More screaming into the void
Jan. 20th, 2025 06:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dolorosa_12I wasn't going to post about the brief banning of TikTok in the US, because I don't use TikTok, don't live in the United States, and see no situation that would cause either of these things to change.
But then the discourse and hot takes in response to the ban started rolling in, and they were, quite honestly, almost uniformly enraging — and to make matters worse, were inadvertently spreading unbelievably appalling misinformation — and I stewed in irritation for several days before giving in to the inevitable urge to vent.
I observed the vast majority of these inane reponses elsewhere online, although there were little pockets on Dreamwidth, but as always, my standard dislaimer applies: if you didn't perpetuate this behaviour, I'm not complaining about you.
I've just spent two days watching people — including many people who think of themselves as activists, politically engaged, and with decent critical thinking and media literacy skills — get played like a violin. The absurd responses I observed being spread around virally include:
The US government wanted to ban TikTok because they didn't want their citizens finding out about socialised healthcare in China (this, shared uncritically by many of the aforementioned people, including non-Americans living in countries with socialised healthcare, none of whom stopped to pause and ask two questions: is China the only country in the world with socialised healthcare? and was TikTok the only way that Americans might learn of the existence thereof?)
Whataboutery comparing the iniquities of the US with the iniquities of the Chinese state, the latter of which were then handwaved away
Conspiratorial thinking, which cast TikTok's algorithm as some kind of paradise for alternative viewpoints and perspectives, 'the one big social media platform where the US government can't control what you see' (with a complete failure to understand that any algorithmic feed is controlling what you see, and none of this is going to help expose you to a variety of perspectives, US government-approved or otherwise)
The disinformation being deliberately spread by TikTok itself, implying the ban was the work of the outgoing administration, and that Trump was working with them to get it lifted (the timeline of all this makes plain the blatant manipulation going on: the app was blocked in the US — with this message about Trump — on 18th January, and the app appears to have been restored to US users on 19th January; Trump was not in office on 19th January and was only inaugurated today, 20th January), again being shared utterly uncritically by myriad people who should have known better — or at least been able to look at a calendar
Again, as I say, I only witnessed the fringes of this on Dreamwidth, tangentially, but I had to go on an unfollowing spree elsewhere online: any time I saw any of this utter bullshit being spread, I unfollowed without a single regret. I used to have a three strikes and you're out policy when it came to social media mis- and disinformation, but one of my resolutions for this year was to move to a zero tolerance policy in this regard. I don't think most people I observe sharing this kind of stuff are doing it deliberately to deceive or manipulate, but their behaviour is the equivalent of unintentionally spreading a physical virus through careless public health choices, and I have very little tolerance for it these days.
Before I move on to this final paragraph, I want to emphasise again that I'm complaining about behaviour I've mostly witnessed elsewhere — the 'you' is a general you — and my complaints are very, very, very much not directed at anyone likely to be reading my journal!
People on the progressive side of the political spectrum are very quick to point and sneer and laugh at the kind of disinformation that goes viral on the right: who could be so stupid as to think that there is a secret sex trafficking ring in the basement of a Washington DC pizza restaurant, or that Microsoft is installing microchips in people who receive Covid vaccines, and so on. But those disinfo campaigns are not aimed at us, and are not designed to be persuasive to us. Unfortunately, there is also a lot of disinformation targeted at the left — especially the US left — designed to go viral, and designed to validate beliefs and values held by people on the left; for this reason, it's much less obvious, because superficially it confirms things that progressives already feel to be true or important. I've become better at recognising it over the years (there were at least two points last year where I'm pretty sure I could spot a critical mass of people unintentionally spreading material that I think was part of deliberate, targeted, malicious campaigns), and I strongly believe that people on my side of the political spectrum need to take it much more seriously. The first step is to behave more responsibly when a post which seems to validate one's understanding of an issue (or of the world) floats up into one's social media feed. The urge to share is often very great, and the mechanism for sharing is so (in my opinion, too) easy: just the click of a button. As I have said many, many times before, if you don't have time to think more deeply about the content of the post and properly evaluate its veracity, you don't actually have the time to share it.
