Everything Is Content - Everything In Conversation: Will A TikTok Ban Solve All Of Our Problems?

Episode Date: January 29, 2025

Everything In Conversation is BACK with a meaty one for you. With your incredible input, we waded into the threat of a TikTok ban in the US.Just how impactful would losing the platform be for creators and audiences; could any good come from it; and what are the political motivations at play? President Trump has positioned himself as the short-from video saviour, but this isn't strictly true...Thank you so much for listening to our extra episode, and please do follow us on Instagram and TikTok to get stuck into the discussions. If you enjoyed this episode (we hope you did) please leave us a rating wherever you're reading this! xxxx----------Am I being censored? Some US TikTok users say app feels different after ban liftedTikTok restores US service after Trump says “we have to save it”The Best TikToks About TikTok Getting Banned Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

I'm Beth. I'm Richera. And this is Everything in Conversation. This is an extra episode we release every Wednesday where we take on one big story to discuss with you at home. As always we'll begin by updating you on the biggest pop culture stories from the week before diving into the discourse together. Remember, if you want to take part in these extra episodes, you just need to follow us on Instagram at everythingiscontentpod. That's basically where we vote on topics and ask for your thoughts and chat to you in the DMs. This week's topic is the TikTok ban. Could it still happen? Should it still happen? And what does it mean when so many people are paying their bills with money they're making online? So you will have noticed our gorgeous Anoni is not here with us today. She's a little bit under the weather so

she's taking a day off to recover which we're very happy she is. Everyone say get well soon Anoni soon and only please. Here are the headlines from the EIC newsroom. After months of speculation, the Oscar nominations are in. Leading the pack is Emilia Perez, Jacques Audiard's Spanish-language French musical crime film, which is nominated for 13 awards. Other big potential winners include Wicked and The Brutalist, who have 10 nominations, followed closely behind by Conclave and A Complete Unknown with 8 each. Both Cynthia Erivo and Wicked co-star Ariana Grande, Butera, are nominated. However, a lot of film fans are surprised and outraged that Luco Guadagnino's Challengers received no nominations. The ceremony takes place on the 2nd of March and we will definitely be watching. Sabrina Carpenter has responded to Pete Waterman's criticism of how she dresses after he

said, if you're asking to be respected don't come on in a g-string. She replied, my message has always been clear, if you can't handle a girl who's confident in her own sexuality then don't come to my shows. Trace Cyrus, the older brother of Miley Cyrus, friend of the pod, we wish, has written an open letter to their dad, country singer Billy Ray Cyrus, after his difficult-to-watch performance at the Liberty Ball for Trump's inauguration. Trace wrote, You may be upset with me for posting this, but I really could not care less at this point. Me and the girls have been genuinely worried about you for years, but you've pushed us all away.

As I write this with tears in my eyes, I hope you realise this message only comes from a place of love and also fear that the world may lose you far too soon. I love you, Dad. The White Lotus, which is returning to our screens on February 17th for season three, has just been renewed for season four.

Exciting. Following Bishop Marianne Budd's unflinching sermon at Trump's inauguration, in which she implored the new president to have mercy upon immigrants and the LGBTQ plus community, Republican Congressman Mike Collins has called her to be deported.

Trump himself has called her, quote, radical left hardline Trump hater with a, quote, nasty tone. Bishop Budd has responded saying she will not apologise and that she doesn't hate Trump, but she does pray for him. The nephew of Nigel Farage has avoided jail after admitting to upskirting a woman in a supermarket in London. Upskirting, e.g. using a recording device to take photos or videos underneath a person's clothes, has been a crime in the UK since 2019. However, Joseph Raj was not given a jail sentence, nor has he been placed on the sex offenders register.

