I agree all the socials are full of memetic hazards and nonsense. Data plane issue.

The platforms obviously bear major responsibility for this but to an extent their hands are tied by dispute about what constitutes "valid" speech.

My perspective is that if this had been an "organic" protest it would have been fine.

What TikTok demonstrated is that the platform is willing to directly spread misinformation to users through system messages with custom UX flows to magnify the impact. Devs at TikTok worked on this, they had meetings about it, they tracked progress until the work was done etc. That's a CONTROL PLANE issue.