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Comment by exabrial | Hacker News Reader

After that, can we please ban it?

Sigh. The entire social network is the epitome of an obnoxious popularity rat race to the bottom under the appearance of democracy, while being completely authoritarian. Worse, the users have been recruited to repeat ad nauseam "popular content gets liked and moved up the feed" or whatever.

While I'm against the federal government having this sort of control, it's just a little bit of relief to see TikTok go away until something else replaces it.

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I just don't like how it's forced the trend of extremely short form video. We're destroying our attention spans.

> While I'm against the federal government having this sort of control,

To take this position - which is certainly the virtuous one on long time-scales, you have to also take it in the case of content you abhor.

I have the utmost sympathy for wanting a life free from the message for which tiktok is the medium, but using the ring of power will only cause is to deepen an entrench more.

This gets the causality backwards. TikTok et al. is the ring of power and not banning or regulating it will cause the negative side effects on civic society to deepen, further speedrunning the death of liberalism and the very freedoms you're trying to protect. This is the clichéd paradox of tolerance. Sometimes you have to do seemingly illiberal things, like locking up murderers, or breaking up concentrated media ownership, or banning free speech when it comes to defamation and libel, etc., to protect the liberal project from destruction. Social media, especially large platforms owned by single people, is so new that the law just hasn't had time to catch up. As the law finally catches up, don't interpret that as an assault on liberal values. It's not.

The argument that "TikTok et al. is the ring of power", rather than the state, which insists on armed conquest and control of the planet and seems to have not a shred of foresight about the long-term implications of the evolution of the internet, is simply not persuasive.

Sticks and stones will break my bones, but tiktok will never hurt me.

You see, this is where I think libertarians get it so wrong. They are focused on the state as the problem. But the way I see it, the problem is the conditions and antecedent causes that lead to the state becoming authoritarian. Libertarians are so focused on attacking the state but they just aren't effective at preventing state power misuse, because they don't understand the deep causality that leads to these bad outcomes. If you have antecedent causes like: high inflation, rampant crime unchecked by a liberal state, concentrated media ownership, a toxic information landscape, a population that isn't educated, extreme inequality, etc -- you will get authoritarianism, guaranteed, and there is no amount of small-government ideology that will be able to overcome the population's desire for a strongman personality. History teaches us that you must use state capacity to attack the antecedent causes, paradoxically it is the only way to prevent an authoritarian state.

Indeed.

social media is the television of the internet.

Everyone agreeing it's a stream of endless garbage isn't a big enough reason to bring the long arm of the law into it IMHO

Lot’s of power available. Unlikely.

It'll end up owned by someone adjacent to those in power.

Like Truth Social and Twitter?

> After that, can we please ban it?

let's start with IG who lobbied to get a competitor removed instead of building a better app/community.

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