The silver-lining of the utterly deplorable tactics deployed by western mass media in portraying the genocide of Palestine is that it has awakened brand new generations of people to this kind of method. Kids are watching a genocide live on tik tok and other short form content, you can’t hide it. It’s like what happened in Vietnam, but to a far greater extent.
I remember before Al-Aqsa Flood, consensus in the US Empire was overwhelmingly pro-Israel, but now it’s flipped to the opposite, supporting Palestinian liberation is the popular opinion, overwhelmingly so among younger generations. This has utterly damaged any reputation mass media has had in the eyes of younger generations, and is partially why invading Venezuela isn’t a popular opinion either. People aren’t falling for the same tricks at the same rates as they used to.
I had just been introduced to communism a month before this phase of the genocide started on october 8th. Literally nothing could have reinforced those beliefs more than what followed.
US already bought tiktok, didn’t they?
Other media platforms were censoring it to their full extent. Now Tiktok(US) will too.
They’ll likely crack down, but it’s still qualitatively different from the era where newspaper and TV controlled nearly all information flow.
This is their WMD moment, but much more acute, and, I think, reaching a larger percentage of the population. Given the grave magnitude and rawness of an active genocide, I’ve avoided calling it a silver lining, but it’s accurate.
People need to understand that this isn’t an a aberration: the media lie to us about the world and US empire every day.
I rephrased that several ways before posting that comment. It’s an unintended side-effect that is undermining the continued hegemony of legacy media as firmly bourgeois controlled and filtered.
the current younger generation are and for now because (as you said) of tiktok; but now the isrealis have full control over tiktok and they’ve taken their first steps that will eventually lead to the prevention of the live streaming of the genocide and ethnic cleansing and they’ve started doing the same the other large platforms like reddit, facebook, bluesky, etc.
americans don’t bother much with non-western social media and hasbara has expanded beyond western social media. the american tiktok refugees on rednote were seemingly a majority when people jumped ship from tikotk’s shutdown back in january; but now my rendote feed has slowly shifted to spanish speakers as americans have lost interest and roughly half of the content i get in english are strongly pro-isreali/pro-zionist.
i fear that this unmasking of the us empire’s deeds across the world was a momentary lapse of vigilance from the ruling class and it will go away once they fully figure out how to mainstream social media in the same way that legacy media has been mainstreamed; future generations will be just as propagandized as genx or boomers.
even non-centralized platforms like lemmy aren’t going to help much when you consider how much larger instances .world is compared to any other instances and there’s zero question as to how captured by the ruling class it is. the future landscape of social media is going to look like legacy media; with only tiny niches reflecting the reality of the world, like it was before lemmy.
I don’t share your pessimism. In the US Empire, on the ground at least, there’s a major shift in how the global south is viewed, and how socialism is. The media is met with far more skepticism, and unlike the past where televized news was the main way of getting information, nowadays people get all their info online. It’s a qualitatively different era. Now, the older generations are absolutely still hyper-conservative, but younger generations are more progressive than any young generation in many decades.
the future landscape of social media
I think you are accurate in thinking how things will be, if technology does not change too much.
But I think there will be many unknown changes that might alter that gloomy outcome.
While we have had a near unchanging server/client type of social media, it does not have to remain that way; and there can be incentives for mass migrations to new ways of communications. The fediverse or its technical descendants can be ported over later. They are seeds for later activism as well as inspiration and platforms for now
The fediverse is already a significant leap, because it’s federated instead of centralized, and it runs on volunteers and donations instead of corporate profits.
I also think it is up to the leftest communities already using the Fediverse to help power whatever lies in the future. All social networks today use, at its heart, concepts that existed since the earliest online boards in the 1980s.
I think the present day is similar to the early use of automobiles. The cars were there, but not the infrastructure. But once the roads and stations and mechanic shops were built, the cars were used more. We now have tens of millions of online servers used as phones, that we did not have even ten years ago. But full use of how they can be used collaboratively is still in its infancy. For example: collaborative servers, made up of tens of thousands of mobile devices dropping in and out of helping, instead of a fixed server, or cluster, used now. That would be a near future change away from current paradigm, but still possible for the current services to make the jump.
Whatever happens, the pressure to develop and use better systems, will always be there. We are now, and will forever be, in an arms race to have a free social internet. And I believe there will be explosive change and opportunities later. I also think there will be a lot of drama and disappointment too. But I believe in the success for communications
can’t wait for captain America to make an unbreakable shield of ceasefireinium no matter how many bombs Israel hits it with it’s still unbroken