He will instead pay a £576 fine plus just £200 in compensation to his victim. After a long wait, Thailand's equal marriage law has finally come into effect and hundreds of couples in the country have received marriage certificates. Quote, the rainbow flag is flying high over Thailand, the Thai Prime Minister wrote on Facebook. We love it. The Kansas City Chiefs, e.g. Travis Kelsey's football team, will play in the Super Bowl on February 9th after a victory against the Buffalo Bills over the weekend. More importantly to us here at the podcast, Kendrick Lamar will be headlining the halftime show with SZA joining him. When asked at the Sundance Film Festival if anyone had pointed out similarities between himself and Luigi Mangione, actor Dave Franco said, quote,

I have never received more texts in my life about anything. Anyone who has my number has reached out about it. His wife, actress Alison Brie, confirmed that despite everyone making the comparison, there have been no official offers to play the so-called healthcare CEO hot assassin. Scarlett Johansson has shared that she'd teach her kids to not ghost. On Today with Jenna and Friends, she said she taught her daughter Rose a lesson on ghosting after she learned that she ghosted a boy who liked her. Honestly, being ghosted is awful because you're just left with no answers at all and you're thinking, oh my god, did they do something, she noted. It haunts you for years.

And that's all from the headlines this week. So, ten days ago, after months of speculation and warnings about an imminent federal ban, the TikTok app went dark in America. For about ten hours, anyway. This all happened as a result of former President Biden signing a law last April mandating that ByteDance, TikTok's Chinese internet parent company, sell the app to a non-Chinese company or face a full ban in the States on grounds of fears for national security. With Trump now in office, upholding this law has fallen to him, and he has since signed an executive order that grants TikTok 75 additional days to comply with the law. It's

impossible to predict what is going to happen, this is Donald Trump after all, but this is where we're at now. A ban is still very much on the table, but the app is at least up and working for US users. And I have to admit, as someone who spends far too much of their time on TikTok, I was really invested in this. I was heavily online the weekend of the ban. I was scrolling my feed. I was watching as all of these creators posted tearful goodbyes to their fans and their audience. I saw them post videos expressing a lot of concern that they might not be able to make certain payments because they wouldn't get their TikTok creator fund paycheck. Some of them were even asking their followers directly for transfers to their PayPal and Venmo accounts so that they could pay rent and pay for all the things that they would normally pay for via their TikTok income. The whole thing was genuinely quite surreal. And it was made even more surreal by the fact

that when the ban came into effect, an error message appeared on Americans' phones that said, a law banning TikTok has been enacted in the US. Unfortunately, that means you can't use TikTok for now. We are fortunate that President Trump has indicated that he will work with us on a solution to reinstate TikTok once he takes office. Please stay tuned. So the whole thing has been weird and confusing and something that I've been thinking a lot about is how there is this huge online creator industry that has emerged in America and also globally in the last few years

that can be on the one hand extremely profitable but on the other carries all kinds of risks and that is the flip side of content creation where so many people have built their livelihoods on something which as proven here is not a stable foundation and offers very little in the way of protection or certainty and this is something that journalist Ava Santina tweeted about a few weeks ago. She wrote, TikTok closing in America really puts all that I work for myself baloney that influencers love to peddle into the spotlight. App closed and you have no income. You don't work for yourself. You work for ByteDance with zero rights. True for sites like OnlyFans2. You create content for a company that makes money on it. That company pays you. You're essentially an employee, but you have no right to basic

employment rights. Think this will become more of a conversation as more and more work moves online. As a content creator, you're at the whim of an algorithm that makes what often seems arbitrary decisions to promote or demote your content, reflected in your pay packet. In a traditional workplace, a manager couldn't one week pay you less sans explanation. I think that is a fascinating angle. And I have to admit, even as someone whose work is quite heavily online and has been for years, it's not something I had considered in those terms. The payoff can be amazing if you put everything into content creation and make it your entire career. You can make loads of money, you can become famous, you can get opportunities you might never ever have had otherwise. But on the flip side, absolutely nothing is guaranteed. You don't have the same rights and you don't have

