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Notes -
Do you think that tik tok's particularly strong boosting of local content, especially compared with other social media platforms, is possibly tied to a desire by the platform to deepen partisan and regional divides across the US?
There is also something dark in the way the algorithm is great at boosting content that shows us exactly what we desire in the most degrading way. For example I'm socially anxious and insecure about my masculinity so my feed was overrun with hypermasculine extremely affable men to a ridiculous degree. I have never had that experience with any other social media platform. I haven't used the app in over a year but there was something about it that always struck me as more toxic than any other. It is almost like the mirror of Erised, the magic device that shows us our deepest desires but never gives them to us. I found it completely maddening.
Well, let me say first that I have read the response by @Primaprimaprima and found it very entertaining. My own response would be that your allusion to that Harry Potter mirror was evocative for me. I have similar suspicions about all the platforms that currently ape TikTok's manner of presenting these what I will call microvideos (I despise what I feel is the wildly inaccurate term content to describe them).
I have friends (male) who launch private, anonymous accounts (equivalent to a reddit throwaway) expressly for the purpose of following whatever fetish artist or bikini model charges their battery. These aren't horny teenagers, either, I mean adult men. They don't do it to follow muscle cars or sports teams, however, thiugh that undoubtedly has to do with shame--no one's going to care if they have a few corvette fan club accounts in their follow list.
Do you have, in your who-you-are-following, a few GNC or similar accounts? Obviously we're all being tracked, both on-
and off-platforms, in various ways. I sometimes wonder of my friends' wormhole(s) of sexy elves or furry fandom (I just made that up; I don't actually know what the accounts are) spiral them further and further into planes of lasciviousness, or plush mink, or whatever.
I deleted my Instagram app some time ago but before I did so I got a lot of unsolicited geeky sci- fi stuff in my feed, which makes sense based on my (random) clicks.
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