'what is tiktok actually doing?'
the subtlety of what tiktok is doing to people, explained. also - elsagate is back (but did it ever leave?)
a reader made me want to draft this up. it’s a fair question.
they more or less asked: ‘what is tiktok actually doing’
broad overview
in order to explain in full what tiktok is doing, it’s important to roll things back a bit.
take a moment to go back in time to what american life was like in the 1950s.
imagine it in your mind as clearly as you can.
if you weren’t alive then - your representation of this period is largely based on media available from the time period - from classic cars, black & white movies with that visceral 1950s feel..nuclear families, tv shows, and fallout shelters. videos of nuclear bombs in black & white, kids crawling under desks to hide. the soviet union. the early stages of the cold war. the building out of the interstate system.
go back further. think clearly about what the term ‘your representation’ means from the segment above.
your mind is creating a construct of a period in which, if you were not alive, you have no accurate first party frame of reference upon which you can ‘know’ what life was like in the 1950s. so your mind fills in gaps, like a word association game.
obviously, this process of ‘representation manifestation’ is deeply flawed - even for (if not especially) people who lived through it.
memory is notoriously unreliable.
if you go forward - to the present - and to tiktok specifically..
narrowing down
what tiktok is actually doing is manifesting a specific representation of the world in the minds of its users. just like facebook, just like twitter, and just like substack. all communications platforms are alike - sans censorship parameters, content permitted on platform, and the userbase.
certain platforms allow for certain content to be shared, while others may not.
certain platforms incentivize certain types of content, while others do not.
this is about target market, target audience, customer segmentation, and another equally important axis…ads, eyeballs, and user metrics
many apps and systems attempt to create a ‘your representation’ of the world for you — more specifically — most newer ‘apps’ are converging at this time on certain mediums by which this occurs:
for example, open youtube - what you will see is an area called ‘shorts’
for example, open facebook - what you will see is an area called ‘reels’
for example, open snapchat - what you will see is an area called ‘stories’
for example, open tiktok - guess what you’ll see on tiktok?
these are all ‘short format’ videos. mere seconds in length. but meant to capture ‘a lot’ of content. sometimes it’s time lapse, or funny memes, or people making weird faces at the camera (getting to that in a bit - it’s important)
the scrolling is infinite. there is no ‘end’ or goal. there is simply scrolling, endlessly, being given content to view which over time shapes that ‘your representation’ of the world. the moderators of these systems can boost certain content.
what kind of ‘your representation’ can possibly be created in a series of fast paced 15 second clips blasted into your skull, only demarcated by ads?
the focal point
given that the app, the data, the algorithm, your data when you’re outside of the app, your clipboard, the window you peer into when you open the app itself - the ads you see when you are both inside the app, outside the app, and even perhaps when you walk down the street ….are controlled, in large part, by beijing
you should be able to see where this is going by now
tiktok is simply a trojan horse for creating a ‘your representation’ of the world - controlled by a hostile, fentanyl exporting killer, communist (in name only) totalitarian clusterfuck that is in strong contention for #1 award of government sanctioned mental patient of the year award, rivaled only by the globalist american empire.
what tiktok is doing, in laymen’s terms, is ‘gluing eyeballs to a window, inside of a walled garden, where users are given ‘your representation’ of the world on a minute by minute basis.’
your niece, child, or local representative in office whose eyes are glued to tiktok all day long is, in fact, being remotely piloted.
by beijing.
symptoms of the illness
one thing i’ve noticed is that - nearly regardless of platform - there is a distinct element of over-socialization involved in the process of this hyper-modern remote-control system.
it is very subtle mind hijacking.
what that means, more specifically, is that for the viewers of these systems and tools, the algorithm points them towards:
bizarre facial expressions
wide open mouths
wide open eyes
strange gazes often looking around
strange poses
they often go on to mimic these behaviors later.
i call it a ‘Cultural Training Simulator’
why?
it’s simple really. the model is tried and true. it was pioneered elsewhere.
in ‘internet ads’
i suggest you read this piece (link takes you off-site) to get a better idea of what that model is.
you’ve no doubt seen this type of .. stuff .. before.
why does it work?
it’s playing on the subconscious mind of the audience. (you, or your children, or whoever else is still using the trojan horse
tiktok has socialized the process of ‘internet ad chumbox creation’ - and this time, instead of the ads being chumboxes …
it’s the users themselves
addendum
if you want to go deeper into this sad wormhole and the specific targeting & impact on kids:
elsagate is back, but did it ever leave?
cancer.
the servers at youtube hosting this stuff should be launched into the sun
Launched into the sun is too kind!
I can’t stand these things, and I refuse to use TikTok. As much as possible, I just scroll by or close the article it is pinned to altogether. The very few times I’ve clicked on one, the resulting article is so poorly written as to be composed by a thirteen-year-old. There’s nothing helpful or worth learning from it, which I’m sure is the point. I used to work in advertising myself and this kind of chum (great label, by the way) seems to me to be the Internet equivalent of the Weekly World News. At least some of the WWN’s headlines were good for a laugh as I waited in the grocery store checkout line.