the same protections. And as she says, it all comes down to whims of both an audience of total strangers and of governments and lawmakers. It is just a very tangled web. And I would love to get into it today with you, Richira. So I actually don't know how TikTok brained you are, likely less than I am, but I have to ask what are your thoughts on a potential TikTok ban and is there any part of you that thinks maybe it's a good thing? So I literally shared with you over Christmas that I was going to commit to being on TikTok, which sounds so ridiculous because most people are committing to do the opposite and are trying to spend less time on the app. Because I used it for work,

my algorithm is just completely fucked and it doesn't know who I am because I've just chopped and changed everything that I'm using it for. So I've heard from other people, I know that I need to spend time on it for it to understand what I want. But yeah, it's not something that I have a problem not going on at the moment, which is quite a strange, unique position in our modern times. In terms of whether I think there's any good in a ban, my overwhelmingly strong response to that question is no. There is a small part in terms of misinformation and especially what we're seeing with, you know, the Justin Baldoni and Blake Lively case and how this platform in particular has just completely distorted what is happening with that story and continues to in terms of

reflecting even the lawsuit, even the New York Times investigation, and even my sister who is really big on TikTok just has a completely different idea of what has happened in that case to me, whereas I have never been on TikTok to get my understanding of that story there is something really legitimately scary about that and how news spreads on that platform in a way that is so different and you know refracted from what the actual news story is in many situations so there is that part of me that can acknowledge that but I think in terms of the creativity in terms of in terms of the fact that Pandora's box has been open it exists but I think in terms of the creativity in terms of in terms of the fact that Pandora's box has been open it exists now I think a ban just think it's just a terrible idea if the platform had never existed then not having that platform wouldn't be such an issue but to

take it away from the hands of people who have built lives have built communities it is a huge part of our society right now you just you cannot you cannot ban it. What do you think? I really agree. And such an interesting point you made about TikTok can be a great disseminator of misinformation. And it can also be a reliable news source, like everything that can be used for good can also be used for ill. And so I guess it's a case of if something's being used for ill, then you just have to redouble your efforts to make sure it's used for good as well. And the journalist, Sophia Gaylor, who has been really, really big on TikTok, she was one of the kind of early TikTok journalism pioneers, wrote a piece for The Guardian about how TikTok, in her eyes and her mind,

is the only truly democratic online platform. And we'll link in the show notes. But she talks in particular about the utility of TikTok in terms of delivering news to young people especially and she shared the statistic that 17% of all US adults regularly get their news from TikTok which is kind of a startling amount I think considering how young TikTok is you know it does feel like that is quite a big proportion for you know relatively new news delivery system and she ends with the note which I think a lot of people disagree with,

but I'm not sure. And she says, with the app closed off to US citizens, those outside the country also stand to bear a somewhat unquantifiable loss. I will lose an indispensable part of my journalistic toolkit and my ability to represent global audiences. As a creator, I'll lose the daily access

that has so influenced my videography and my reportage. And as a user, one of the 23 million in the UK and 150 million in Europe, it is like someone is walking into my local library and stealing half of its books before I ever had a chance to read them, which is such interesting framing of essentially depriving entire countries and global audiences of access to new ideas. And it paints it as a really uncurious, anti-intellectual endeavor obviously that's not all it is it's also like prank videos and some of the worst shite you've ever seen and some of the worst brain rot but I think as we're watching other platforms be dismantled and put

together in a horrible way I'm thinking of Elon Musk's ex stuff like that I think TikTok can weirdly be quite a good place for good reporting because there are good reporters on there making the effort to do it like Sphia Gaylor it has also been a huge place to disseminate news coming out of Gaza for Palestinian solidarity and education for fundraisers so I think it's it's just not the whole picture when people are going oh it's just a silly brain rot website it's just a time-wasting app. Because it's not just that. It is a bunch of undesirable things. But then again, it is also so many powerful, important things.

