We live in the dumbest, lamest cyberpunk dystopia possible.
So LA has been — and continues to — protest against ICE. These protests haven’t gotten any smaller or lost any momentum, but social media wasn’t reflecting it.
TikTok users, realizing that the platform/other social media are censoring/deleting/shadowbanning these protest videos, decided to find a workaround.
They’re calling it the LA Music Festival. Ice detention centers and other protest locations are “stages.” The hottest band is Rage Against the Machine. “Here’s what gear you should be bringing to stay safe at the LA Music Festival.”
And it fucking worked.
TikTok has become a proving ground for a lot of new music, meaning lots of labels and organizations have lucrative deals with TikTok to promote their new artists and music festivals. So they absolutely cannot censor the words “music festival” or train the algorithm to ignore it, or they risk endangering that very important revenue.
So now protest videos are flooding feeds again, but it’s the LA 24/7 Music Festival. Truly an incredible timeline we’ve landed in.
During the Civil Rights Movement of the 60s, radio broadcasts would refer to upcoming marches as “parties” and use other such euphemisms to sneak calls to organize past censors. For example, the Birmingham marches of 1963 were called “a field trip in the park with a luncheon”.
This is, frankly, a timeless strategy, just done online.
