The most obvious example is the TikTok Shop. The company is pushing its eCommerce so hard you hear about it more than any other topic on the app, both in ads and organic videos from creators hoping for a share of the profits. The app is even testing a new feature that uses AI to identify products in the background of regular content and turn every single video into an ad.
Then there’s the videos themselves. In a bid to compete with YouTube, TikTok is reportedly preparing to allow users to post 30-minute videos and prompting creators to upload horizontal content instead of the app’s standard vertical format. TikTok is even encouraging people to upload photo slideshows instead of videos altogether. On top of that, TikTok just fumbled a relationship with Universal Music Group, which pulled its music catalog off the platform and silenced any video featuring Taylor Swift, the Weeknd, and every other Universal artist.
So it Twitter, but people still suck Elon’s Dick, Reddit pretty much told people to go fuck themselves, Facebook has been a shit show for over a decade. So I won’t hold my breath.
I think a big difference, though, is that there is political force to ending TikTok. The US government has no major issues with Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, etc. existing. Remember, there’s actual legislation banning TikTok. Whether that makes a real difference or not, well, I guess we just wait and see. Personally, I think they all should go down in flames.
What’s the actual argument behind banning TikTok though? IMO it’s just so that US firms remain the monopoly in the social media market.
Honestly, it’s more likely that they want to ban it because it allows China to manipulate the narrative in the US in ways that only Facebook, etc were able to in years past.
I love it when free market capitalists get a taste of their own “let people vote with their wallets, regulation be damned” medicine. The young generations are being radicalized against the US’s propaganda system and there’s not a goddamned thing our piece of shit Patriot Act-signing, civil-rights-eroding propagandistic demagogues can do about it (short of an outright ban).
