Entertainment Social: The Costs and Benefits
Social media’s gotten pretty heavy as of late. Mark Zuckerberg’s been defending his platform’s policy of allowing blatant falsehoods to be promoted on Facebook. Twitter’s had to update its policies by allowing political figures’ tweets to remain on the platform even if they go against the its rules and policies. These social platforms are having to take stances and defend those stances because, whether they like it or not, they have become political tools. They are where views are shared, campaigns are mobilized and news is consumed by users.
Things have gotten heavy on social; so heavy in fact that they may very well collapse under all that weight.
When one falls, another arises.
That’s why it’s particularly interesting to see where we’re at with social media. While many are congregating on the Facebooks and Twitters of the world, Gen Z is embracing a different kind of social platform, an entertaining one that not only discourages political discourse, it bans political ads. I’m talking about TikTok.
TikTok has a clear focus. It aims to keep the platform lighthearted, irreverent and a fun place to spend time. Facebook and Twitter can’t really say any of that. TikTok bans political ads on its platform. Sure, politicians can set up user profiles, but if they hope to promote and scale their messages, they’re going to have to look elsewhere because TikTok isn’t playing that game.
There is a vacuum out there for fun, irreverent social interaction. With the confluence of news consumption moving to social channels, those social channels encouraging said news consumption to drive engagement and an increasingly politicized society, the Internet’s town squares became serious business. TikTok’s the opposite of that. It’s the right app at the right time.
And yet…
TikTok is not without baggage of its own. The app is owned by China-based ByteDance, and it was recently revealed that, under pressure from China, TikTok removed content shared by Hong Kong protestors. Zuckerberg used this point to defend Facebook’s “free speech” policy when he said, “While our services like WhatsApp are used by protesters and activists everywhere due to strong encryption and privacy protections, on TikTok, the Chinese app growing quickly around the world, mentions of these protests are censored, even in the U.S. Is that the internet we want?"
There is room and demand for an entertainment-first social platform, and for the most part TikTok fills that void, but the question we have to grapple with is the cost. I don’t know the answer. At a time when everyone’s exhausted, it makes sense for an entertainment-first refuge to exist, but now it’s almost more important than ever for political voices to have every outlet at their disposal.
We have a tale of two approaches, neither of which is completely right. Facebook has eschewed all responsibility and allows any message to be supported and distributed with the right amount of money. TikTok suppresses truths that need oxygen. Two extreme approaches and no perfect answers.