And since we have the technology and since other people are using it, it just makes sense for everyone to have kind of an equal dog in the fight. Every country on earth. Well, maybe not every country on earth. I guess it's a private company. But where it has existed for years and years and years, to then remove it, that doesn't make sense to me. And I think that is where a lot of people are missing the point I agree and like you said the 360 view of it is never going to be that is perfectly good or perfectly bad for us and as you

were talking I was just thinking about I really wanted to raise you know the information the activism regarding Palestine and Gaza in the last few months via TikTok has been so powerful and is 100% one of the reasons why in my mind if I was in court and I was listening to both sides that would probably swing it for me because it feels like it's been such a powerful force in that horrific world event and you know even things like creators from across the world just like hiding their activism and doing like makeup videos it it seems so superficial, but it also isn't because it's communication. And it's global communication, it's spreading messaging. And it's also a super creative way to dodge algorithms and dodge censorship from various parts of the world and spread that messaging and increase solidarity and support like you said so yeah I just I don't know I double down on a ban it's never going to be the right thing the power of the platform will always swing in favor of it has the potential to spread these really important messages and just getting rid

of it just works against us and the other thing I was going to say is banning the app is just such a ridiculous move rather than regulation it's insane to me how governments will do anything other than force these big tech companies to sit down with them in a room and adhere to a strict level of transparency regarding what's going down on their platform and you know the figures they have for everything because they're conducting studies they they're conducting all of these things to better learn their users to understand what's going on on their platforms they know they know a lot about what's happening on their own turf it's just that they are under no requirement to share that in a very transparent

way with government in any form like Netflix is famous for not sharing anything about its platform that it doesn't want people to know so I think there's that and it just frustrates me that this this is being presented in a way that is about safety when it is far from and I think there's that and it just frustrates me that this this is being presented in a way that is about safety when it is far from and I think it's very disingenuous because as far as I can see there has been no visible public commitment to sitting down in a room with any of the big tech billionaires and forcing them and pushing them so that the public can see this too and understand that this is going on to work for us or to present a safer environment for us i have not seen anything like that and we had conversations along these lines when we talked about australia's proposed

ban for under 16s using social media which has since i believe been passed or at least it's well underway and it is it's just this complete reticence to engage meaningfully in the damage that social media can do the power it has to crumble democracies and change public conversation and spread misinformation and it does feel like we're entering this really shadowy time of the tech billionaire of the brologarks of all of this and conversation at the moment is about if Trump does uphold this law and require ByteDance to sell TikTok, and that happens, even though the CEO of TikTok has said that they're not interested in that, adamant that it won't happen. If that were to happen, the conversation already about who is going to buy it has one of them is Mr. Beast,

who, I mean, we obviously know who this man is, but if you are fortunate enough not to let me tell you about this man he's just a 20 something youtube semi-billionaire has about 300 plus million subscribers makes his videos based on setting like wild challenges to his followers to normal civilians in exchange for like chunks of cash it's a kind of twisted thing i think it's awful i think it's very sinister but anyway he's very sinister. But anyway, he's very popular. He has said that he is very interested in buying this wants to be the CEO wants to be the boss of TikTok. Elon Musk has also been fingered as a potential buyer. Trump himself said that he would be open to the idea of Trump having it. He also named another one of his tech billionaire friends. So it's likely that if someone

does buy it, it is going to be a self-interested Republican billionaire anyway, which is not going to be good for anyone. I think that they've marketed this well as threats to national security. Well, we know that everyone is now defecting to Red Note, which is a Chinese company anyway. They're happily handing over their American data. So I would quite like not to see a Mr. Beast or God forbid, an Elon Musk take on the helm. As we've seen with X, I think it is a platform that was once serviceable, once was quite good, even if it was flawed,

has become completely rotted through with Republican ideology. It is made in Musk's image. All voices that don't align with his are suppressed. And there are huge rewards for, you know, bad actors on there. And thinking of TikTok, which is, again, a flawed but promising app, go that way. That really fills me with dread, as we have seen that social media is, social media does have that huge power in kind of destabilizing countries it's not nothing and

thinking of TikTok going that way does yeah it does fill me with dread yeah I completely completely agree there's two things that I really want to bring up one is just I hate the framing and the narrative of this ban which is it's only come about because of trump's presidency first time round where he really pushed this through it was one of his like marked legacies from his first presidency that he pushed this through to the point that biden's presidency argued it through and now he's come back you know we got to the point of having a shutdown of tiktok that's the most dramatic it's been and then trump comes back and says, quote, we have to save it. And then TikTok thanks Donald Trump for saving it. And it's like,

