If you use any social media, you will probably be aware of the news regarding various platforms, and various information on ownership, and the like. It’s wound up with a lot of people being angry, and a lot of discussions on things like censorship. A conversation that started over the last few years on Twitter (X). Where abuse and death threats became the norm.

It seems as if a lot of the users of social media platforms are just coming to the realisation that we users are not the customers. The customers are the shareholders, the advertisers, the marketing teams, the ones who pay money to access the data of the users. That is where the money is. Not the photograph you took for dinner, but the information of where you bought that food, what bank you used, what shop, what brand of product did you buy. A lot of these things are simply things that your smart phone picks up. And that ‘stuff’ is what marketing companies want. That is how the social media companies make money, by showing you advertising that is targeted to you. As social media oligarchs make changes that benefit the money side of the company, but alienates huge portions of their user base.

I use TikTok a lot. I like watching different videos, and I have found a lot of really informative content on it. I like the whole video diary idea, and follow a lot of people who create daily videos in this way. However, different agencies have come out that TikTok is too liberal leaning, that it attacks the more conservative viewpoints. So there came this statement where the US government was going to close TikTok down, with the app actually closing their US app down. For 14 hours. For 14 hours, the rest of the world could access TikTok, and more local content rather than the US stuff. But after that 14 hours US users were welcomed back with a message thanking new US President Donald Trump.

The thing is, when the US users came back online, they noticed some changes. Various hashtags regarding the inauguration of Donald Trump, or LGBTQ+ things were unusable . With users being told that the topic couldn’t be referenced to for the ‘good’ of the TikTok community. People found that LGBTQ+ user pics were removed, with no indication from TikTok as to why. I, in fact ran a trial of my own after discussing the TikTok ban on my own profile, and found it go hardly any views, where as me asking whether people preferred kittens or puppies got my normal views, This, to me, proved that TikTok wasn’t sharing opinions that were negative in anyway about the TikTok ban. In fact, some users reported their videos just disappearing, without any warning or notification from TikTok themselves. This has lead to people talking about censorship, and try and understand why certain voices are being silenced.

The counter-argument was, that nobody cared when conservative voices were being silenced. But the truth is, they weren’t silenced. They maybe had accounts removed from social media, but that tended to be for threatening violence, spreading misinformation, and breaking the platforms terms and conditions. When Elon Musk purchased twitter in 2023, and renamed it X, he also reactivated a lot of the accounts which had been removed due to abuse. These people came back with gusto, as if nobody could stop them. The abuse they sent was awful. As a user who spoke up against them, I didn’t get a discussion, or even blocked, I got death threats. Every day. I didn’t even have a big account, with only a few hundred followers, but the site was rendered unusable. I closed my account in the wake of this, and ended up floating over to Meta’s Threads. Where I made a lot of bookish and formula 1 friends. And I saw the positives of social media again.

It looks like TikTok is going to be in US hands, when its CEO was trained by Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg. And I sit and wonder if this social media ‘fight’ has all been a ruse to make each platform more money, and whittle away the usability for us, the user. I mean, my Facebook and Instagram are currently unusable due to AI, and irrelevant US made bigoted content. What will these big tech billionaires do, if their platforms do become examples of the Dead Internet Theory? Will they simply just buy something else, or stick with their sinking ships? I mean, advertisers won’t pay for things human eye’s don’t actually see.

And then, today, I read the revelation that blogging is back. That people are going to divert away from social media and curate their own online spaces. It’s proof, to me, that if you keep at something long enough, it will eventually come back into fashion again. Look at me, ahead of the trend.