It is weird, then, how the competition doesn’t do it well.

Reels and Shorts, for example, really aggressively push rightwing content out of nowhere. I’m a leftist and subscribe mostly to leftist content creators. TikTok has no problems showing me mostly content from that spectrum. But Shorts? It almost entirely ignores my subscriptions directly and instead pushes me elsewhere. For example, I subscribe to a game streamer. Only one. So naturally Shorts shows me almost exclusively videos about guns in video games as rightwing propaganda is narrated on top.

Reels wasn’t much better when I tried it.

It seems that the competitors all have certain things they want to push—rightwing nut jobs in YouTube’s case and coronated internet celebrities in Instagram’s—and everything else falls by the wayside.

TikTok hones in quickly and makes feeds truly unique. That is why it is so good and dangerous.