A Rant About Social Media Hellscapes
In the face of a TikTok ban coming down the pike, we're just giving a bit of a lay of the land of some of the big companies.
Hello, friends,
Last week we talked about Biden’s performance at the State of The Union address, and how he sure as hell didn’t seem like a doddering old man. Mid-week, we had a follow-up article by my friend and frequent co-conspirator Jamie Diamond, taking us in-depth into one aspect of Louis DeJoy’s postal service policy.
Today I don’t have anything particularly on-my-mind, but in an effort to get something out, let’s talk about social media stuff.
Let’s start with Twitter, since that’s currently where the Nazis are congregating.
But first, if you’re reading this I strongly encourage you to subscribe, to leave a comment, to like the article, to share it - whatever it is you can do. I’m trying to gauge just how interested people are in The Progressive Cafe, so the more feedback, the better. Thanks!
Twitter’s At It Again, Helping Nazis Out
A few days ago, the author behind the Naz44i-aligned comic Stonetoss was doxxed. While I don’t exactly love doxxing in most cases, I have a general purpose “Nazis don’t deserve fair treatment on account of their personal choice to be a Nazi” principle for most things in life. In other words, being a Nazi opts you out of progressive societal norms with me, as a way of shortcircuiting the paradox of tolerance.
Well, now Twitter has cracked down on journalists who reported on Stonetoss’ real identity, such as Alejandra Caraballo (link goes to my personal confirmation of this fact), because apparently it’s a bad thing to doxx people when they’re Nazis, but totally fine when psychopaths like Chaya Raichick do it to Queer people. I point Raichick out only because Caraballo happens to be Trans, meaning Elon must have gotten extra interested in banning her.
I kind of want to be done with Twitter. I know it’s still a major global news hub, but it drifts further into psychopathy every day and it doesn’t feel like there are real conversations happening there.
Let’s talk about where real conversations are happening: TikTok!
So They Want To Ban TikTok
Okay. In fairness, “Banning TikTok” isn’t quite the official agenda. It’s more “force ByteDance, the company which owns TikTok, to sell it.” Because, you see, ByteDance is owned by the Chinese Communist Party - or something. I don’t know. I don’t care.
See, the fear is that Communist Bad Guy China is going to use the data TikTok extracts to harm the American people - you know, like all other social media companies do. Because, of course, our data privacy laws are dogshit and need to be seriously rewritten, but that would be hard.
So that’s led to Fascist ex-Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin to put together a team that would just so happen to be happy to take TikTok off of ByteDance’s hands for whatever scraps ByteDance could get from them. After all, what’s more capitalistic than one party being forced, against its will, to sell a valuable asset to another?
But since Mnuchin is literally an ex-Trump official, there’s a second subtext that is increasingly clear about how TikTok is being treated: It is feared by conservative interests (including conservative Dems like Nancy Pelosi) because it is essentially having a different conversation than most of the rest of the internet. TikTok creators talk about the ongoing genocide (I re-refer you to Netanyahu’s “Amalek” statements as one aspect among many reflecting why I believe the various acts of slaughter, such as the Flour Massacre, is coordinated as part of something larger) in Palestine - and that’s a threat to conservative interests.
In other words: To them not only is China using American data, but it’s also using historical information to subvert American interests, and that’s unacceptable to them.
Or maybe it’s just because I recently joined TikTok. Who knows?
And to be clear, TikTok, isn’t perfect. It has heavy censorship that’s made alternative lingo get way out of control. There are topics we can’t really talk about there without at the very least getting our accounts throttled. The word “kill” is thought to be one such word. “Unalived” is now the term, because of course it is - at least until the next phrase gets input into the moderation scanning tools.
Facebook/Instagram’s Parent Company, Meta
Meanwhile, Facebook’s parent company Meta is basically sitting this disaster out, knowing that the biggest rival to its Instagram Reels might get shut down and salivating over the profits such a decision would yield. After all, it’s certainly not as if Meta has a history of hiring Fascist ghouls to attack TikTok.
Meta, of course, was heavily compromised in the Cambridge Analytica scandal, wherein peoples’ data was misused by Fascist-aligned groups to maximize Conservative voices both in the Brexit situation of the mid 2010’s and the 2016 election. It’s almost as if the data privacy laws sucking are the issue here, and not TikTok’s Chinese ownership.
Almost, right?
Otherwise, one gripe I have about Facebook that’s just a gripe is that it likes to automatically reload itself and lose your place in your scrolling. I know I have the opposite complaint about timeline-oriented social media, but the FB Algorithm is either “repeats the same thing ad nauseum” or “You can never find that thing you were about to click before the site refreshed itself again.”
In other words, the app has a lot of work still to be done to it.
Reddit is probably my favorite news aggregate, but even they don’t escape mention today. They’ve recently announced they’ll be selling their users’ posts to AI training companies. You know how we feel about generative AI here. I had videos planned about their r/writingprompts subreddit, but now I can’t do them since peoples’ writing will just be stolen and absorbed into an AI monstrosity.
The Others
I mean, look, there are other social media networks out there, but they each have problems.
Post.news is very news oriented, and not built for much else. But it automatically copies The Progressive Cafe over, which is nice!
Spoutible is a Twitter clone, but it’s had its own moderation issues.
Tribel has been janky in the past, and its category system is weird.
Mastodon is so disconnected that discovering friends as well as content is just a chore.
BlueSky is perhaps the most promising, but is one of those timeline-oriented sites that shows the latest post first, meaning if someone spams a bunch of posts all at once, that’s mostly what you’re gonna see.
Threads is an Instagram, and thus Meta product, and we’ve already talked about them.
Tumblr exists, and isn’t exactly a “The Others,” but is mostly for art and not news/politics. It’s also had issues with kooky management.
And I’m sure there are others I’m leaving out, but that’s for another time I suppose.
So, yeah, that’s kind of the social media landscape at the time. The big competitors all have problems. The little ones are still little. They all have flaws, but they ultimately do serve a purpose - even if that purpose can, to undiscerning users, just turn out to be burning the sands of life’s hourglass away.
The whole point of social media in its heyday was that you could use it to reliably contact someone at a specific enterprise. Social media teams, especially on Facebook and Twitter, constantly worked on outreach to attract new followers while responding to concerns raised by users. It was an imperfect solution to a significant problem, but it at least allowed you to reach out to a news agency and say, “Hey, there’s a problem here” and expect some sort of action to be taken.
Once Twitter ended its actual verification program and replaced it with a buy-in, authentic journalists blended in with regular users while spam bots got “verified” and get special posting privileges to make everyone’s life more annoying.
How Do We Fix It?
I mean, one aspect is definitely stronger data privacy laws, while another is not letting a Fascist-aligned venture capital group buy up the social media platform of choice for Gen Z. Those are two probably pretty big things.
Following that? I have no idea. It’s a weird area where in theory market competition should force these companies to provide better and better products, right? And maybe that’s still true of the little ones, but the big ones keep enshittifying little bit by little bit. “Oh, your feed automatically refreshes so you lose your place!” “Oh, verification isn’t a real thing anymore!” “Oh, we control who you see in your feed!” A common complaint I’ve seen from friends is, “Oh, your Instagram account got hacked? We’ll get to it right away in six months!” “Your ‘business’ inbox is full of spam!”
Thank you for reading The Progressive Cafe. If this article has helped you, please consider signing up for our mailing list. This article is by Jesse Pohlman, a former hyperlocal journalist and sci-fi/fantasy author from Long Island, New York, whose website you can check out here.