Americans are joining the Chinese social media app en masse to protest an imminent TikTok ban.
- American users have flocked to Chinese social media platform Xiaohongshu in defiance of security warnings.
- Chinese and American users have engaged in surprisingly friendly conversations about each other’s lives.
- The influx of American users could burden Xiaohongshu’s censorship mechanism, experts say.
Just proving US government right tbh.
So, US said: “TikTok is too powerful and has too much influence” and then people continue to be influenced. I kid you not, most trending rednote tiktoks right now are about price comparison between China and US with topics like: “veggies are like 2$ in China when they are 6$ in the US” with absolutely zero awareness of how economies work:
- median hourly salary in the US: 27 USD
- median hourly salary in China: 5 USD
Chinese vegetables are more expensive.
You could attribute this to people just being financially stupid but I think there’s definitely some truth from US government pov that China has a lot of propaganda power over US citizens and I say this as non-american myself as it’s quite apparent as a 3rd party observer.
Personally I still think low level laws that protect privacy of all americans is the way to go but America will never sacrifice free market money like that.
The only video like that ive seen was showing how cheap a day of vacation in china would be.
The app is obvi not a bastion of unbiased free speech. This is reactionary and even if tiktok were banned on the 19th, people would be put off by using an app where you cant understand 80% of the comments and some of the more subtle content. Its a protest.
Man, Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts must be really shit if the TikTokers didn’t even consider them for a second lmao
IG reels are utter garbage for the most part but Youtube Short would actually be good if Youtube had the balls to separate it from Youtube itself as it’s always limited in that regard.
YouTube Shorts are the absolute evil
If you carefully cultivate your subscriptions and watching habits it’s not bad. I get mostly stuff I’m subscribed to, a movie cut into thirty second chunks (right now it’s Braveheart), tv clips with one of three pieces of music overlaid, a mix of benign recommendations that are mostly meh but sometimes funny, and thirst traps. So… it’s not good but I do sometimea see something worth following.
It used to be worse, I think abandoning guntubers was the right call. I used to have Andrew Tate and Jordan Peterson pushed at me.
They were just reposted tiktoks, make it make sense.
Instagram has a shit algorithm, yt shorts are generally just worse forms of yt or reposts from ticktok/insta. People are willing to tolerate a lot of data selling already, so why should they care that it’s being shared with the CCP?
Are they allowed to talk about tiananmen massacre I wonder.
Are they allowed to talk about &%$!@$+×# &%;%$ I wonder.
Whats that?
You know, the LALILULELO!
That backfired real good, didn’t it?
Not really surprised. Most Tik Tok users are braindead.
as a tiktok user — can confirm.
This might have an interesting side effect. Western voices and opinions being shared enmasse with Chinese youths on platforms they’re comfortable with. It will be interesting to see how the Chinese government responds to this
I’m on the app and, honestly, I have been seeing the exact opposite. Loads of American users are seeing, for the first time, that folks in the PRC don’t have it so bad.
It will be interesting to see how the
ChineseUS government responds to this[Deleted]
They will probably ban the app or make in unavailable in other countries. Typical censorship stuff
I’m amazed at all the CCP dick sucking here. It’s like I stumbled into r/Sino
操你中國政府
Yea, I made a post to my people to come to the fediverse. While we have capitalist and communist forums, ultimately the fediverse sits in the anarchist camp.
I like it because I’m suspicious of tankies and hate musk fucks. A nice 3rd option.
Anarchy, because have you met people? Those fuckers can’t be trusted with power
Can’t stand the no freedom of speech, but I understand they can’t have it because that would become a CIA backdoor to overthrow their leadership and also winnie the ping has let state capitalist run rampant. Ringing the lifeforce out of the populace in a way that would make Jeff Bezos proud, and erect. But you can’t deny that, for an expansionnist fashistic budding empire, they do have their shit together and trains running on time and so on.
I’m starting to think the usa military won’t be able to kill them all in a day and then starve everyone by sinking all their food and oil ships.
Good for them. People should be free to live their lives.
Tick tock is cancer though, yt shorts as well
I don’t like it either, but these fuckers clearly do, so at least they’re doing it in a way that isn’t basically a bunch of governments spoon feeding what they want Americans to think to them
Literally no difference between that and Lemmy.
It’s all social media and all has the same effect on us
You can’t really infinite scroll on Lemmy for hours watching content specific to your tastes.
You might get five minutes per day of mildly interesting content on Lemmy
Lemmy kind of sucks, that’s why I like it. Reddit to me was like beer and Lemmy is like non alcoholic beer. If stop drinking a non alcoholic beer is fine, but I don’t really need one every day.
yeah that is definitely part of the appeal!
another part is that the self selected crowd is a bit… cooler
I don’t believe it.
You should, my wife is one of these folks and she’s having a very eye opening time.
