US lawmakers vote 50-0 to force sale of TikTok despite angry calls from users

This is a really great way of putting it. I’d never heard that before, but it’s a truly apt way of summarizing one of the biggest problems I have with fellow leftists. However, I think I’d argue this is a slightly different situation.

Yeah, it’s a start toward something good. But it’s still sticky in its spirit.

It’s sort of similar to the complaint against incrementalism. It’s true, incrementalism is not a healthy solution to the problems we face. But fighting against good steps forward because you’re against the concept of incrementalism is…foolish…right? Or is it? Because sinking our efforts into incrementalism takes away effort from broad advancement. And incrementalism has been our MO since forever. And it’s only brought us further down the road to ruin.

But, again, fighting good incremental changes is nonsense. I dunno, it’s a nuanced issue and I’m not even sure how I feel about it. It’s interesting. And as someone who doesn’t use the more “standard” social media and never has, I’m all for erasing social media from existence. I’ve seen what it did to everyone in my life, and I was the perfect age for every step of social media’s growth: xanga/livejournal in middle school, MySpace in middle school/early high school, and then Facebook came about in my senior year, instagram in college and while i traveled in my early 20s…but I was an anti-anything-popular emo kid and goddamn I’m glad I was. But I also saw first hand how much social media changed my interactions with everyone in my life. It wasn’t pretty. People were addicted, constantly being just floored that I wasn’t on FB, countless people threatening to make me a Facebook page? It was severely strange behavior. And now tiktok is like all of that on goddamn super steroids. But it’s less people shoving it down my throat, and more just completely sucked in by it. Which is honestly scarier.

https://www.businessinsider.com/fbi-uses-instagram-etsy-linkedin-to-find-george-floyd-protester-2020-6#:~:text=In%202016%2C%20for%20example%2C%20the,a%20way%20to%20track%20protesters.

It's fucked that an authoritarian government would use social media to track and arrest protestors. I'd love to believe that this is a move toward transparency and protecting people but I think it's a lot more likely to be a "nobody exploits social media to manipulate and repress my citizenry except me, and maybe the boy" situation.