#do i think the current tiktok ban (for lack of a more concise phrase) is good?

[princesssarcastia]

listen to me. are you listening? tiktok is not uniquely anything when it comes to the internet. it is a tool and a platform like any other, used by all kinds of people—by nearly every kind of person or entity to whom it is available, in fact! and while what the u.s. government is doing right now to force the ownership of the company to change hands is bad and happening for the wrong reasons, to put it mildly—

claiming that the u.s. establishment is interested in shutting down tiktok because its been sooooo good and revolutionary for progressive/left-wing organizing is uhh. horse shit. that's not true. everyone uses tiktok. you, statistically, probably use tiktok. so do some of the congresspeople endorsing legislation that might end in tiktok being banned. so do right-wing influencers and terfs and trad-wives. just like everyone uses every other social media site.

don't fall into that trap of thinking that just because you and the people in your circle use this tool for good, that this tool is only used for good. it is actually just a tool for everyone!

here's an excerpt from a book called, The Wires of War, by Jacob Helberg which, if you're interested in why the u.s. congress is actually pulling this shit with tiktok, is a great read. this excerpt follows a section where Helberg described the role social media played in the Arab Spring in 2011. emphasis mine.

It would be several years before the 2016 election awakened the West to the ways in which the Internet could exploit the vulnerabilities of their societies. But for the autocrats in Bejing, Moscow, and Tehran, the Arab Spring was a technological awakening of their own. Seeing other repressive governments around the world crumble, illiberal regimes in Russia and China accelerated their treatment of the information space as a domain of war. "Tech-illiterate bureaucrats were replaced by a new generation of enforcers who understood the internet almost as well as the protesters," write Singer and Brooking in their book, LikeWar: The Weaponization of Social Media. "In truth, democratic activists had no special claim to the internet. They'd simply gotten there first. "