are we all experiencing the same situation? Because I don't understand how he's now becoming the savior of this app when there is no need for a ban to happen. He's the one who promoted it. It's been pushed through since. And now he's rebranding himself as the savior and the hero doing anything he can to make it safe for the people it's truly insane propaganda and I mean I just feel like I'm losing the grip of what is real and what is not and losing my mind so I don't know how everyone else is feeling our collective memory is actually so short it's such a good point that we really, we just remember the last thing that happened. It's so easy to kind of pull the wool in front of our eyes and just go, yeah, Biden did this one. Yeah, that was a Biden one. Actually, you just have to go back like another few years, another few kind of legislatures and it's Trump. And I think that is, it shows our self-interest, the amount of influences that were

like, thank you, Trump. I love you. It's so self-interested we are really like it's like we're all under a shared delusion a shared amnesia and I think it's just individualism and it's pathetic and that will doom us that individualism will doom us remind each other of the reality which arguably you can do on an app like TikTok you can tell the truth to millions of people at one time. We have to do that. We have to kind of remember and not allow ourselves to get bamboozled by the orange man. The orange man. Yeah, I completely agree. I think it's just, yeah, we need to remember what has actually happened because especially, I mean, who knows what's going to happen after his term. I hope for the best, but I must expect the worst at this point. But that kind of re-narrativizing what's happened is just essential to politics.

And those things are so sticky. So yeah, we have to remember, this is not a Trump save TikTok. It's really, really not. The other thing I was going to say that quote by Ava that you read out was so fascinating. And I think I always forget how with these online platforms we are 100% their employees and I remember when I used to tweet quite a lot I really I don't know I really felt uncomfortable over the course of a year I don't know why but I just had this feeling that I was kind of sharing things about myself. And it felt like dollar signs were just on top of those things every time I would share them out into the world. And it felt like I was exchanging that for something, but both it feeling like I'd costed it and shared it out,

but also like I wasn't getting anything back from it. It was just feeling like, yeah, I guess I was cannibalizing all of my personal thoughts and feelings into this pool of people that I had no idea who they were. And so I definitely have felt that before. But I think what Ava was saying really has reminded me of that feeling of this thing that we are essentially employees on these platforms, even though we feel like self employed, and we are business owners by creating these TikTok channels, or even, you know, know creating podcasts we're still on somebody else's platform we are still at the mercy of these companies who essentially own our ideas own our creativity own our output and especially with something like TikTok it is kind of wild to

me that so many news platforms so many magazines are pivoting to you know putting a lot of effort into their content for these channels but you you can't game the algorithm, you can improve your chances, you can build up a good reputation, but we have no idea how they work, really. So you are just kind of putting so much effort towards these things, which are a dispensable, somebody like Trump can remove them be these places will have targets for you know the amount of views they have to get every month and they'll be driving driving driving in the same way that they do with page views but the difference is with page views there's something you can learn from it with the algorithm it's just so nebulous and I don't know it just feels it feels so strange to me that we're putting so much effort into trying to understand and game these things when these companies don't tell us anything they don't you know have any kind of transparency about how to work on their platforms and to get the most out of them and we're just I don't know why are we why are we trying so hard with them I think it's a really good point and I'm so pro creators making money, making big sums of money, in fact, from the time and energy they invest in building their platforms.

