TikTok: C or D

Totally.

instagram is like this too, i imagine. it's become so much more about people trying to become personal brands than it is a photo sharing app.

I think Tiktok has gone out of their way to heavily censor anything perceived as adult content tbf, much more than Instagram, but it's not a good situation.

that was / is snapchat for me. I can't even figure out how to use the app. every time I open it i just get the camera and the icons make no sense and no i don't want to import my contacts. it was the first app that made me feel completely old.

― akm, Thursday, April 23, 2020 10:38 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

oh I didn't get snapchat either but sort of categorized it as a messaging app more than a social media platform, I'm not even sure if that's correct mind you

this one is killing me somehow.

https://vm.tiktok.com/ZS9QNE4s/

between this and the guy who tries to guess paint colors while he’s watching the constituent paints being mixed there’s this kind of joy in the abject that i feel like tiktok often just nails and i am a huge sucker for it

this one’s good too

https://vm.tiktok.com/ZS93wSxX/

https://www.tiktok.com/@rickastleyofficial/video/6890858524092402946

i almost clicked on that

amazing
https://www.theverge.com/2020/11/10/21559677/tiktok-cfius-court-petition-ban-deadline

I’ve been laughing at this TikTok for 24 hours. pic.twitter.com/ZTN5qBwEGo

— T. Kyle 🏳️‍🌈 (@tkylemac) November 20, 2020

(that woman has some severe apnea issues i think)

https://www.tiktok.com/@collroy/video/6887045734991023366

Somewhat related: It also looks like Epic records is paying tik tokkers to use old songs in hopes that a viral sound will lead to a boost in back catalog streaming. via @colinphl https://t.co/s6HV9hxzc7 pic.twitter.com/6aemUBKIb4

— Taylor Lorenz (@TaylorLorenz) December 4, 2020

Coming up with a way to make people lip syncing even worse - bravo!

lol, that is a fucking sin

can't stop watching this

I think this is the best edited Tik Tok I’ve ever seen.

pic.twitter.com/OUCqiBKkSK

— Kristi Anderson (@CinderSlays) January 9, 2021

wtf
that makes mj's black and white seem amateurish

similar in the comments

This guy too pic.twitter.com/gzgncyu5o6

— n0 name (@mrnonamerod) January 10, 2021

^nice

tiktoks that are almost definitely terrifying to watch while high:

"wow these edibles are shit" pic.twitter.com/JT5Z7PALC7

— 𝖛𝖆𝖑𝖊𝖓𝖙𝖎𝖓𝖆 ✣ 𝖑𝖔𝖗𝖉 ⬜⬜🟥🟥⬜⬜👽 (@VPestilenZ) December 16, 2020

(@connection_intercepted)

awesome

amazing

I just watched the sea shanty, done with the four lads originally from a photo. Not only is it some dope work, the shanty is catchy as hell.

the shanty is horrifically catchy and satisfying to listen to but it's been haunting my dreams

oh, can't wait for that tonight then

gonna post it anyway

Sea shanty tiktok is WILD pic.twitter.com/rjY1iXFQkA

— Kristian 🇳🇱 (@vonstrenginho) January 14, 2021

https://www.tiktok.com/@overloadcomedy/video/6920289799702203650

A little weirded out by how weirded out the kids are by their non-mirrored faces.

https://www.tiktok.com/@maelynesque/video/6910768593911221509?is_copy_url=1&is_from_webapp=v1

?eah, ?eah, ?eah, I left that extra part in post haste.

