly aware that it was all a stunt and most likely a case of propaganda and some kind of tech company corporate merger (likely Meta - a lot of US politicians quickly bought up shares in the past week or so) combined. They're happy to take it for now, because it means they get their audience and income back. But most of them are continuing to ridicule Trump.
Time will tell I guess. But I think that while there are an element that swallow the propaganda, a lot of American people, especially young people, are not as stupid as they think.
As a TikToker myself, I think that's exactly it — the bubble! Remember that Donald Trump has almost 15M followers on the platform and has garnered many millions (maybe even billions?) of views/impressions during the election — much of which probably never hit my FYP or yours. Plus, the flip side of this is that I'm seeing a lot of conspiracy theories (as mentioned in the piece I have some serious doubts about Meta's involvement in the shutdown beyond any sort of political handwaving) which can distract from the basic truth of it: Trump is a narcissist and all parts of our government + corporate actors are willing to back him up.
This is very true and the scary thing is there is a HUGE censorship issue now. You can’t say anything negative about trump, musk, zuck without your comments being auto-deleted and tons of words and phrases are auto-flagged now. Comments auto-delete if they don’t pass the censors and content is being automatically taken down for the same reasons.
Our Dear Leader and his pack of oligarch cronies implemented some nice new policies and cute little algorithmic tweaks to aid their propaganda machine when they “saved” tiktok. There are tons of terms you can no longer look up on the content search pages and videos railing against it, spreading active current news, etc, aren’t being spread to people the way tiktok’s algorithm normally works.
Wild how the right is so adamant about freedom of speech and yet they support a fascist regime actively suppressing speech and the sharing of information.
Tiktok isn’t the freeform, weird little place it once was, and it sadly never will be again in the U.S.
I'm totally recommending people in the U.S. delete any and all meta apps off their phone. And if you rely on any of the apps for income, this video may be of interest https://www.reddit.com/r/nothinghappeninghere/s/SyilPNTsOh
I hate to say this, but TikTok has never been a "freeform" place of any kind. Censorship has been REALLY intense on it right from the beginning - look at all the "code" words that have sprung up over the years. I've had endless innocuous, though political, comments removed over the years. I know heaps of people who have been deplatformed, demonetised and shadow-banned long before all this stuff started happening. The only difference was the rules were made by it's Chinese connections, now they're being made by the US as well.
I actually think the censorship is stronger inside the US now than it is outside though. I am hearing a lot of US people say they can't search keywords or mention topics in their posts or comments, yet it seems fine using it here in NZ. Or at least no different to it was before.
This is a great point. I think those are things I’m used to in a certain sense. Instagram & (especially) tiktok are not 18+ spaces, so certain topics needing their own terms to get around censorship made sense to me on the grounds of protecting a somewhat (and albeit problematic in its own right) teen-friendly space. To me I saw it as keeping things PG and PG-13 at most (U.S. movie censorship category ratings) rather than R.
But you’re def right. Shadow banning and censorship had already been a big issue on the app. I’ve never been a creator and I’ve never looked back at comments I’ve dropped to see if they’d been hidden or deleted for any reason so the impact it had on my life was pretty non-existent until now
Mine too! Last week my FYP reminded me of early days of twitter...people getting increasingly sillier but we were all in on the joke.
What happened that this was a diversion for? That’s the question I always ask when something like this occurs.
Yep, feeling pretty ill about this whole thing. To me, it is a reminder of how *in control* governments are of social media. They're designed so that you feel free on the apps, but that could not be further from the truth. Tik tok is the ultimate brain washing tool -- and we lap it up! Who knows what kind of deals Trump could have made with tik tok to adjust the algorithms... I feel it is getting unsafer all the time. I know this and yet my tik tok screen time is still over 8 hours a week!! It is so hard to break the addiction. Seeing it for what it really is does help though, so thanks David and Rachel.
It's a conundrum I battle with daily! Social media, like most things, has its good and its bad. The "invisibility" of the algorithms on all social apps is definitely unsettling and I'm curious if/when we'll start to notice a change on TikTok.
"Thanks to President Trump...." stroke the ego and you will get your share of the pie grasshopper.
The orange idiot strikes again.
There's only one thing Trump loves having stroked more than his ego, but either way, you get the trickle down.
Strong rumours he loves a golden trickle down.
Eewwwww 😫
It’s all a bit Scientology, isn’t it? Incidentally the incoming Attorney General, Pam Bondi, has ties to Scientology. Scary times ahead. I feel for the many millions in America who want no part in this madness.
I am looking forward to sharing this - thank you so much for putting all of this together. I'm a Canadian but feel very connected to Americans and feel ill thinking about what the next 4 years are going to look like.
I increasingly want to check out of this world and just focus on my daughter and family. So I just tune out of most politics, news etc.. which is perhaps to my detriment. It’s actually foul that this is so clearly a stunt and people are so easily fooled. My heart hurts.
Donald J Trump. Real Estate mogul, president and professional stuntman.
I know this matters to a lot of people, but I abandoned the social media a while back and....there was a gap for a while and I filled it with hard news (which has added a lot of soft entertainment stuff) and I have come to rely on a few sources like webworm to keep me up to date on how crappy and and exactly how, as in by which means, social media is crappy. I'm seeing so much rage bait crap and true crap coming through today with the handover and I'm thinking about just checking out for a bit. I know a lot of people don't have that choice, and I hope that they can channel their energies to uncovering and sharing the crap that is about to go down. I'll come back and consume that content, and wait for that pile of content to get large enough to stimulate change, or revolution. I'm here, ready to vote for imposition of carbon costs and application of restrictions on conflict of interest. Also, steeply progressive tax curves and flat out limits to wealth accumulation. Maybe some hard nosed limits on inheritance. There are many ways to fix our problems, people just need to get scared enough to talk about them, and angry enough to vote for them. Meanwhile, Trump will be the attention-seeking ass that he is, and he will forever fall short of getting respected.