But so we got a message from Miriam who said, RE content creators. I always think about a UK based creator. They have two small dogs, Jasmine and Rose, and would make TikToks of them. From the TikTok creator fund, they could come off benefits and afford a dog walker. They have a chronic illness. And despite all the criticism influencers get because of this example i'm so glad tiktok didn't go away and they can keep their income they earn more than benefits and they've been able to get more independence from what being

a content creator has done for them even though tiktok isn't getting banned in the uk obviously losing that demographic would mean that content creators everywhere would be hit and it almost answers the question that we've just asked of why why are we trying to game these systems? And in some cases, it is literally replacing benefits, replacing the social support that people should get. And I think this extends out, although it doesn't apply to everyone who is obviously on these creator funds. A lot of them are able-bodied and a lot of them have other options but it does I think it is one way that a person without privilege and a person without money and a person without a support network could in theory make a lot of money change their lives and it is just a very harsh reality that the other side of

that is you are taking a big risk it could all go away in a minute. And I think because these are companies that don't have any requirement to protect their quote unquote employees, I think laws are always going to be behind tech, but they will catch up. But in the meantime, people that use them have to be really smart. And I'm not being a hater, but if you do use these platforms, you do have to have savings. You have to have a a backup plan you have to have a net if possible because it could all be taken away and i do think uk creators and us creators for now should bear this in mind should remember that these are kind of empires that can fall should always have a way out and that is i'm very very pro creators getting paid but the reality of the situation is it's just not a safe it is not a safe

place to build your foundations of your entire career going forward yeah i think that's a really good point and really good advice i remembered that i wrote a piece in 2020 which reminded me of the fact that so much of this discussion was led by trump's presidency and you know inflaming the nation around the safety concerns of TikTok. And when it felt like a ban was going to come into place for the first time in the US, I wrote a piece about the creators who were prepping for an exit plan from the app. And I feel like for the most part, the people who do well on the platform are really savvy. And I think especially after Vine collapsed in 2016, when Twitter took over and basically removed the most amazing video sharing platform, can I think for whatever people say about most young people wanting to be online content creators,

I think what that means is people kind of want to build themselves up into multiple businesses and multiple streams across platforms. I think the general trend from what I saw in having interviewed a few people is that they would just never rely on one platform. And I think, I mean, I hope that's the case for most people. I think young people are smart. I don't think that they would just never rely on one platform and I think I mean I hope that's the case for most people I think young people are smart I don't I don't think that they would rely on just one platform anymore something I was thinking about a lot of younger people have been saying that they need TikTok or need something like TikTok because it helps them kind of create their lives like they say how else do I find an itinerary for a holiday how else do I find new music how do I find recipes and I think a lot of people are calling this learned helplessness for Gen Z because it paints this portrait, not only of, I guess, a lack of digital literacy or cultural literacy to be

able to find these things without TikTok, but also like how shrunken and how narrowed the internet has become, the internet as we know it. The open web, I think, is dying or is dead, I don't know, because of these social media monopolies and companies like Meta who profit from making the internet smaller and funneling people just to their products and their platforms. And I think our reliance on the internet is growing as the internet is shrinking, which just makes for these echo chambers and these really like haunted areas of the internet like it used to be there used to be websites and the internet just used to be a completely different space and i think gen z will just have to take us millennials word for it before these kind of quite dark days of data mining and social media monopolies there

were interesting places to go on the internet there were blogs there were kind of art zines there was just there was something affluent about it there was something very rich and now I don't know it just feels different and I think I'm not saying I'm pro TikTok so that people you know can learn to do their own research because I don't think there is ever a way back to that kind of internet heyday but it's just really interesting that that is why a lot of young people want to hold on to it so that their lives can remain more culturally diverse, so they can be exposed to new ideas. We didn't used to need one kind of big TikTok to do that. People were just maybe exposed to it a bit more. And I think now all roads lead back to matter. Google is a SEO cesspit. I just think the usefulness of the internet has been destroyed.