No one is doing TikTok like him pic.twitter.com/TpjcGovjKX

— Kalhan (@KalhanR) March 18, 2021

i like the sea shanty video.

however.

the platform is mostly dystopian, as are the instagram "reels." most videos are autobiographical and self-commodifying -- people commenting on their personal life, their relationships, etc, but in a way that burnishes a curated image. so far so predictable. sometimes they are selling a product or have a cashapp in their bio or whatever.

what's weird is the way the users do so, usually recreating some kind of popular meme. they turn themselves not just into a commodity, but into a very dumb meme. and they draw their pets and family members into it. like they're all cartoon people, living out a slapstick existence. the most terrifying of these videos involve that robot-voice narration.

it's like, if adorno wrote a dystopian novel, this would be what people were doing all day in his version of 2021.

i've got a video for you treeship

https://www.tiktok.com/@geezyunit/video/6947387987659443461

ok, that's pretty good.

my usually social media-illiterate became obsessed with tiktok over the past year and now i can't send videos of my cats to the family gc for fear that she'll turn them into videos with stuff dubbed over them. she's getting to a point where she sees everything as fodder and she's addicted to getting views. she and my dad keep guilting me and my brother for not liking her videos and we keep having to explain that you need to have an account to do that

social media-illiterate MOM**** became etc

am also about 90% certain that she's going to end up in a cult as she's already shown an inclination towards some of the culty new age grifters - she was already prone to that stuff before stepping into a social media platform that shoves it in her face

https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMdqJj29q/

I’m not interested in your hot takes about Afghanistan pic.twitter.com/djBOCs1pR2

— Patrick J Loller (@PatrickLoller) August 16, 2021

this cadence is like having a needle shoved into your eardrum repeatedly

tiktok is where you get to listen to the world's most obnoxious twitter accounts recite their tweets in the exact cadence you always imagined they would use

Not sure why the perpetrator of that TikTok thought that adopting the persona of Howdy Doody would lend credence to his views about foreign policy and military interventionism.

More of this, less of blandly attractive people lip syncing

https://www.tiktok.com/@hendersizzle/video/7001618935770615045

im on this now, and i am single-handedly saving it from itself

Okay, a buddy's kid was recently caught (or involved with) ripping a soap dispenser off the wall in the school bathroom (he denies having anything to do with it). I thought it was sort of an odd, kind of old-fashioned form of juvenile delinquency, something you might see in a 1981 after school special, or Seven Green Bottles.

But no, it's a tiktok challenge! And it's sweeping the nation: ...the goal of a new trend, the "Deviant Licks" TikTok challenge, is to either damage school property or steal items and post videos of it online in an attempt to go viral.

This includes vandalizing bathrooms, cutting up books, etc.

Sorry if I'm the last person on the planet to know about this.. I feel old

Furthermore, I question the wisdom of posting evidence of these crimes online, but what do I know

be gay
do crimes
post about them
online

Do you see the perpetrator?
Yeah I’m right here.

this is pretty good: In the video, the voice over the intercom said they don’t have the resources to call each of their parents to tell them what’s been happening, so the “only recourse they have” is to remove the doors from the hinges in both the girls’ and boys’ bathrooms.

My worst possible nightmare as a kid

lol Andy i don’t know where that’s from but the whole thing sounds like a pretty elaborate wind-up

even if it’s true, if it wasn’t tiktok kids would find other reasons to be idiots. i think you were right at the beginning: it’s a tale as old as time. i have a 12-yo who’s a bit of an idiot and even he would know that doing this kind of thing for the likes is moronic

No, it's a thing. It's called "devious licks," and it started with just swiping random things from school, like boxes of masks, and displaying them on TikTok. Vandalizing bathrooms was September's "challenge" so we did have a lot of people trashing the bathrooms at my school. My guess is it's fading out now, though, because the next set of challenges issued involved actual physical assault and most kids aren't dumb enough to slap their teachers and put it on TikTok.

Lily and Andy are right, but so is Tracer. If it wasn't #deviouslicks, there'd be another excuse.

TikTok seemed to be heavy on the worst genre of social media (people talking at you dropping knowledge bombs) and lighter on the best genre (dogs and puppies doing funny things).

cmon theres gotta be a lot of dog stuff on there

the algo betrayed you because the dog and cat content is primo

I know I've been critical of Tik-Tok, which is not aided by my shitty vision making viewing videos on a phone to be a headache-inducing affair, but I'm realizing that the Dems made a huge mistake by ceding the ground on this to Trump, especially since it was his Supreme Court nominees that banned it.

