Make no mistake, it's not only that the capitalists in the states can't compete and want it gone, it's that they can't control the message. Musk owns twitter and it's lurched to the right, Facebook burying any Gaza data, the algorithm at alphabet is going to insure pro genocide propaganda gets top rank page position. But tiktok? It's a loose Cannon and that is why they are shutting it down. Don't believe they won't come after the lemmyverse next y'all. Spreading 'enemy disinformation' by sharing photos of dismembered Palestinian children. It is an information war and we are on the front lines.
As someone who has used both TikTok and Instagram I can say 100% this is both information warfare as well as a way for them to remove competition. I'm guessing the gov has been getting pressure from US corpos to ax TikTok, because Insta has less regulations on advertising.
I was listening to useful idiots interview with Simon Schuster about Ukraine and his insight was that the information war had been lost in the Donbass hence the war happened. If only they had controlled the message and convinced those Russia likers that they were wrong. Or something. It is all information war now, perception management, manufacturing consent. If the average Joe really understood how screwed they are getting by the multinational capitalists everyone would be adventure time with a gadget. That is their greatest fear: people knowing the truth
I've been trying to put together a proper way to explain this.
All prominent social media is under assault by the five-eyes member nations. They are being brought to heel or otherwise defanged across the western hegemony. Google and Youtube in Australia, Twitter and Facebook in the UK, Tiktok b& in the US. etc. Twitter was completely in bed with the US state department for a while, if it isn't still in some capacity. Platforms like Reddit are quietly co-opted because they are so easily algorithmically manipulated.
Digital ID laws in Australia: how do you prevent a teenager from accessing all the powerful platforms? You have to de-anonymize everyone at scale. That is a piece of the process in that country.
It's a slow grinding process and I'm not going to make the mistake of prematurely spelling out each strategy or tactic because I am not capable of clearly articulating it all without sounding schizophrenic or like a hysterical right wing piece of shit. I'm not even sure it's a coordinated and overtly intentional thing so much as a natural process of power maintaining power.
When Arab Spring happened the western world did the soyface wojack and then started to shit their pants. Since then the noose has been closing and in the last year or two it has become almost impossible to ignore. But most people are still ignoring it or just don't care.
It's going to get a lot harder for radicals to express themselves freely and anonymously on the internet. It will become very very difficult to effect change through journalistic efforts and propagandizing against the state etc. We've lived in a strangely cursed and blessed window of time in this regard and I'm concerned that we won't have the chance to see it reach full fruition. Future generations will not even know what it was like to shitpost freely to a global network of friends and foes. In retrospect only the right wing will have ever managed to effectively use opportunity for stochastic terror and the history books will write this off as a mistake. The Cool Zone is here and Hellworld follows after.
Tiktok is already partially owned by a trumper billionaire (Jeff Yass) so i dont buy that its some pro palestine leftist platform that capitalists want to shut down. If it was trump would want it gone but hes already listening to his billionaire friend and might prevent it from getting banned in exchange for more stake/control. I actually doubt trump would even be president rn if tiktok had been banned a year ago.
Is there an archive of the Palestinian photos that I can pull as a backup? Hopefully some smart people are working on ways to preserve this info before it gets wiped completely off the net.
Not aware of any though I'm sure there is one, just probably not that huge in scope at the moment. /c/datahoarder might know something of this or be of use. Maybe the reddit version since it tends to have more people.
Unfortunately social media apps like tik tok go out of their way to make it difficult to download and locally store anything you see on them. It's against their interests to let you take content off their platform. There are obviously modified APKs and non-mobile apps as well as websites that allow it but it's generally an annoying process. I'm sure some amount of it is being saved but in the way people browse these things and discover this content via algorithm it's kind of something you then have to go back to on another device to save and download and that's time-consuming and annoying so most people won't do that, or will tire of it after doing so for a bit.
The best hope is that there's some non-profit scraping this, that a couple of people have a day job grabbing and archiving this stuff in an attributable way so that it can be used in future though it's a big job and I'm honestly doubtful this is actually happening given it would seem to have no point. South Africa has presented their case of genocide, that's proceeding but the courts of public opinion are already set for now. You either see it for what it is (a genocide), you believe the zionist propaganda narrative, or you're just checked out. Re-presenting a tranche of videos of this stuff in 5 years would seem to be of little practical value. Either South Africa succeeds with their case in which case additional evidence is moot or they fail in which case it's not going to be reconsidered with a bunch of years old content the provenance of which cannot be proven beyond a shadow of a doubt given its original sources are now gone. It'd be useful for propaganda purposes but to who and where would you spread this when you're only archiving it because it's going to be removed and the platforms its been posted on locked down against the spread of that stuff in future.
Just the same I am sure some amount of it, a fraction is being archived in this way by some group but they may be academics or uninterested in sharing it further for now.
