TikTok Is Just Digital North Korea

Imagine, if you will, that you are a consumer of North Korean media.

Or that of any Communist regime in the pre-internet era.

What you will find is a very warped and distorted version of reality, where up is down and black is white.

Only you will not know that. At least not from the state media you consume.

There will be no inkling that what you are seeing is a carefully curated fringe POV. No inkling that there are, in fact, any other POVs.

Every newscast, every pundit, every columnist, every letter to the editor will reinforce this unique set of facts, each building upon the other, citing the other, cherry picking or inventing facts to support the argument.

Your peers, your fellow citizens and consumers of this state-supported media, will be on the lookout for those who appear to deviate from the party line, who don’t seem quite as committed to The Single Source Of Truth.

And so when you do see the samizdat, when you hear carefully whispered rumors of a different reality, you will dismiss them as lies. As inventions of those Others who want to bring you down and deny the Truth.

Welcome to TikTok 2025.

Why It Matters

There is no clearer illustration that we live in the era of Feudal Media than the political parts of TikTok, YouTube, Instagram and other social platforms.

Each ultimately functions as its own Pyongyang, where users are served up feeds that reinforce a particular point of view, each new clip seemingly reaffirming the fact set previous videos have laid out.

There will be experts with impressive sounding degrees. Defectors from the other side who have been red pilled. Many will be outraged and expect you to be outraged too. Others will be calm and factual. No one will claim to be partisan. They will all just be truth tellers who want you to know the truth.

You will know them by name. Know their quirks. Their families. Their journeys. They will be your celebrities and your fellow bubble denizens will have in-jokes about them. Gossip. Screen grabs and GIFs.

More than that though, you, the TikTok or other social media user, with a limited understanding of history, current events and the inner workings of algorithms, will have no reason to believe that this is not The One Single Truth.

Because it will never dawn on you that there are other opinions, other POVs, other perfectly reasonable people who don’t believe a word of what your apostles are preaching.

Because that is how it works in a digital North Korea.

Compare this to the days of the monoculture.

If I wanted to get all my news from Fox and to regard it as The One True Source, I was still aware that there were other POVs out there. That CNN and MSNBC existed. That their pundits thought mine were wrong, but would engage in civil debate with them. 

I would know that when I went to a newsstand or Googled some bit of news that there were a wide range of opinions out there. Most of which disagreed with mine on a point or two. 

Or maybe all of them.

But if I am getting my news from TikTok or similar, I know none of this. Because all I see are videos from people in my bubble. People who share a fealty to the One Universal Truth. Some may be very angry and confrontational. Others, way more chill. The differences are tonal. Not factual.

Now you may decide that you can stop here because you believe that these bubbles I am referring to are built around controversial topics like vaccines and the Middle East.

Which is true, but political Feudal Media extends far, far, far beyond that.

There are, for example, three distinct bubbles that all promote a variant of the notion that the United States is the primary source of evil in the world. While left-leaning in presentation, they despise progressive politicians like AOC who they believe are secretly 'sheepdogs' herding leftist voters back into the Democratic pen to be slaughtered. 

For realz.

That some of the more popular influencers in this sphere have millions of users across multiple platforms should be worrying, given, as noted earlier, that many of their followers are not sophisticated enough to realize they are trapped inside a bubble of fringe, some might say “lunatic,” opinion.

And while it’s easy to say well, that’s on them, we are about to enter an era where AI algorithms control even more of what we see in terms of search results and those are just as easily gamed and siloed.

Even Wikipedia, that alleged paragon of crowd-sourced impartiality, has been compromised. 

There has been much reporting of late about how easy it’s been for Bad State Actors to manipulate its entries and even founder Jimmy Wales has found himself swept up in the controversy. (Wikipedia being, of course, where the major AI chatbots get a whole lot of their information.)

And this all matters because it is easy to see how quickly this can move from vaccines and Democrats to Netflix and Paramount. 

Or Coke and Pepsi for that matter.

Meaning that whatever POV you subscribe to—fringe or mainstream—is going to be replicated pretty much everywhere you look.

And while AI and algorithms helped set this world of Feudal Media in motion, they can also help to take it apart.

What You Need To Do About It

If you are the industry in general you need to remember this important fact: the people who built out all these apps were generally good and well-meaning techies with a utopian streak who could not even begin to imagine what bad state actors would be able to do to their platforms.

Meaning there are few, if any real safeguards built in, along with an innate tendency to downplay the damage that’s being done.

Let’s start there and with the acknowledgement that the major downside of AI is that it will allow these bad state actors to crank out an infinite number of videos featuring realistic looking AI-generated creators. Who will then reinforce all these bubbles of falsehood by making it seem like hundreds, if not thousands of people share the same opinion.

So there’s that, but on a more positive note, If you are one of these platforms, the soon to be American-owned version of TikTok in particular, there are a number of things you can do.

Start with making your algorithms more transparent and giving people control over them.

Add in AI-driven tools that will guard against “bubble-ization” and ensure that diverse POVs are surfaced along with randomness. The loss of serendipity, what you may have heard me call the “90s record store experience” is a huge loss as it leads to just more of the same and then people get bored and an entire industry just stagnates.

Or as a wise woman once explained to me early in my career, if you let consumers design a Porsche, it would look a lot like a Toyota Camry. True genius lies in the unexpected, is often initially rejected, and ultimately seems as if it’s always been there.

But I digress.

The other place where AI can help is in creating something akin to X’s “Community Notes” which relies to a large degree on consensus from various sources. It’s where outright lies can be called out, sketchy claims can be flagged and where videos with other POVs can be suggested.

This in some ways is the most critical piece—letting people know that there are, in fact, other POVs and teaching them critical thinking skills.

If you are a software developer, think about creating some sort of middleware app that sits between the consumer and the social media platform and curates the app for the user. You’d probably want to get some buy-in first in that it would require the platform to give up control over a massive revenue driving mechanism. But the PR value of that sort of feature may prove well worth it.

If you are an advertiser, reward platforms that try and break up all the bubbles, insist on improvements to the UX that will result in better user experiences and remember that there’s strength in numbers: the more advertisers band together, the tougher it gets for the platforms to say “no.”

If you’ve been a loyal TVREV reader all year, thank you and have a wonderful holiday season.

See you next year for our Fearless Predictions on January 2nd.