Two things can be true at once: the US TikTok 'ban' was an act of hypocrisy, enacted for disingenous reasons, and the way the 'ban' played out these past few days was a piece of deceptive political theatre, sparking a whole lot of discourse that in my opinion seemed deliberately designed to manipulate. (And, as a final note — use whatever apps you want, but handwaving the dangers of data harvesting is not a good look, particularly for people involved in political activism, and the best solution is to regulate it, give users robust and transparent opt-out options as the default, and then block platforms that don't comply.)
But all this feels like shouting into the wind.
But then the discourse and hot takes in response to the ban started rolling in, and they were, quite honestly, almost uniformly enraging — and to make matters worse, were inadvertently spreading unbelievably appalling misinformation — and I stewed in irritation for several days before giving in to the inevitable urge to vent.
I observed the vast majority of these inane reponses elsewhere online, although there were little pockets on Dreamwidth, but as always, my standard dislaimer applies: if you didn't perpetuate this behaviour, I'm not complaining about you.
I've just spent two days watching people — including many people who think of themselves as activists, politically engaged, and with decent critical thinking and media literacy skills — get played like a violin. The absurd responses I observed being spread around virally include:
Again, as I say, I only witnessed the fringes of this on Dreamwidth, tangentially, but I had to go on an unfollowing spree elsewhere online: any time I saw any of this utter bullshit being spread, I unfollowed without a single regret. I used to have a three strikes and you're out policy when it came to social media mis- and disinformation, but one of my resolutions for this year was to move to a zero tolerance policy in this regard. I don't think most people I observe sharing this kind of stuff are doing it deliberately to deceive or manipulate, but their behaviour is the equivalent of unintentionally spreading a physical virus through careless public health choices, and I have very little tolerance for it these days.
Before I move on to this final paragraph, I want to emphasise again that I'm complaining about behaviour I've mostly witnessed elsewhere — the 'you' is a general you — and my complaints are very, very, very much not directed at anyone likely to be reading my journal!
People on the progressive side of the political spectrum are very quick to point and sneer and laugh at the kind of disinformation that goes viral on the right: who could be so stupid as to think that there is a secret sex trafficking ring in the basement of a Washington DC pizza restaurant, or that Microsoft is installing microchips in people who receive Covid vaccines, and so on. But those disinfo campaigns are not aimed at us, and are not designed to be persuasive to us. Unfortunately, there is also a lot of disinformation targeted at the left — especially the US left — designed to go viral, and designed to validate beliefs and values held by people on the left; for this reason, it's much less obvious, because superficially it confirms things that progressives already feel to be true or important. I've become better at recognising it over the years (there were at least two points last year where I'm pretty sure I could spot a critical mass of people unintentionally spreading material that I think was part of deliberate, targeted, malicious campaigns), and I strongly believe that people on my side of the political spectrum need to take it much more seriously. The first step is to behave more responsibly when a post which seems to validate one's understanding of an issue (or of the world) floats up into one's social media feed. The urge to share is often very great, and the mechanism for sharing is so (in my opinion, too) easy: just the click of a button. As I have said many, many times before, if you don't have time to think more deeply about the content of the post and properly evaluate its veracity, you don't actually have the time to share it.
Two things can be true at once: the US TikTok 'ban' was an act of hypocrisy, enacted for disingenous reasons, and the way the 'ban' played out these past few days was a piece of deceptive political theatre, sparking a whole lot of discourse that in my opinion seemed deliberately designed to manipulate. (And, as a final note — use whatever apps you want, but handwaving the dangers of data harvesting is not a good look, particularly for people involved in political activism, and the best solution is to regulate it, give users robust and transparent opt-out options as the default, and then block platforms that don't comply.)
But all this feels like shouting into the wind.
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Date: 2025-01-20 07:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-01-21 05:56 pm (UTC)