Social media is the worst state propaganda machine ever created. Destroying it would be a huge hit to authoritarians.

Bahaha right, so that way dissidents have no way of speaking out. Man, I'm sure they'd hate to see that happen.

The civil rights movement was organized before social media existed.

MLK would have been banned from YouTube.

Yes, absolutely, and most of the media would have portrayed him as an antifa rioter.

Maybe the civil rights movement wouldn't even be possible in this era.

When did social media enable dissidents to do anything?

The Arab Spring, the Mahsa Amini protests, the recent resurgence of the Palestinian/Israeli conflict, have all been conducted primarily using social media.

This is a very narrow scale when taking the bigger picture, as these are just prominent events in Middle Eastern history since the growth of social media usage, say after 2011.

You are not even considering the travesties avoided due to social media, what regulatory action has been avoided (or taken) to avoid social media backlashes.

You are being extremely disingenuous, and you are directly attacking some peoples' only hope of minimizing repression. I urge you to reconsider your beliefs. This directly and critically affects me.

I’m sorry for you and by all means, keep social media where you live. Maybe the next Arab spring will work out better than the first one and TikTok will enable that.

Where I live, we’re already free from repression and social media threatens to reintroduce it.

Yeah but with social media they can also undermine them outside of their state.

Agreed!

I guess the question is, how should citizens communicate with each other? Who should apply the restrictions? If the authoritarian state is applying the restrictions, then it's probably for their own goals.

An authoritarian state might have more legitimacy in applying the restrictions than a for profit company. Think about it.

But really, people should communicate with each other by means not including algorithmic feeds optimized for engagement. Preferably including as little emotion as possible when it comes to discussing policy.

> by means not including algorithmic feeds optimized for engagement

I think that's the problem, not "social media". We're typing these comments on social media, after all.