don't blame me

TikTok, like all social media, is a similarly volatile space. Your FYP algorithm is supersensitive; “vibes” are constantly “shifting” for occult and obscure reasons; everything is temporary; and your chief means of expressing preference is to either click or keep scrolling. For this reason I suspect that the experience of electoral volatility is

I don’t think that Trump won “because of” TikTok in any new sense beyond the now-obvious fact that social media is a necessary condition to his success. But I suspect that social media, as it transforms and matures, shapes voters in ways it will take a long time to pick up on. Who is the “TikTok electorate”? How do its users relate to the world,

“As technology gets more advanced and more convincing, our idea of a communal reality might genuinely become archaic,” Williams says. “This election has really taught me that we are very much sucked into these worlds that we create on our phone, when the real world is right in front us.”

It’s absolutely true that the tone and content of the videos people consume on TikTok or Instagram affect their understanding of the world around them--but so too do their non-phone experiences, their relationships, their jobs, their mental states, their social worlds, their spending habits, etc. Why do doomers and reactionaries so thoroughly

Voters like Smith understood the facts and the odds. They just underestimated how convincingly something like TikTok’s feed could build a world that didn’t quite exist — and in the wake of Harris’ defeat, they’re mourning its loss, too.

When you rely too much on the idea that propaganda works homogeneously and omni-directionally, it’s very easy to misdiagnose the problem. Is Andrew Tate really turning innocent, smooth-brained young morons into misogynists all on his own? It seems much more likely that some young men bring a set of misogynist assumptions and masculinist