What damage, exactly, can TikTok be claimed to have done to society? Certainly not anything that Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Instagram, Youtube, or- what comes to mind as closest to TikTok in format if not sophistication, Vine, has not already done (and then some)
Is it so disastrous (or different from what came before) that now there are trending dance videos? Nevermind the fact that these things absolutely existed before. And is it so damaging, that short-form video content has become more popular? Frankly, what has TikTok revealed within western society, that did not exist before?
TikTok exists in other countries as well. What “irreparable damage” has been inflicted on the various Latin American, Asian, African, east European countries that have it? What makes TikTok so different? You know, Facebook in particular has been provably caught with electoral interference through systemic misinformation campaigns- within multiple countries, including the imperial core of the imperial cores itself, AmeriKKKa (Cambridge Analytica). It has actually been used to facilitate genocide in Myanmar (and I think a very strong case could be made about Meta and Alphabet facilitating it in Palestine as we speak). These AmeriKKKan social media sites/apps are also also all rife with “former” US alphabet agencies’ staff, it’s basically an open secret, and their services are, among other things, basically backdoors for Uncle Sam and the 5 Eyes to violate their users’ privacy, swoop them up in dragnets, etc… and their algorithms notoriously have a certain (right-wing) bent- or as they call it, the “alt-right pipeline”- and now, even as Meta and AIPAC lobbying has brought about what will be the disastrous move (for the US, not China) of outright trying to force a sale of TikTok despite its following American laws to the letter- what the rest of the world recognizes as extortion, and another example of the US cutting off its nose to spite China’s face (like with the seizures of Russian assets, the ““reparations”” being handed to Ukraine, the 100%+ tariffs on Chinese EVs/etc) it’s TikTok that is supposed to have done “irreparable damage?”
Interestingly enough, the key difference between TikTok and the other US alternatives is that- TikTok has, unlike pretty much all mainstream AmeriKKKan social media, actually allowed some vestiges of “freeze peach” and thus revealed to many the horrific atrocities the Pissraelis are committing. Can we call that “irreparable damage,” or rather the opposite?
