Also, ownership of TikTok is largely a symbolic, selective, ideological/political fight rather than meaningfully addressing industry regulation of content moderation, data privacy, algorithmic oversight, mental health/app addiction, or data (re)patriation.
What's also quite twisted is social media companies (and their more zealous users) framing critics as being against "free speech", when their algorithms are actually being used to control what people see, censor criticism, push narratives for powerful interests, promote enraging news, appropriate user-owned content, and sell lots of advertising by getting people addicted to doomscrolling. That's the opposite of freedom.
And there's no easy answer. "Just moderate better" isn't going to cut it. The people running social media companies simply have too much power; abuse is inevitable.
It only works if there is a sharing and coordination mechanism that the majority agrees too. As is the case when it comes to Broadcasting on Radio Spectrum. You wont find anyone protesting or demanding the right to stick a radio dish on their roof and the ability to broadcast across all frequencies in the name of Free Speech.
Because this debate (about share finite broadcast spectrum) already happened and a coordination and sharing mechanism was agreed too. That agreement comes out of social and political debates. Not out of technical debates. Its not a technical problem.
Social media designed by people who had no idea what they were building, allowed everyone to freely Broadcast(1-to-all) simultaneously, because it became technically possible <insert Jurassic Park quote about Engineers building things cause they could not because they should>. Post facto, this bunch of self certified geniuses realized they need a sharing/coordination/filtering mechanism and you get more garbage like the view/like/click/upvote count, moderation/censorship systems which do a half baked job. So we get infinite evergrowing spam (as cost to spam on free to broadcast system is 0), randomness, chaos, squandering of finite collective attention, and no control at all over what emerges tomorrow morning out of Jurassic Park.
Counter-intuitively, the easiest to manipulate is the highly educated.
The other factor is the media, which seems to only be interested in the spectacle of the protest rather than the substance of it. Very rarely do they actually ask about the specific reasons people are protesting. They care more about whether people are protesting in the “right way”. It’s the kind of sanitized distant coverage you get when all media is consolidated into multinational corporations. Of course they will talk about how destructive protests are as a means of affecting change but never about how the most common method, lobbying, is just legalized bribery.
