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.
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.