Comments from Jimmy O’Toole
The social media app TikTok, which has gained a significant foothold in media and educational attention for many around the world, but in particular for Americans roughly in the age bracket of 13 to 25 years old. TikTok for many individuals in that bracket is the primary means of information consumption.
TikTok has long been criticized for a variety of reasons, including but not limited to the promotion of unsafe content to children, a scrolling format that is deeply addictive and that rewires the brain’s neurons and endorphin sensors, and also the wide‑scale promotion of inappropriate imagery involving children to an audience that is largely adult men.
Another issue that has become very important with TikTok has been the ownership. Some, myself included, have been critics of TikTok’s ownership by the Chinese company ByteDance. While I criticize Facebook, Instagram, and other social media outlets, I do believe that at the very minimum, American business interests are not simply seeking to dumb down the American public. They just want to make them consumers. And while that’s not a laudable goal, it’s significantly better than intentionally dumbing down and unifying the brains of America’s rising generation.
US Ownership Switch
TikTok was moved into the ownership of an American company very recently. It should be noted by observers of free speech, free press, and social media trends that upon the inauguration of Donald Trump for his second term, TikTok began to broadcast more pro‑Trump imagery and was beginning to show less of what you could call oppositional content. And now, with the most recent transfer of ownership to an American company, we have heard some horror stories over the past week, up to and including but not limited to searches for #Epstein — referencing the controversial financier Jeffrey Epstein and his relationship with Donald Trump — getting no views. Videos about ICE are getting no views. Videos about the Democratic Party are getting no views.
Putinification of TikTok
We are seeing in real time, much like in Putin’s Russia in the early 2000s, the deliberate watering down and obfuscation of oppositional information sources that can counter the narratives and ideas being posited and expounded upon and demanded to be accepted by the presidential regime.
This is particularly damaging, as for individuals who are still literally having their brains developed, the main information source for many of them is now even further compromised and will be even further and more powerful of an attempt to deliberately water down what they can know and to amplify what the regime believes they should know.
That said, this gives further credence to the use of what I will call now legacy social media — i.e., Facebook and Reddit and the blogosphere — where there is such a dedicated community of daily users, of people that are providing their opinion and their honest outlook, that are not to the same degree at least being censored, restricted, watered down, and covered up by the algorithm in an attempt to curry favor with and provide electoral support for the presidential regime.