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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32178 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 23, 2023

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Here's data on gen z social media platform use from June 2022 - youtube is the biggest, and tiktok is tied with instagram for second, with snapchat (and facebook!) close behind. If we do 'minutes spent' for all ages, youtube and tiktok are tied for first in april 2022, with twitter, snap, fb, and insta each at >2/3 of YT and tiktok's minutes. Or another 'minutes spent' for gen z specifically in aug 2022 has youtube at 2x tiktok. I'm sure there's lots of sources of variation here, but this doesn't look at all like a monopoly to me. Note that some of these may show as 'exclusive premium statistic' when you click on them - that's just their paywall on free statistics, it shows up after you click a few. Statistia isn't the best datasource, but it's certainly the easiest to use.

Suppose the USSR in the 1980s offered a broadcast TV network [...] until they could control the media that an entire generation sees

We let Russia Today get 3M twitter followers, and it's much more like a 'broadcast TV network' than tiktok. But it isn't growing that quickly. If tiktok was going to become a >50% media source for a generation, that would be a problem - but I don't think that'll happen. Note that youtube made an almost exact clone of tiktok as YouTube Shorts that's now very popular. Also, 'broadcast TV networks' tend to have more editorial control over content than tiktok does, and have much more of an emphasis on news and politics. All together, tiktok manipulating the US conversation doesn't seem like a big risk.

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