TikTok, like any other platform owned by a multibillion-dollar tech giant, was never intended to serve the public interest.

NO FUCKING SHIT, SHERLOCK

It pains me that this seems to fly high over many people’s heads. Companies are not your friends, they don’t give a single flying fuck about you or your wellbeing, all they care about is money and how to extract it from you with the least effort. They WILL fuck you in every possible way if they know they can get away with it.

Safeguarding access to them is crucial for ensuring free speech, and yet that speech is never truly free — always regulated by a black box of algorithms, always harvested and sold by profit-seeking companies.

In a way, that’s what the fediverse is trying to solve, by putting the power back into the hands of people, though at the moment, only the more savvy or those with the means of keeping instances running

Black box algorithms should be banned.

Social media algorithms affect society deeply.

Why the fuck are they allowed to be black boxes instead of forced open for the scrutiny of legislators, the courts, and the public?

Nah, instead of doing anything fucking reasonable like regulating the algorithms, we’re just gonna ban ones we don’t like.

Are we in a simulation ? Controlled by some tech companies and political parties ?

No we are not. I recall Marshall McLuhan telling a story about early Egypt. Originally, the power in society was with the Priest caste, because they could write (heiroglyphics). Eventually though, papyrus was invented, and the Military caste began to use it to do things like document stores, send short messages, and so on. The language on papyrus was used in every day life, the heiroglyphics were not. So, over time the power in society moved from the Priest caste to the Military caste because they were in charge of the useful communication tools.

In the modern era, software code is quite literally language made manifest. Only a relatively small number of knowledge workers speak these lagnauges fluently, and it does give them deeper control over the world because now everything runs on computers and software code. We have handed control in society over to the techbros accidentally by centering software so much they essentially can put a gun to the head of society and say “Hey, without us, all this stuff stops working. Do as we say.”

Traditional media/communications was our Priest caste, and the tech community is the now the new Military caste, having developed and are in control of the dominant and important communications infrastructure/language.