To be fair: some Democrats too. But at least we have Democrats who fight media control like Sanders.
To be fair: some Democrats too. But at least we have Democrats who fight media control like Sanders.
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If you’re getting your news from TikTok you’re as fucked in the head as any lead-addled boomer.
No one should get their news from any one source. You could replace "TikTok" in your sentence with almost any single mass/social media outlet and be correct. I wouldn't advise anyone to get their news from just Fox, or just X/Twitter, or just MSNBC. Edit: Also, multiple major news organizations have TikTok accounts, and a lot of politicians including Biden. Even if you say, "I'd rather get my news from CNN", well CNN has a TikTok account, but it exists alongside several other journalists, politicians, news outlets etc. TikTok actually has an advantage of being more diverse than many other single-outlet sites.
The blind spots created by funnelling news through a single filter is a big, often desirable feature of mass media conglomerates. Doesn't matter if it's CNN, Fox, TikTok, or Facebook - no one source is going to give you the full picture or be completely true all the time. TikTok has value as part of a diverse media in that it bypasses the need for corporate/government approval of discussion. Here's Bernie Sanders talking about how a handful of corporations control what news makes it to people: "It is the limits of discussion, the kinds of issues that we are allowed to talk about. So I never get asked about income and wealth inequality."
The meme is as much about hypocrisy as anything. Folks will accept misinformation/bias so long as it's their brand of it. I mention Facebook for a reason - there are staunch conservatives among my family who post about vaccine hazards, LGBTQ+ agendas, how white Christians are persecuted in North America, God's laws must be our laws, etc. Lawmakers will allow (and in the worst cases support) misinformation on many platforms, but figuring out why and which ones is a different discussion. People seem to accept that bad posts on say, X/Twitter, are something to be worked around without the need for a ban even though there's vile stuff on there. I'm not arguing for censorship of them (which almost never works out). I'm talking about the clear dissonance in opinion where "this is ok here but needs to be banned here".
While true, I think your statement is misleading. No one should get all their news from one source, but Facebook is particularly bad, and TikTok is many times worse than that again. Facebook will show you the misinformation of the highest bidder. TikTok will do that but also be beholden to the Chinese government. Not sure if the content is worse than that of Fox News or the Daily Mail (that's a low bar to squeeze in under), but they're at least sneakier.