About what? Didn’t expect everything to be in Chinese?
Surprised by how much is in English, but also surprised that China isn’t the hellscape that we’ve been fed through the media. It’s middle class people in both countries talking about real things in a completely new way.
One thing that surprised her, everything in China isn’t just cheap crap. It’s american companies that cut corners by ordering crap and shilling it to us and then blaming China for it being cheap. China makes quality products, but the US will never see them, and so we live with the perception that everything from China is crap, but only what we don’t tariff to death makes it through. It’s cool to see her perceptions of the world change.
I’m not some tankie, and I don’t give a shit about tik tok, but there’s a massive cultural exchange happening that’s too huge to filter off the rip, and I feel like folks are realizing there’s a lot more that unites us than divides us. Our billionaires don’t like their billionaires and so we beef? Nah, not my fight
China isn’t the hellscape that we’ve been fed through the media
China has been really showing off hard in the past few years, especially on tiktok. Chinese cars are winning and every single person on Tiktok knows about Chongqing. So I don’t think this is as apt as it used to be.
I’d love more cultural exchange with China but it’s really up to Chinese themselves. Literally all west media and apps are blocked in China. So should we converge on a clear propaganda app which is litterally named after the little red book of communist revolution as our “honest cultural exchange” source? Does anyone seriously think that’s a good idea?
We have Lemmy, Mastodon, the whole Fediverse, bluesky, Telegram, Nostr — the free options exist already, it’s up to Chinese to get some balls to meet us midway.
Americans figuring out that Chinese people are also just people like them is the most hilarious and american thing I read in a while.
I agree, but as an American it also doesn’t surprise me at all. Dehumanizing others is one of the top tactics to make awful conservative policies more palatable.
Considering the distance between LA and NY is roughly the same as Turkiye and Portugal, we do tend to get a little single-minded in the experiences of others. But learning more about the world is never a bad thing. America is cooked
yap dollar
Xiao hong shuuuuuuu
I thought the difference in humor would take a while to bridge but it’s very familiar. Day in the life of an american type videos with road rage, burgers, shitcoins, podcasts and pancakes
It’s really cool. The people are super nice and welcoming. The cities are incredible. Their cost of living is leaps and bounds better than ours. Life is affordable there.
They just got it better. The cold war propaganda we’ve been spoonfed from birth was all lies.
We are the bad place.
Their cost of living is leaps and bounds better than ours.
Crazy how effective this propaganda is. Median Chinese salary is 5 USD/hour. Now 5x every chinese price you see to get really cost and revisit your comment.
Friends of mine lived a year or so in China. It was very harsh and the people were not very welcoming. That’s not strange as people tend to be like that towards strangers immigrating. But it’s no utopia you can fit into easily.
Yeah, sure. Just because one team is bad doesn’t mean the other is good. There is a lot of poverty, exploitation and general shit happening “there”.
They’ve eliminated extreme poverty and are on track to eliminate poverty. Given even the poorest citizens don’t worry about rent or medical bills or food costs, their poverty looks incredibly different to that in the US.
Yeah they eliminated poverty the same way they defeated COVID… By just saying they did and people like yourself slurp it up without a second of critical thought.
No, you people choose to be ignorant and believe the US government, instead of visiting China yourself or talking to someone in China or doing any research.
Even the CIA, by the way, has stated China has eliminated extreme poverty in the world Factbook.
I get it, a lot of rich white people paid for you to be the way you are; it’s still your fault to remain ignorant.
How do you know?
This is a fine example of how the american government doesn’t care about the interests of americans.
The government only exists to serve the wealthiest among us. Some of those wealthy people are upset that Chinese aristocrats are getting all that money.
This trade war only exists because rich americans want more money for themselves. It has nothing to do with national security and you’re a useful idiot if you think otherwise.
You don’t lift 800+ million people out of poverty by concentrating all of the profits among a small few. And China has increasingly been prosecuting their wealthy.
Which is what they really don’t want us learning to do.
you don’t lift 800+ million people out of poverty by concentrating all of the profits among a small few.
This is false attribution.
There’s no way to verify how other political system would have worked for China. Maybe it would have worked even better? Taiwan for one is richer, stronger and happier than China per capita so does that mean dictatoriship -> democracy is a better system? Do you see the flaw in this attribution logic now? So, unless you have a time machine…Actually it’s very easy to know. By design, capitalism concentrates most of the reward among a small number of privileged few.
And people with good sense judge a country by how well it’s working people are doing- not by how much more wealth a few people have been able to hoard.
Capitalists use the same exact argument for why outsourcing labor to the poorest countries is actually a good thing. For real, I’ve argued so many right wingers saying “searching for the cheapest labor actually helps the worlds economy because you’re lifting those poor people of _____ out of poverty! It doesn’t matter that it’s only pennies/day, because to them, that’s a lot of money!”