And TikTok is maybe like a last bastion for people to be exposed to new ideas, to kind of get a cultural education, find new music, find new movies, find communities. It used to be that those places were everywhere. You had forums, you had discussions, you had different websites. We don't really have that anymore. Maybe TikTok actually is kind of a vital resource for young people websites we don't really have that anymore maybe TikTok actually is kind of a vital resource for young people who just don't have that kind of exposure that we had I mean I haven't fully fleshed this idea out but I do think dead internet theory and this idea of everything being essentially rotted under the baking heat of like social media for profit everything profit seo for profit I think there's something in that which i will percolate on yeah

i think that is a really interesting thread alice messaged in and said i know i probably sound like a conspiracy theorist but hear me out it's hard to ignore the blatant trump propaganda around the tiktok ban from the explicit mention of his name in the notifications users got when it went down slash came back to the timing of it all around the inauguration the whole thing was a power move to endear people to him and when you look at who benefits the most from a tiktok ban basically anyone invested in meta and who controls and profits from those entities a ban is about nothing more than money and power and censorship is a huge part of that what better way to control a group of people than limiting what they see and how they communicate to platforms you own we definitely touched on that a little bit but i completely

agree and especially with the censorship it's such an interesting important point around all of this when you limit the amount of platforms you are censoring people by default you are limiting the ways that they can spread messaging that they can protest you that they can talk about you in any kind of negative light especially when you are cozying up to musk and x potentially could be you know in your wheelhouse of platforms that support you as a result when zuckerberg is cozying up to you and instagram facebook become platforms that are on your side as a result the other thing that i think is really interesting i saw a piece in reuters last week called am i I Being Censored? Some US TikTokers say the app feels different after a ban was lifted. So I think this is really interesting. I would

love for a researcher to confirm this. But essentially, loads of TikTokers are saying that various terms and searches on TikTok, which were previously never an issue, have now been flagged or suspended, or certain videos are now no longer allowed on the platform and moderation seems to be a lot stricter. So in the piece the writer says some claimed that TikTok was striking comments that used phrases like free Palestine and free Luigi, a reference as we said before to Luigi Mangione and previously that was never an issue so I'm interested. Does it feel conspiracy coded to think that Trump kind of bringing it back and extending it for 75 days and TikTok thanking Trump could mean that behind

closed doors, there have been conversations around various things that will not be allowed on the app if they are going to move forward? Do you think that's conspiracy coded? Because I don't know, I can believe that. I think it's really belie believable when we talked last week about the Vox article about the Brolligarks that had this sci-fi future doom framing as well and I think it is we are now at the age of the kind of like digital terror of like it is just crazy enough to be believable it is not just the stuff of like sci-fi films from the 1970s we have all the tech in place we have the kind of terrible overlords who have proved themselves to be bad actors using tech in the past. So I don't think it's at all out of the realm of possibility that this is happening. And a lot of the people who wrote into us were saying this is of its fact, they believe it

completely. We had a message from Lindy who said the ban was a coordinated effort to censor TikTok in the US. And yes, that's worrisome. That was echoed among lots and lots of people. And I don't think it is sensible to just chalk it up to, oh, that's crazy. It's not particularly crazy. We've seen that these things do happen. We've seen that misinformation, social media has been utilised by entire countries to, you know, suppress elections and to guide things their way. So I think this is, you know, people are not being fantasists when they say they're worried about this. I think people are actually just being quite sensible Georgina messaged in and said I went from having 12,000 followers on TikTok in 2020 2021 and probably scrolling too much but enjoying the app to not even allowing myself to have it on my phone now because I literally cannot

control myself and will rack up 12 hours per day of screen time without even realizing the short form videos are rotting our brains but it wasn't like people weren't addicted to their phones before what did we all used to go on them i don't think a ban is the answer though especially when the format has trickled into other platforms tiktok is like a strange ugly creature that we've brought to life and are now at the mercy of there There's no way to kill it. We just have to learn how to live with it. God, that was powerful. Such like an evocative image. And I often do think that actually look at my phone.

I think you are a beast and I am completely in your thrall. Like I am completely devil possessed by you. And maybe a TikTok ban isn't what I need, but I just need to ban TikTok in, you know, the jurisdiction of my own brain. Thank you so much for listening and for all of your amazing opinions and takes on this topic.

We love, love, love being in conversation with all of you. Remember to follow us on Instagram and TikTok at everythingiscontentpod and also to hit follow on your podcast player so you always know when we've dropped one of these brand new episodes we'll see you as always on friday