Summary
Senator Cory Booker’s speech on TikTok live surpassed 350 million likes as he stood for over 25 hours speaking in the Senate chamber.
Booker broke Strom Thurmond’s record for the longest Senate speech, which lasted 24 hours and 18 minutes in 1957 to block civil rights legislation.
I’m not trying to take away from the accomplishment, but how does this get 350 million likes? The entire population of the U.S. is less than 342 million. Yes, tiktok is worldwide, but are there really that many people paying attention to this?
I live in America, so my apologies if I seem a little biased.
I got the feeling that a large portion of the world is interested and paying attention to what appears to be the downfall and collapse of the largest “super power” on the planet. I imagine many people outside the country would be interested in attempts to combat/slow/reverse what for all intents and purposes is the biggest economic and military nation in the world going full fascist, even if it’s just symbolic.
I just saw a comment on a reddit thread saying that on tiktok live you can repeatedly press the like button, and it caps at 2000 likes.
That seems a little disappointing. I don’t use TikTok so not overly familiar with anything about it, but 2000 seems a bit excessive. Like I could maybe see a max of 3. 2 for something you really like and then 3 for something amazing or something you love.
As a european, I follow the us shitshow partly because it influences our politics and lives and partly because I feel sympathy for all the people suffering because of it. Mostly however, I follow it because it is ~70% of the content on lemmy. If I had tiktok I would have liked the speech there.
On tiktok a single person can give more than one like.
I dunno why this simple and obvious answer has no upvotes compared to the wacky theories.
I guess people are more used to trading conspiracies about TikTok than actually using it.