If the Dems in Congress had any competence or fight, instead of being a bunch of quisling gobshite wimps, they would have had/still have a coordinated message on all media (especially before TikTok went dark) hammering away that DT is the literal reason that this was disappearing. But like the similar coordinated messaging effort calling the Repubs a bunch of book-banning, womb-monitoring weirdos, that would commit the dual sin of being called 'impolite' and 'cringe' by the upscale Beltway types in the old media, while also successfully appealing to normies, and the we cannot have that!

I like pets (esp animal shelter social media accounts to convince you to adopt their dogs and the person with 3 sighthounds in Wisconsin) but I actually preferred the knowledge bomb-style posts on the whole.

xp If they had two fucking brain cells and weren't all a median of 70 years old they wouldn't have banned it in the first place.

I get an alarming number of live feeds of people living in tents, or rubble, or tents in rubble, in the Middle East, shivering and asking for donations, it’s extremely grim

Democrats have been firmly committed to Cold War II for the past four years. Maybe the concern should be less about them looking stupid re: TikTok and more about that?

Hopefully they’ll stop accusing anti-genocide protesters of being Chinese agents now that Trump is in charge of ratcheting up tensions with China.

wait what's the deal with tik tok and meta? did meta take over their hosting?

short form videos i guess pretty unsatisfying name

Found myself telling a friend at dinner the other night "sorry, I don't watch much short-form video content," and my wife zinged me by saying "is that the new 'I don't even own a TV'?"

Zuck buying TikTok and immediately seeing a mass exodus because he makes it as shit as every other meta product would be cool.

xp Honestly, though, I stopped using Facebook and Instagram before the unasked-for algorithmic junk started to populate people's feeds, and whenever someone tells me about some random video that got served up to them out of nowhere, it makes me irrationally angry even if it was something they liked. It just feels too insidious. It creeps me out.

The chronological Twitter timeline was always ideal to me, as far as social media goes, because you'd see stuff from people you didn't follow -- but only because it was amplified by people you did follow, not by The Almighty Algorithm.

a lot is being made about tiktok as a spy platform but i wonder if the usa government isnt more worried about it as a propaganda platform, its really perfect for that, i could see how a foreign government having influence over how your citizens are getting news could be troubling

oh for sure. Ryan Broderick wrote last week that what makes US politicians nervous about TikTok is that they "assume it’s doing to us what American companies like Meta and Google have done to other countries. Which is why they can’t actually admit that none of this is about free speech or national security. It’s primarily about measuring — and defining — Chinese soft power."

xp luckily they’ve solved that by deleting comments that say “free Palestine”

that should do it lol

apparently all this grandstanding/executive ordering trump is doing is pretty legally meaningless and theres a good chance that once the grace period to find a buyer expires tiktok will be unavailable in america, details in vid

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGXU46rMtRE

i think it's unavailable on the app stores

oh for sure. Ryan Broderick wrote last week that what makes US politicians nervous about TikTok is that they "assume it’s doing to us what American companies like Meta and Google have done to other countries. Which is why they can’t actually admit that none of this is about free speech or national security. It’s primarily about measuring — and defining — Chinese soft power."

― jaymc, Thursday, January 23, 2025 4:57 PM (eleven minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Absolutely, but also my FYP has been full of people reading A People's History of the United States and On Tyranny
and lots of other "subversive" material. And calling out electeds and putting the spotlight on companies and CEOs and shareholders and the Resnicks and lots of things that most people don't know about (even if they're not exactly "secret").

i think it's unavailable on the app stores

― what angers me about the smurfs these days (voodoo chili), Thursday, January 23, 2025 12:11 PM (twenty-eight seconds ago) bookmarkflaglink

yup thats the main mechanism of the law, tiktok shutting down its servers for half a day was just a political stunt

