tiktok is banned because it seduces you.
The TikTok ban is now passed. The US has painted a veneer of ‘public security’ over it, when the truth is much more simple, and ultimately worse.
It’s about one thing: the algorithm.
Social media is a black box that turns amateur creators into household names, amplifies pre-existing social strifes and issues, and drives enough ad revenue to give Mark Zuckerberg money to build the Quest headset and terrorize Hawaii.
The effects of the algorithm are omnipresent. In our modern age, the algorithms have become our “god”, whether we like it or not.
While writing this, I’m listening to Charli XCX and Addison Rae’s “Von Dutch” remix. Addison is a TikTok star pivoting to pop star whose algorithmic enticement no doubt landed her the feature.
I opened YouTube shorts after listening to watch a see a video of Charli’s friends reading her team’s viral marketing ideas, like getting her nipples pierced at Claire’s and standing in the middle of subway tracks.
Her team is like every other, making appeasements to our culture’s primary kingmaker.
In a world where the scale of content vastly outweighs the average person’s ability to comb through it, there is a need for a middle man that determines quality, relevance, and that leads the way for your online experience.
This is what made Google the company it is today, their ‘Page Rank’ algorithm.
Once you have content, anyone who’s built social media platforms knows the actual growth lever is the algorithm. Content is a byproduct of network effects, and it can be generated with smart marketing and incentives. Content is plentiful.
But the algorithm is what animates our feeds to keep us bound: the fact that you can rank and formulaically arrange the landfill of content in a unified experience.
It is not a “god”, it is math. Algorithms are developed by humans to be a profit-making tool deployed by private companies who are incentivized to hide the pain it causes.
It will change your life, face, desires, spending habits, and your entire view of the world. It controls what comes in front of your eyes, and you need it to. It’s not about the actual content, but what it makes you do. Sometimes it’s innocuous, other times it’s not.
Good outcome: Devon has a Corgi with a degenerative spine condition, so she bought a backpack called ‘Little Chonk’ from a TikTok creator to carry Esme (beloved fat corgi) around.
Bad outcome: Social media use is a higher predictor of whether or not you will get plastic surgery than dissatisfaction with your body. Every time I go on Instagram, I want new tits.
Social media has given me a $25k grant, a couple of viral Tumblr posts, access to people who I never would have met otherwise, and a majority of Astra’s users.
Everything about my online presence is built to get attention from you. My tiny house is the median result of a large interior design Pinterest board. My Linkedin is crafted to convey soft power. The items I own were decided by an Amazon recommendation engineer.
We forgo our originality as a sacrifice to the algorithm: to fit into a formula that tries to meet pre-defined parameters for reach and fame.
In exchange, it gives us a view of the world that’s clearer, more aligned with our personal beliefs. Through small doses of dopamine, we are mentally sedated in a world that seems more complex and fragmented than ever.
The world is hard and vast, so don’t try to figure it out yourself.
Here’s a lamp that you would love, your favorite celebrity, or a take about housing that we know is going to piss you off. We know what makes you tick, and buy. We know you better than you probably know yourself.
Everyone is seducing the algorithm, and it seduces us back.
We don’t like to think our modern world is shaped by invisible modules of code that a couple of people control, but it’s the truth. And it’s why TikTok just got banned.
I was a panelist at a youth social media conference for the Center for Storytellers and Scholars in LA last fall. After my panel, I watched Jacob Sartorious (an internet icon made by Musical.ly), ask someone high up at YouTube how they rank mental health videos during a panel with content creators who discuss mental health on their channels.
Her response was “we don’t know”.
I don’t believe that.
A company blessed by their algorithm will know it as much as they can forward and back, and will take their understanding of it to their corporate grave. That’s a narrative that exists because it lets them off the hook for the responsibility of what the algorithm does, and who it platforms.
Even Jacob, someone who has been given millions of followers because of the algorithm, has yet to figure it out.
It needs to be bigger than us, more elusive than us. Algorithms are painted in a PR gloss as omnipresent and unknowable gods because that is in the interest of companies that own them. They are made by humans for humans, and exist to provide form to a formless world.
To reduce things to knowable is to make them controllable.
TikTok is banned not because it makes you do terrible things, but because it is uncontrollable by the US government.
I would argue Meta’s algorithms have done more quantifiable damage (ie: teenage suicides and prompted people to try and invade Area 51), but Meta is a testament of American prosperity and innovation.
Most modern social media companies are American and rely heavily on lobbying and satisfying American politicians.
It is a convenient PR strategy for the government to paint TikTok as a stranger from the CCP who’s telling your teenager to do a line of crack off a Karl Marx book.
The algorithm is nothing outstanding from what every other social media has, but the perception of power and servitude from companies to pre-existing institutions of power is vastly different.
TikTok threatens the one thing our government cares about more than dunking on each other for donor brownie points: self-preservation, and the continuation of American cultural dominance.
