This is excellent by Taylor Lorenz and a great counterpoint to my tendency to frame algorithmic filtering as an intrinsically destructive thing:
Since 2020, TikTok has served as a major hub for progressive speech and activism. The ban will deplatform thousands of progressive content creators and skew online discourse toward conservative ideologies. It will consolidate media influence within right leaning platforms like Meta and X. Over time, I believe this reconfiguration will permanently alter the political landscape of the creator economy.
When Vine ceased operations, social media was still in its formative years. Though the app formally shut down in 2017, it quietly shuttered months earlier in the fall of 2016, and creators had begun a mass exodus a full year before that, when it became clear that the app was in a death spiral. Platforms like YouTube and Instagram were still establishing their footholds, and the concept of the “creator economy” was years away from existence. Vine’s shutdown displaced creators, but the relatively small scale of the platform meant that the ripple effects were contained.
TikTok, however, is arguably the most culturally and politically relevant social media platform today. Not only is it a huge economic engine (TikTok contributed $24.2 billion to the GDP in 2023 and supports at least 224,000 American jobs), the app democratized content creation by disrupting the follower-based model of social media, allowing creators from a wider range of backgrounds to amass significant followings quickly. TikTok let “average” people enter the content creator industry without them having to invest an enormous amount of time or resources into building a platform.
https://www.usermag.co/p/the-great-creator-reset
Mark Carrigan 