davel

it drives engagement

Defenestrate corporate media framing. There are no advertisers to market social media “engagement” to. We are not the product. In fact there is no product, just as there is no customer.

1. Wikipedia isn't a citation.
2. What does that random dude have to do with anything?

Show us how it is.

It’s pure projection.

[Mitt] Romney Admits Push to Ban TikTok Is Aimed at Censoring News Out of Gaza

"Some wonder why there was such overwhelming support for us to shut down, potentially, TikTok or other entities of that nature," said Romney. "If you look at the postings on TikTok and the number of mentions of Palestinians relative to other social media sites, it's overwhelmingly so among TikTok broadcasts."

• Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR): TikTok Law Is an Attempt to Censor, Not a Warning to Big Tech (Emphasis original)

  [NYT’s Cecilia] Kang’s thesis [link] was premised on years’ worth of media and policymaker fearmongering that TikTok user data was susceptible to surveillance by the Chinese government (BuzzFeed News, 6/17/22; Forbes, 10/20/22; Guardian, 11/7/22). According to Kang’s colleagues, the law’s enactment was prompted by “concerns that the Chinese government could access sensitive user data” (New York Times, 4/26/24). In 2023, Montana Gov. Greg Gianforte sought to prohibit TikTok throughout his state on the grounds that “the Chinese Communist Party” was “collecting US users’ personal, private and sensitive information” (Montana Free Press, 5/17/23). (Gianforte’s attempt was later thwarted by a federal judge.)

  If such fears were officials’ genuine motivation, one could hope that broader data-privacy regulation might follow. Yet, as the Times neglected to mention, the spying accusations are tenuous—and deeply cynical. As even US intelligence officials concede, apprehensions about China’s access to TikTok user data are strictly hypothetical (Intercept, 3/16/24). And, despite its bombshell headline “Analysis: There Is Now Some Public Evidence That China Viewed TikTok Data,” CNN (6/8/23) cautioned that said evidence—a sworn statement from a former ByteDance employee—“remains rather thin.”

  Given their dubious nature, it’s hard to see these data-privacy claims as anything other than a pretext for the US to throttle TikTok. By forcing either divestment or a ban, the US, at least in theory, wins: It transfers a tremendously lucrative and influential company into its own hands, or it prevents that company from serving as a platform—albeit one with plenty of problems—on which people can engage in and learn from discourses that are critical of US empire.

• CNN, 2022: TikTok moves US users’ data to Oracle servers to address security concerns
• US private equity firms own more of TikTok than anyone. WSJ: What Is TikTok Worth? Some Say $20 Billion, Others Say $100 Billion. The CEO is Singaporean, Shou Zi Chew, and the VP is American, Michael Beckerman.
• [Mitt] Romney Admits Push to Ban TikTok Is Aimed at Censoring News Out of Gaza

  "Some wonder why there was such overwhelming support for us to shut down, potentially, TikTok or other entities of that nature," said Romney. "If you look at the postings on TikTok and the number of mentions of Palestinians relative to other social media sites, it's overwhelmingly so among TikTok broadcasts."

• Paris Marx: The TikTok ban is all about preserving US power The platform isn’t a national security threat, but a challenge to Silicon Valley’s dominance

I point none of this out to defend TikTok as some beacon of hope: it’s just another corporate social media platform. I don’t have a TikTok account and don’t use it.

We’ve never really had an “honest” election process. The US has never been a democracy, because it was born of bourgeois revolution[1], and its laws & institutions were crafted by and for the bourgeoisie. The wealthy, white, male, land-owning, largely slave-owning Founding Fathers constructed a bourgeois state with “checks and balances” against the “tyranny of the majority”. It was never meant to represent the majority—the working class—and it never has, despite eventually allowing women and non-whites (at least those not disenfranchised by the carceral system) to vote.

[Princeton & Northwestern] Study: US is an oligarchy, not a democracy

It was effective in Syria last month, after a decade (really several decades) of effort and hundreds of billions of dollars. All you gotta do is infinitely fund and arm ~~terrorists~~ “moderate rebels” and Bob’s your uncle.

Whacking a CEO doesn’t do shit. They just install a new one and divert more funding to the police state.

She’s got an excuse for everything. They’re shit excuses to historical materialists, but they’re good enough for corporate social media platforms. She should write Langley’s Liberal International Order hasbara handbook.

Scratch an Global North liberal and an imperialist bleeds.

This person is very smug about her capitalist realism, probably because she’s convinced that she personally benefits from it and wants to maintain it, while simultaneously crying liberal crocodile tears about the damage it does.