What does it mean to use TikTok ironically? How is that different from using it normally?
Tiktok has 1 billion users. Whatever message they decide to push is going to propagate through the masses. I don’t think most people have the ability to notice and deflect misinformation like you’re implying.
A good friend of mine called me and wanted me to explain to him how to format a hard drive. I tried explaining, but he wasn’t getting it. I asked questions. Do you have a Windows cd to reinstall from? No. Do you know it costs hundreds of dollars? No. Is it broken? No, not exactly. Why do you want to reformat it? I just do. Then, it switched to, could I do this for him?
After enough back and forth questions, he grudgingly revealed that he had stolen the laptop from the local university. He had a job as a janitor there. Apparently, there was a group of the janitors that did this regularly, and my friend felt he had stumbled across a good thing.
I was so incredibly angry. Angry at the level that I didn’t know how to deal with the feeling. He wasn’t going to tell me any of this. He only revealed it because I pushed him on it. He tried to trick me into helping him commit crime. He’s stealing laptops from a university, a place that objectively makes the world better.
I stopped returning his calls and talking to him. That was 24 years ago. We had been friends for 10 years. I don’t know why I did that. I often wonder if there’s something wrong with me, something that makes it easy for me to cut people out of my life and not feel regret. I wish that I had at least said why I was angry. I didn’t say anything. I just stopped talking to him. I should have just turned him in. But at the time, it was hard to do that to a friend.
It’s not a law for no reason at all. Free speech is also an ideal, a principle. It can apply, as a moral, to non-legal areas.