Maybe you've seen what's happening in recent days with Meta and TikTok.
It seems that the new chair of Meta's board of directors will be Dina Powell McCormick, deputy national security advisor during Trump's first term. She is highly recommended and favored by the president. So they're putting a politician to run Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp and so on.
Then there is TikTok. After a battle lasting years between the Chinese company ByteDance and the US government, the part of the company that deals with the US market is passing into the hands of Oracle (along with other joint venture companies), a multinational in the IT and technology sector. The person pulling the strings behind what will become the American TikTok is Larry Ellison, Oracle's executive chairman and currently the richest man in the world, with a net worth of $351.8 billion (as of September 2025).
With this premise, what happens is a tumultuous odyssey of users towards other platforms. American TikTok users in particular, upon reading the new terms and conditions, were annoyed to find that the app will analyze a whole range of information, including gender, sexual orientation, membership of ethnic minorities, identification with non-binary genders (!!!), membership of the LGBTQ+ movement (!!!!!!!), geolocation...
If we combine the collection of this data by the gov — ahem — by TikTok with what is happening on American streets, where ICE agents roam free like angry pit bulls, I don't find it strange that users are prudently uninstalling TikTok.
No one seems to be talking about Meta yet, but it's probably only a matter of time.
The social platform of choice for the exodus is Upscrolled, a mix between Instagram and X where you can upload photos, videos, and even text posts. There are temporary stories and content can be separated by topic. The app was recently designed by Palestinian-Australian developer Issam Hijazi with the aim of creating a social media platform free from censorship and shadow-banning. The inspiration came from noticing how often news about events in Palestine was filtered, censored, edited, or obscured by the media and algorithms.
This change struck me deeply. I have long complained about how Instagram has gone to shit in recent years, trying to compete and keep up with TikTok. I realized that many of the reasons I was still wasting time scrolling were actually just excuses. It was the dopamine talking. But the shock broke the dopamine flow and woke me up. It gave me courage.
I've completely lost the desire to open TikTok. If I open Instagram, any content that isn't posted by people I follow or my friends makes me feel sick. This got me thinking. Thanks to the addiction these platforms create, stealing our attention, they can afford to go downhill, a little bit every day. The famous enshittification process. And I thought about how tolerant we are. Each of us has our own tolerance for the crap we have to deal with.
Even if we don't pay for them, these platforms make money in exchange for the attention we give them. These platforms make us addicted and then thrive on our limit of how much we are willing to tolerate.
But tolerance has a limit. And that limit has been exceeded for me.
I am not opposed to profiling per se. The fact that Meta and Google understand who I am allows me to see advertisements for things that I am actually interested in and that I have even purchased thanks to this mechanism. As a musician, profiling is my ally in promoting my music only to people interested in my genre, allowing me to spend my money more effectively.
But this is too much. We have gone far beyond commercial purposes. I will no longer trade my attention to fill the pockets of politicians or other shitty people.
(translated with Deepl.com)
I have other things to say, more related to my artistic account. But this post would be too long so I keep it for another time.
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