[jstarfish]

> Supported by shareholders to disrupt lines of communication regarding citizen journalism, union building, and other working class solidarity.

TikTok is not about promoting citizen journalism, union building or working class solidarity. It's about being positioned to undermine all of that when the need arises. Anybody that dares say the app about twerking has national security implications sounds like a lunatic.

It's problematic because it's part of a broader campaign to backdoor (pun intended) every goddamn device in this country. They've already flooded the consumer market with mandatory internet-connected IoT crap; they ship the hardware and the firmware. We don't sell Huawei in the west, so the next best thing is getting users to download foreign state-controllable software onto domestic mobile devices. Enter TikTok.

Because it's a media app, users necessarily give the app access to cameras and microphones. Everybody with the app installed is one auto-update away from quietly having their device turned into a foreign surveillance unit.

And that's assuming they don't flip the switch to selectively push propaganda to A/B groups. Everybody's experience is different-- by design! You're enjoying ass-clapping videos while your kids are being encouraged to idealize mental illness and Communism (everything is free and nobody has to work!), and your neighbors are being introduced to the QAnon pipeline.

It's chaos engineering. War is coming.