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Trump Makes It Very Clear They’re Going To Turn TikTok Into A Right Wing Propaganda Machine
(www.techdirt.com)
this post was submitted on 30 Sep 2025
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Tik tok will die and become a cesspit of far right people. Honestly just a way to burn billions of dollars in a year.
I mean, I hope so, just like I hoped so for Twitter.
Evidently a lot of people can't give up whatever is the biggest social platform of its type
I wonder if the demographics will change things. TikTok (I don't use it but from what I assume) is full of liberal people of different ages, genders (LGBTQ+) whereas Twitter was for mostly middle aged white people.
You would think people could come together and find something else and just let it be an overpriced thing oracle buys. Need a fediverse clone.
That's Loops iirc
Fediverse is great but if its not going to pay "content creators" a large number of people won't move to it. Those with the highest engagement generally expect to get paid now and for some of them its their livelihood.
There is things like Patreon, and others like that. Perhaps some kind of addition to the app that makes it easy for advertisers to find you, and you get the added option on blocking advertisers who you don't agree with or something? That could actually mean cutting out the middle man and making better profits, or if using a middleman there could be several advert companies you can patch into your vids.
Just thinking out loud. There should be a model to make it work and far better than it does now.
Wrong, TikTok will become a right wing propaganda algo aimed at people Fox and OAN wouldn't ever reach.
Turning it into another X would be the dumbest strategy. Their best strategy is to shadowban both liberal and fascist rhetoric, and amplify the "apolitical" noise that everyone already uses it for. Make them feel like it's a platform connecting them, but don't let any real conversation happen. They have the power, now all they need is bread and circuses, and they will pay for them using oppression they keep hidden.
TikTok already doesn't that kind of low-key suppression of content. I remember there was a big hubbub a few years back when it came out that TikTok had been actively suppressing content from disabled creators (as well as other groups). They apologised, and I think they said they would no longer do it, but I frequently hear people who continue to say that whenever they make posts that involve their disabilities, it feels like TikTok is still actively suppressing those posts.
In some cases, it appears to me that there isn't much evidence to support their suspicion — aside from the fact that we know for a fact that TikTok used to do this, and we have little reason to trust what TikTok claim when they are incredibly opaque at the best of times. It unnerves me that I don't know what to believe. Pretty much all big social media are terrible for transparency though, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Yeah, that's basically what I was getting at. Tiktok can just be the same slop farm it already is, be as useful as the right need it to be, and remain just as successful. The decision to drive Twitter into the ground was made by an individual whose intelligence is an extreme outlier. We shouldn't assume they'll make the same blunder with Tiktok.