Technology

Tiktok actually has (or had, last I looked at it) a lot of value for marginalized groups finding content made by and for each other. I used it for a while before the ads got to be too much, and I had NEVER seen so many regular trans and nonbinary and ace and aro people getting to talk to each other about whatever instead of only about gender and orientation (and seeing them existing as regular people in video form is just really fucking comforting if you're not around others like you in real life), nor so many informative videos by and about disabled folks. T

he platform has (had?) an incredible ability to enable discovery of niche communities, and I rapidly learned a hell of a lot about accessibility (from videos by actual disabled people about their struggles and solutions and day to day lives), about modern Native American cultures (especially there were a lot of Native American amateur comedians that were very funny) and concerns (f the pipeline), about ex-mormon experiences, about autistic people (yes, there's a lot of misinformation on tiktok about neurodivergence, but there's ALSO a lot of actual neurodivergent people talking about what their day to day experiences are actually like in a way that's really damn hard to find in other places that are dominated by Doctors and parent-directed articles), and people/culture from India (before India banned Tiktok), and so on and on, that I wouldn't have learned about otherwise.

And there were more successful female and Black comedians than I've ever seen elsewhere. I had more videos by Black people and Asian people and women then I've ever even come close to having in my youtube feed; it's not even comparable in that respect, really.

All of which long-winded paragraphs is to say, don't ban Tiktok, or other specific platforms. Especially not when the bills that are ostensibly to do that hand absurd amounts of power to government to do the same to future platforms with little to no oversight and with little to no justification. And more platforms just like them will crop up out of the ashes anyways.

Instead, ban individually-personalized advertising, aka the root motivator that makes companies want to peel every scrap of information out of their users in the first place.

Individually targeted advertising hasn't been a thing for that long, even though it feels so ubiquitous and unstoppable now, and for decades companies did just fine with population-level targeting like newspaper ads used to be.

I don't think the individualized ad targeting has added anything of value to society.

Having typed all that, I re-read your comment and, yeah, I suppose schools could at least block social media sites on their school wifi. That can only do so much when they've all got data connections anyways, though.

Anyway I agree that phones shouldn't be banned. It's infeasible, inadvisable, and counterproductive.