ismatu gwendolyn

To be clear… THIS place also looks like Facebook did when I was twelve years old. Less celebrities, more people telling me how they want to see members of the political party they oppose be beaten up in the streets. Neither outcome bodes well.

anyways. i got work to do. short form social media fractures my ability to focus in such obvious ways. it was never the best way to get global news, was it?

peace.
ig

It is… alarming how much Twitter looks like when I was twelve years old on Facebook. I used to be able to scroll for thirty minutes and get news broadcastings from around the world. Now, no matter how many times I click “not interested,” it’s news from celebrities and engagement farm memes.

I imagine this is how adults of Sierra Leone felt watching Siaka Stevens prime Sierra Leone for war— the gutting of any and every Public Health Service, the filling presidential cabinet with cronies. We always think war means guns, which means we catch on way too late; war always starts with policy.

Haven’t made a video about Trump’s executive orders because I want to focus my lens on news outside of the states, and news outside of the acute panic.

Difficult a bit as a public health person, because there’s a lot of reasonable acute panic over public health concerns exacerbated by those EOs :)

RICCARDO <3

Twitter is the social media site I mourn the most. Public health Twitter was so massively helpful as an undergraduate/graduate student in the field. It was a phenomenal conglomeration of research about our ongoing pandemics; many users didn’t transfer to bluesky. How do I fill this gap in knowledge?

Threadings. essays, stories, and interviews (by ismatu gwendolyn) for the collective good.

If you do not know me, my name is ismatu and I am a publicly-funded scholar. I write essays at threadings.io | I am using bluesky to talk about current events that are interesting enough to write about but not meaty enough to warrant an essay on. Thanks for having me!

I never expected a true TikTok ban to last; if I think that the colonized world could be better off with Americans absent, surely US Foreign Affairs thinks so too. I suspect that TikTok now has US-American made accounts on its own algorithm, separate from the TikTok users of the rest of the world.

Closing thoughts: I was originally excited to see what TikTok looks like without US-Americans on the app. That could be a very powerful organizing tool for much of the colonized world— a place where they could speak while knowing that American-made accounts could not overhear them.

Remember that causing TikTok to go dark on US Servers was the decision of ByteDance Inc. It was not required by the Supreme Court. So they created this “problem” and then chose to solve it with a structural endorsement of Donald Trump. Unprecedented action for a social media platform to take.

In short: we now have precedent that endorsement can come with hiring (or compensating) the media hub as a whole by paying their labor (such in the case with Oprah the Billionaire) or by attributing the continued availability of a social platform to an incumbent ruler (in the case of TikTok).

YouTube video by Barnard Center for Research on Women Normalizing the In/Security State: Police and Prisons

There is now an endorsement of Donald Trump embedded into the INFRASTRUCTURE of the app, where not an insignificant user base will forever associate TikTok with the right-wing ruler. I am reminded of this talk about the surveillance state, where the state wants you to believe it’s all seeing.

Political endorsements are designed to create and sell narratives. Trump’s name sparks media maelstroms, meaning an endorsement is a great way to use a smoke screen to distract from what’s happening behind the scenes. What is the narrative we are designed to accept here?

Attributing the platform going dark to the Supreme Court and its supposed resurrection to Donald Trump produces social capital for TikTok: the ability to change servers, transfer data, and impose a new algorithm on every user who made their account in the United States without sparking outrage.

My personal hypothesis: TikTok in the USA has likely been acquired by (or is in some sort of partnership with) Meta. The time dark was utilized for a server transfer. TikTok users have noted Facebook now having a TikTok page as one indicator that some sort of merger or partnership has taken place.

One more quote I want to hone in on from Dr. Thrasher: “The “guest” who can bring the most production value to the host with the most social capital will get the airtime.” What happens when that ‘airtime' allows for a smokescreen with which to change the structure of a media hub? Enter: TikTok x DT.

Tweets from @thrasherxy from Nov 12, 2024: "The Spectator article reporting stands: Oprah Inc was paid $ 1,000,000 to endorse and recreate TOWS. Harpo could have been paid nothing & Oprah could have endorsed on a plan stage w red, white & blue balloons. For Oprah to pretend like she did not benefit at all from endorsing the possible next president on the set of TOWS (built and paid for not by her, but by the campaign!!!) and that it only benefitted Harris is disingenuous.” This text is spread across two separate tweets and has a collective total of: 401 likes, 32 retweets, and three comments.

I put “free" here in quotes because while there was no monetary exchange, there is plenty of social capital to be gained in putting on the Oprah Winfrey Show (at no cost to Harpo Productions) to endorse the Harris campaign. See comment from Dr. Thrasher below:

Kamala Harris and the death of the celebrity endorsement Kamala had so much celebrity glitter thrown over her that she seemed to exist inside a kind of just shuffled glittery snow globe.

In the case of Oprah Winfrey: no, she did not accept one million dollars for an endorsement; she accepted money from the Harris campaign to pay her media and production team. The endorsement itself was “free.”
www.spectator.co.uk/article/kama...

What’s the difference? Previously, a media center would need to invite the politician onto their platform, record something with them at their own cost, and disseminate the media to their viewerbase. The benefit is in the exposure to that particular congregated audience. The game has changed.

Thread thesis: we can now expect for legacy media centers (shows, networks, social media platforms, newspapers, etc.) to embed political endorsements WITHIN the platform’s structure, and not just WITH the media platform itself.

Many saw the message upon TikTok’s removal/reinstating which cited Donald Trump for aiding in “finding a solution” to TikTok remaining live in the US. This reminds me of this set of tweets from Dr. Steven Thrasher analyzing Oprah Winfrey’s endorsement at the Harris campaign. Where’s the connection?

TikTok’s 14 hour ban allows alt. servers to:
(1) acquire the media.
(2) create new internal codes and policies that:
(2a) defang, depoliticize, decentralize, and disinform users and
(2b) conduct increased surveillance for all using (under the ever ambiguous waving banner of National Security).

On TikTok: The media strategy used in the USA when a media outlet operates against the will of the empire: acquire, gut, sterilize, and re-release. This removes the teeth from the source and provides its user-base with a gummy, nutritionally-devoid alternative to suck on + maintain addiction to. 🧵

This will be another place where I post and go. Engaging with short form media (even written short form media) where there’s a heavy center on US electoral politics shortens my attention span and limits my gaze on the world.