Hello and welcome to Fugue Plague, a weekly newsletter about AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!! My name is Kaile Hultner and I’m the one doing the screaming. This week: TikTok as the new Twitter.

How do you get your news? According to the Pew Research Center, it’s far more likely that you use your phone, tablet or computer to source news than you do a television, radio, newspaper or magazine. And when it comes to digital platforms, at least half of the respondents said they got their news from social media at least some of the time (most people still preferred visiting news websites or getting news through searches). It probably won’t surprise you to learn that, when broken down by age, the percentage of people ages 18-29 who got their news at least sometimes from social media jumped up to a full 69 percent (nice), followed by 55 percent of all respondents aged 30-49. In essence: Millennials, Gen Z and Gen Alpha are using the tools they’ve been taught to learn about the world.

There are certainly no shortage of issues with using social media as a means of news consumption. Disinformation and misinformation spread like wildfire and the people running the show at these sites by and large can’t be trusted to be proper stewards of the news environments they have a hand in creating. But this isn’t specific to just one social network; that’s all of them.

So it’s been weird to see the good ol’ United States Congress go after one social network in particular: TikTok. I mean, it’s not weird in the sense that it completely tracks given the US government’s Sinophobia going back to the 1800s, but it is weird in that they’re trying to make TikTok out to be some kind of unique radicalization tool, as though TikTok users are being bombarded with nothing but Chinese Communist Party propaganda and not endless attempts to do a dance set to the Mashle opening theme.

At the end of April, the Senate passed a bill that would, as the AP reported, “force TikTok’s China-based parent company to sell the social media platform under the threat of a ban.” Following the passage of the bill Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-WA) is quoted as saying, “Congress is acting to prevent foreign adversaries from conducting espionage, surveillance, maligned operations, harming vulnerable Americans, our servicemen and women, and our U.S. government personnel.”

Except, as it turns out, that might not be entirely true? Damn who would have thought.

Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) – you know, the guy who told a crowd of backers during his 2012 campaign against then-President Barack Obama that he didn’t give a shit about 47 percent of the voting population because they believed they were entitled to things like healthcare – was caught on camera saying the quiet part out loud yet again, this time during a forum hosted at the McCain Institute in Sedona, AZ where Romney was chatting with current Secretary of State Anthony Blinken. Here’s what he said, according to Axios:

“Some wonder why there was such overwhelming support for us to shut down potentially TikTok or other entities of that nature. If you look at the postings on TikTok and the number of mentions of Palestinians, relative to other social media sites — it’s overwhelmingly so among TikTok broadcasts.”

Now I am certainly no expert on constitutional law, but Romney, with his joint JD-MBA from Harvard University, should have been able to immediately spot the problem with what he said. It is almost certainly a First Amendment violation for the government to try and force ByteDance to sell TikTok to an American company specifically because of the pro-Palestinian videos on the platform. It makes the whole “national security” justification seem like a vacuous facade.

I first joined Twitter at the tail end of its radical heyday, where it was being used as a coordination and news dissemination tool by everyone from anarchists protesting the Pittsburgh G20 to students protesting 32% rate hikes at the University of California System to Iranian freedom fighters struggling against the Revolutionary Guard and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad during the Green Revolution. Twitter was an important tool during Occupy as well as the anti-government protests across the Middle East from 2010 to 2012. If at any point the government had been like, “Jack Dorsey! You must sell your company to an even bigger shithead or we’re banning you from operating in the United States!” there would have been a full-on uproar, especially if the post-hoc justification given for this was because there was too much liberatory shit happening on the platform. So you can understand why TikTok users are fucking pissed right now.

Changing direction for a second: The Met Gala was last week and a TikTok influencer caught a lot of heat for [checks notes] attending the gala dressed in a gaudy floral ensemble and quoting Marie Antoinette as “Deceptacon” by Le Tigre played as background music. My – well, “favorite” is a bit strong to use here – stitch of the original video is here. Content warning for images of brutalized and starving Palestinian children.

People are livid at this creator, and it sparked a site-wide backlash against any celebrity who attended the gala, with the common question being, “why are you out here celebrating gaudiness, wealth and excess while Palestinians are being killed en masse every day?” Honestly, fair question!

It was so dissonant hearing Deceptacon playing in that original video, though. My first interaction with the song was a cover, done by the Rude Mechanical Orchestra in 2007, with the lyrics changed: “Here’s to the man and his bombs his bombs his bombs/ Here’s to the man and his motherfucking war games.”

Anyway, people are using TikTok in the same way people have historically used other social media sites like Twitter. They’re using it to, broadly speaking, “organize” around fundraisers for Palestinian families attempting to survive and flee Gaza. They’re using it to agitate against tone-deaf and brain-dead celebrities who see nothing wrong with celebrating their wealth and status during a genocide. And they’re using it to keep up to date with what is going on—not just in Palestine but around the world. And they’re doing it because there are very few other places to go. They don’t trust media like the New York Times or The Washington Post. They can’t get their information from Facebook, which has become an information black hole more than anything else. And they can’t use Twitter the way it used to be available for, thanks to Elon Musk enabling every far-right chudlord in the Western Hemisphere to be as awful as possible.

It’s not a Chinese plot, it’s a desire to engage with a world that feels increasingly alienated/ing, a desire to make an appreciable difference in that world, even if all that means is helping one family at a time get out of hell.

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