The stage is set for a never ending game of social media whack-a-mole as users flock to TikTok alternatives.
The mainstream media has spent years in their effort to push conspiracy theories about TikTok, such as the obviously unproven conspiracy theory that the platform is some sort of Chinese government brainwashing device. The US government happily helped the mainstream media along and passed legislation banning TikTok. This, in part, as an attempt to block users from using the platform and hoping that they would magically come back to watching their newscasts afterwards.
All that effort, at least as far as the mainstream media was concerned, came to a conclusion when the US Supreme Court flushed the US constitution down the toilet and declared that mass government internet censorship does not violate free speech. It was a ludicrously stupid ruling that sets a staggeringly dangerous legal precedent that the government can censor anything they damned well please on the internet – this by screaming “NATIONAL SECURITY!!!” and making pesky little things like freedom of expression magically go away.
Yet, despite all that time, energy, and effort to ban a widely used platform for no real good reason, the mainstream media is quickly realizing that years of effort is already beginning to unravel. Reports quickly surfaced that TikTok users, as part of a protect against the ludicrously stupid decision to ban the platform, began flocking to alternatives like RedNote and Lemon8 – two other Chinese company owned platforms.
Suffice to say, the mainstream media is absolutely livid that those users weren’t magically flocking back to them and watching their content. Broadcast media began screaming about the tired talking points of “CHINA BAD!!!” and scaremongering their viewers by saying that these other apps are worse and that users are “putting themselves at even greater risk”. The protest, of course, made one thing very clear: the scaremongering and conspiracy theories of TikTok completely failed to convince users and this protest is, in part, a giant middle finger to all that perpetrated taking their beloved platform away.
What this also sets the stage is for a never ending game of “whack-a-mole”. Yes, the US government can censor any platform they feel like censoring on a whim thanks to the Supreme Court ruling, but for those who have long been familiar with the file-sharing scene, just because it’s illegal doesn’t mean that users won’t engage in certain activities. In fact, for some, it’s part of the whole thrill. You might remember my editorials on this such as me pointing out that speech is the new “piracy” back in September of last year or the other article I wrote in March about how social media could be following the historical blueprint of file-sharing. While few likely paid much mind to the points I made in those articles, we are now at the point where those words could be downright prophetic to today’s events (the typical “Drew Wilson was right” moment).
Indeed, if you look back in time at the history of file-sharing, you’ll see some very familiar elements involved. Different names, same situation. Napster cropped up offering a new way to share and distribute music. The major record labels didn’t like it and sued to have it shut down. This with the thinking that if they shut down Napster, then copyright infringing activities would simply cease to exist. Many pointed out what a horrible mistake it was to do this, but the labels did it anyway.
That move gave rise to alternatives like BearShare, LimeWire, Morpheus, Grokster, Kazaa, and eDonkey2000. Users, naturally, flocked to these alternatives to continue sharing music and music video’s among other things. The records, refusing to learn from their past mistakes, then just sued again to have a number of these alternatives shut down. This perpetuated the endless whack-a-mole game with different clients. File-sharing developers, in response developed open source clients and networks with the idea that if they come after them, then the source code could be picked up by a different developer and the work would carry on.
Things got even better when decentralization happened. eDonkey2000 had a decentralized server system while eMule added the Kademlia network. BitTorrent, of course, also came around and anyone could set up a tracker to share content as well. Years of litigation turned into decades of litigation with no end in sight. ISPs implemented traffic shaping and the developers implemented protocol obfuscation to thwart that. It was ultimately a losing battle for the movie studios and major record labels.
Indeed, the argument was that if they adapted their business models and offered something online, then file-sharing would get hit. Unfortunately, it took years of doing things the wrong way before people came along and convinced them that you can sell music and movies online. The movie studios and major record labels were ultimately dragged kicking and screaming into the internet age before they realized what a wrongheaded attitude they had all this time. When they started forming partnerships with companies like Netflix, Apple, and Spotify, that’s when file-sharing started taking a huge hit. A fair price for a convenient service? It turns out the critics (myself included) were right all along. Unfortunately, it took more than a decade of market development off the timeline, but at least it was a step in the right direction after years of failure to recognize the passage of time.
Now, fast forward to today and we are seeing the exact same stupidity all over again. A US Supreme court ruling that the government can censor a whole social media platform. This with the dubious reason of “national security” and “DON’T YOU DARE QUESTION IT! TAKE MY WORD FOR IT, DAMMIT!!!!!” With users flocking to alternatives, the conditions are absolutely ripe for yet another game of whack-a-mole. After all, when users flock to these other social media platforms, how is the US going to respond? Order the censorship of those platforms as well? Sure, they can, but just because they can doesn’t mean they should.
Indeed, you can bet that there are plenty of developers out there who would love to get their hands on that huge boost of interactivity from users. I mean, who wouldn’t want the potential for millions of dollars to be another TikTok? Developers are likely falling over each other to figure out how to be the next big social media platform because the financial windfall is going to be spectacular. That alone would help perpetuate the whack-a-mole game. The government spends months ordering the censorship of one or two platforms and four more pop up. What’s more, I think the US government is dumb enough to try it anyway, thinking that if they make the same mistakes the major record labels did years earlier, they would get different results – definition of insanity and all that jazz.
The real damage here is both economic and legal. From the economic standpoint, all the financial benefits of having a healthy social media platform gets swept away in all of this. This is exactly what happened with file-sharing when all of the commercial clients went under. The same sort of thing is likely going to happen with a number of social media platforms where the financial benefits will get swept away.
As for the legal side of things, there is not only the precedent that mass government censorship is now perfectly legal in the eyes of the courts, but it also stands to be normalized as a standard way of doing business. This has international repercussions as repressive regimes will view this activity as a green light to censor whatever they want as well. This risks leading to a somewhat fractured internet where different thought crime laws put barriers up on the internet. There’s the possibility of an encrypted service taking over with the explicit purpose of evading the government censors, but for now, decentralized platforms that rely on protocols (such as Mastodon and Bluesky on ActivityPub) is probably the next best thing we have for the time being.
Of course, there is one major stumbling block in all of this. With file-sharing, it was much easier to go after specific kinds of content. With social media, it makes it much harder to enforce censorship orders and laws because you are censoring speech in general. As a general rule, that is a much taller order to go after this. If you are going to go into the extreme of arresting influencers for thought crimes, others are going to take their place. This is exactly the same as the scene where piracy groups get busted, then others simply take their place and things move on. It’s a losing battle all around magnified ten fold because now you are trying to jail an idea. Simply put, it’s not happening and is going to be a losing battle just like the record labels facing a losing battle with file-sharing networks.
Right now, we are on the verge of technological history being repeated. A lot of trouble could have been saved had the government simply went through the hard work of passing strong federal level privacy laws. Unfortunately, the government refuses to do that on the basis that it’s a common sense and sensible idea. That’s the last thing the government wants to do. Logic and reason must be excised from all of government at all costs. Stupidity must remain supreme. As for the rest of us, unless something unexpected happens, we’re in for a real shit show.
