The New Yorker:

Live-streamers have flooded the social-media platform to prove the righteousness of their side.

By Jacob Sweet

On a recent evening, Pasha Boyer, a thirty-two-year-old father and professional sports bettor who lives in Missoula, Montana, logged on to TikTok to continue what has become an unpaid full-time job: debating Israel vs. Palestine over TikTok Live. As usual, his screen resembled a nightmarish Zoom call, with the seven other interlocutors locked in a perpetual state of disagreement. “They said literally everything I was saying was wrong,” he told me. The acrimony did not deter him. He stayed on hour after hour, as fourteen hundred viewers came and went, and he eventually settled into a debate with a fellow-Jew who disagreed with Boyer’s pro-Israel stance. By the time Boyer logged off, it was 3 p.m. the next day; eighteen hours had elapsed. “You know what the crazy part is?” he said. “The other guy was on until three o’clock in the afternoon as well.”

With TikTok’s cultural influence well established, many of its users are now exploring whether the platform can host constructive debates. Boyer is one of several dozen people who have pushed this question to its limit, hashing out one of the world’s most contentious and intractable issues on TikTok Live, the app’s most freewheeling feature. Whether Boyer and his fellow-debaters can change minds is unclear. But, given the opportunity to engage with real people in front of large audiences, staunchly pro-Israel and pro-Palestine users have decided to join live streams that allow them to express their views—and argue with others—seemingly forever.

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