There are multiple accounts that just report on sitting officials' stock trades.

chinese soft power and subversive materials arent necessarily unrelated, china could be promoting that stuff to sow discord in america, banning free palestine is kind of telling in that regard

its an interesting dynamic to ponder, gotta stand with china on this case lol, tho obvs its not hard to imagine a situation where it would be less to my personal tastes if say china invaded taiwan

I'm pretty happy for people to use social media to self-organize leftist reading groups for political education, seems like an overall good. The fact that it implicates the School of the Americas or United Fruit or robber barons who did anti-union massacres or whatever...it's history.

yeah it seems like some people were taken aback by "free palestine" stuff on TikTok and the only way they could comprehend it was to assume that it was the result of a meddling foreign power, rather than a natural outgrowth of homegrown activist movements and discourses that had gained purchase among young people over the last decade or two.

it can be both tho a meddling foreign government is going to try to promote natural affinity groups that are convenient to their ends, it would prob be beyond even the powers of social media to create movements from scratch, and having the worlds best recommendation engine is the perfect tool to find and cultivate the stuff theyre interested in promoting

yes and a deeper issue from the standpoint of organizing imo is, how effective can we really be if we don't have reliable information about our community, what they're interested in seeing, etc? it seems like we've accepted a scenario where we're okay with never really knowing what's going on, how certain things are being boosted or silenced, and i feel like paranoia or suspicion is a natural byproduct of that. and so at the moment i'm inclined to be thinking about getting back to basics and away from reliance on social media

Several people seem to be arguing with a point no one is making. I am not, nor is anyone, saying that organizing can be done only on social media and be effective or have longevity. Or that "we" should rely on an app for "information about our community." That's just weird. That's like the epidemic of someone posting "I like pancakes" and 873484 replies saying, "OH SO YOU HATE FRENCH TOAST?"

By all means go and do things irl. It is also possible for people to share information on the internet. Like...?

i was responding to the two previous posts, which seemed to highlight a problem around determining whether activity on social media is a "natural" phenomenon or the result of manipulation, either by platforms or external agents.

i never said that you should feel bad for finding interesting things on tik tok, or that nobody should share information on the internet.

im sure this has been said tons of times itt but it is interesting that tiktok is winning via showing people things they want to see where all the american platforms seem to be full of crap that no one likes these days, except maybe youtube i guess, youtube is always the secret winner

Yeah fwiw YouTube seems to have moved past the "we see you watched a lecture on feminism, here are some videos of Ben Shapiro DEMOLISHING feminism" era and become pretty good at sussing out what I actually want to watch. Difficult to think of it as social media tho.

yeah its more a streaming algo with social aspects, but so is tiktok, which is prob part of what makes them more pleasant than the purer social networks

In orbit otm in this thread btw

TikTok be different and is what you make of it iykyk

Should govt employees have their Whatsapp taken away? It seems any Paragon client can access anything in their phones. But I guess that’s… okay? Since Meta and Paragon aren’t Chinese?

https://fortune.com/2025/02/14/gen-z-teens-experts-trust-influencers-tiktok

It’s not that Gen Z doesn’t believe in experts. Rather, it’s that social media has rewired the way they think about credibility. TikTok influencers are now our “friends.” The algorithm repeats and reinforces what we already believe. And a well-edited, engaging video is much more convincing than a long, complicated explanation from a professional. Credibility today isn’t about expertise but about who tells the most compelling story. This change is slowly reshaping how an entire generation decides what is true and what is not—sometimes with demonstrably negative results.

My only experience with TikTok was cute animal videos being shared before everyone in my circle went back to Instagram and Youtube for that.

The things I hear and see now that I'm around dozens of people watching TikTok for hours a day... burn it down, burn it all the way down. As a cesspool of misinformation, AI slop, racism and true crime scare stories it's worse than Facebook - or maybe it's just that Facebook is mostly silent and not blaring from a forklift driver's bluetooth speaker.