>the US really wants to control the narrative its citizens see

They had control for decades, then traditional television/cable media started to collapse. They're trying to take control of "new media," in the internet.

TikTok has a narrative? I thought it was all about cooking recipes that may or may not destroy you if you make them as instructed.

Yes. It totally switched the narrative on Israel (and that's great imo). They didn't ban videos of Palestinians getting murdered and bombed, like other platforms did. It's a bit insane since even my apolitical friends got exposed to the raw videos and now it really shaped their opinion. I won't push it since I know this never actually happens, but it got zoomers to maybe even consider the conflict important enough to be an issue that swings their vote (the issue is that we don't vote lol).

For me that's awesome. But it really really really didn't sit well with members of Congress I guess, and boomers in general.

Huh. I guess it's obvious I don't use TikTok (I'm past 30, I have no business going there) but I had no idea it had actual political content.

Ha! Yeah I get it, I don't use it either. That's why it was so shocking to me too. It just started popping out at all times, in a weirdly "bipartisan" fashion too. When I asked about it, almost everyone said that they saw it on tiktok, or heard about it there.

I'm usually not super into video content, so even if I'm "younger" i never got into it but imo it's better than say, Facebook for this type of stuff. Even with the algorithm you still get exposed to people you don't follow, by design, which makes it harder to spread fake news in an echo chamber. so I'm not too concerned about the narrative control aspect.

As I said, most of the Palestine related stuff (that I started looking into afterwards) wasn't some pundits or grifters trying to get people outraged about a fictional "other side", it was mostly raw footage of what was happening in Gaza.