Didn't know where to share this.
I don't use tiktok. But every other young person I know does.
And now that it owned by a pro-trump company... It's about to get real difficult.
this post was submitted on 26 Jan 2026
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Reminder that Democrats including Murphy were pushing to ban TikTok under Biden to censor pro-Palestinian speech. I believe heβs come around on it now that he realizes censorship cuts both ways.
Regardless of how you feel about TikTok (I fucking hate it) any ban or restriction on the internet should be opposed because itβs inevitably used as a tool for censorship.
But at the same time, I do oppose the spamming of AI slop and propaganda. In the same way that I think robo calls should be considered assault. But how do you do that without falling victim to it as you say?
Propaganda by definition can be basically anything, and isn't inherently bad, it just means someone is spreading a message on purpose. What makes it bad is when it is in support of evil. People often think the solution should be to give control to some central authority which identifies the bad propaganda and filters it out, but that's a problem because such authorities are subject to powerful perverse incentives and are easily corrupted. Obviously the current US government is going to promote harmful propaganda and suppress necessary propaganda, and even if we can boot them out, the underlying corruption risk will remain.
I think the only actually robust solutions possible will have to involve individuals being able to take on more responsibility for social networks and information sharing, and not leaving it up to a company to decide what everyone sees. The basic premise of TikTok as an endless stream of personally appealing content that a hidden algorithm curates for everyone is inherently dangerous. People should move to some sort of model of sharing information that has more of a community trust dynamic and involves way more people in the work of filtering out bad info, and doesn't put all the trust in a single party.