I had expected an Orbanisation (aka, what happened to the media sphere in Hungary after Orban took over and his cronies bought up almost all media) of Tiktok, but not that fast, it's like less than a week after the deal [2].

Scary shit if you ask me, and it's made scarier by the fact that Tiktok has already been changing the way our youth speaks due to evading censorship (e.g. "graped" instead of "raped", "unalived" instead of kill/murder/execute/suicide).

[1] https://x.com/krassenstein/status/2015911471507530219

[2] https://techcrunch.com/2026/01/23/heres-whats-you-should-kno...

It's sad that certain topics (anti-ICE, Epstein) neutered on a social media platform, but this went on for years when the politics were reversed.

Let everyone have their say, I say.

Edit: here’s a link to an example https://bsky.app/profile/seaniebyrne.bsky.social/post/3mby7j...

The same with X and, before that, Facebook.

TikTok has never worked for me though so maybe there's no real equivalent alternative. Maybe time to make one if not?

To me it says something about the public, but I'm not sure what. I'm tempted to attribute it to indifference or complacency but I'm aware of network effects and the reality of alternatives.

Sometimes I feel like education and theory about security practices needs to extend beyond micro-level phenomena like passwords, to things like administrative conflicts of interest and strength in decentralization and competition. Private monopolies and quasi-monopolies aren't just economically bad, they're bad for privacy and security, and make the public vulnerable through lack of choice. In important ways it doesn't matter if it's the government or a private company; whenever power concentrates it is easier to align and abuse.

Going by the comments, people on TikTok seem very fast in seeing conspiracies, when many problems can be simply explained with normal problems or human failings. And it's good to be critical and aware of dangers, but I fear if they are so easy to call out problems, it will wear of fast, and people will start to ignore real problems again, like they used to be.

They ALL do incredibly corrupt things

it's just retaliation

and obviously, trump will play into this

https://gothamist.com/news/ai-videos-of-fake-nypdice-clashes...

I suspect these are some of those that have been banned from TikTok, and there's probably heightened moderation around this content at the moment since people are sharing AI-generated propaganda and riling others into violent confrontation with ICE.

At least on the surface level, I could believe this is just a full algorithm reset and they are having problems with it. But even after other algorithm resets that I believe I've experienced, Tiktok figured it out extremely quickly. If this continues, I will believe in the heavyhanded censorship theory.

I remember when everyone migrated from MySpace to Facebook and I assumed everyone was going to just keep moving over to the next big thing every few years but that actually didn't happen. Facebook became an institution.

There was a protest and the state media was reporting on it. When the reporter said, "our camera broke down and we can only show black and white pictures", my father IMMEDIATELY jumped up and angrily said, "that's bs, you don't want to show how they [the protesting students] got beaten up [by the police]!"

This was an interesting life lesson. So yeah, sure, technical difficulties..

If AI removes any technical limitations, and automates content management, what's stopping a content creator from owning what they create and distributing it themselves?

How can centralization continue to survive?