Telegram, the app that some of your friends obnoxiously insist on moving your group chats to – so that you can escape the privacy-evading grip of the “evil “Meta machine – is not exactly an innocent alternative to WhatsApp. While Telegram offers private group chats just like WhatsApp, it also has a large public space that is less hidden, easily accessible, and weakly moderated. This makes it a particularly interesting medium to study. Thanks to its privacy-enhancing features,

TikTok has rapidly developed from a punchline for jokes about "kids these days" into a social media juggernaut. The speed of this development is unprecedented, even in the rapidly-changing world of social media. The TikTok app was released in the United States in August of 2018. In 2020 it was already the most downloaded App across all application stores, beating out social media heavyweights like Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. TikTok represents the synthesis of three of t