Pretty goddamn gross behavior.
Outsourcing is extracting wealth from another nation. How can you possibly compare that to lifting ones own citizens out of poverty?
Exchange isn’t extraction. If you’re buying raw materials from Africa, yes. If you’re buying finished goods from China, no.
This is precisely why the US had a sudden about face about China. They were hoping their entryism with capitalist exchange would result in the fall of the communist party, who number one priority is preventing the plundering of resources through unequal exchange.
You can’t untangle the outsourcing of manufacturing to China from that.
I wasn’t making a 1:1 comparison. I was saying that “but look how many people have been lifted out of poverty!” argument is a capitalist argument, because it completely ignores the reality of the situation. Have people been lifted out of poverty by outsourcing? Of course. But that doesn’t negate the core problem.
As the other person mentioned, outsourcing manufacturing TO china is largely responsible for the manufacturing boon there. And then rich Chinese capitalists (though they use the cover of not being called capitalists) became rich middlemen between “western” businesses and the cheap Chinese labor. So outsourcing has absolutely contributed to it. You and the American capitalists are looking at the same thing, one is crediting American executive innovation, the other is crediting the CCP.
You do it by exploiting the billions outside your borders from countries even more poor like mine where they sell their garbage low quality products that cant be repaired or recycled, from shitty earphones to bikes that start breaking down in a year, taking advantage of poor people who cant afford to buy anything of better quality. China isnt better than us when it comes to exploitation and inequality.
Hold up. You think the Chinese are the ones deciding to manufacture low quality products, and not the capitalists who are ordering them that way?
They are spreading their wealth to those in need. Not exploiting. They value mutually beneficial relationships.
Chinese manufacturers build according to budget. They are perfectly capable of making high quality products, and do. The problem is a lot of companies (looking at you, Walmart) demand their Chinese manufacturers build products for a pittance – the manufacturers won’t say no, but they’ll find a profit for themselves by using lower cost materials. (ETA: also less quality control and cheaper labor)
Ask yourself – if you were a woodworker and someone offered you $250 to build a small stand out of wenge, you’ll probably do a good job of it. If someone offered you $30 to build the same stand, and you really needed that $30, you’d make it with pine and just paint or stain it to look like wenge. Chinese manufacturers are no different.
Bingo.
Bro, there’s ALOT of Chinese capitalists.
Humans are humans.
What do you think “capitalist” means?
I don’t think you know, because by definition there cannot be “alot.” That’s the whole point of capitalism- to concentrate the means of production into the hands of a very few.
Sure buddy, keep that head up your ass.
LoL. You really are just parroting propaganda, without any clue what the words you’re saying actually mean.
They all work for the government.
Hold up. You think the Chinese are the ones deciding to manufacture low quality products, and not the capitalists who are ordering them that way?
Chinese brands owned by Chinese capitalists operating with consent from the chinese state.
spreading their wealth to those in need
Using planned obsolescence and taking advantage of poor consumer and environmental protection laws to sell garbage to people trapped in a cycle of poverty isn’t exploitation? Also China ‘invested’ billions here too and we didnt get any hospitals. We got china flooding our markets with its shitty goods and chinese ‘businessmen’ running scam centers.
They value mutually beneficial relationships
they do have a mutually beneficial relationship with our dictators.
I love that capitalists attacking communists always end up accidentally attacking capitalism. Classic.
China is a capitalist country with aspects of socialism. it’s not really communist anymore.
No one here is shitting on communists, were shitting on you for a thinking the Chinese are any different than us.
China is a capitalist shithole but for some reason its biggest defenders are always self proclaimed western communists.
edit: we also have a few militant communists groups that like to blow up chinese nationals working for their govt every now and then.
What exactly do you think “capitalist” means? Because it sounds like you think any participation in markets is capitalism.
What do you think “capitalist” means? It sounds like you think it’s just market participation.
I think the Chinese businessmen are exploiting slave laborers to produce cheap goods and export them to most of the world. Would you call that a mutually beneficial relationship?
I wouldn’t. Source?
Yeah you do it with slave labor, genocide, mass aborting baby girls, and IP theft.
Did you lift this straight out of a State Dept press release?
Why would I need to, these things have been known for decades?
Don’t get me wrong, capitalists (ex apple) love to collude, but it doesn’t make china some magical perfect land.
Yes, the intelligence orgs have been spreading lies for decades.
China isn’t perfect, but most of the scandal news we hear about it is fabricated by our government. Even our own government has now admitted they made up the Uyghur genocide claims.
Huh. Care to link the last one?
What they were actually trying to combat was China preventing the US from continuing to radicalize and use the Uyghurs as a front for regime change operations.
It has everything to do with national security, they just don’t consider common people as part of their nation same as slaves weren’t.
Yeah, national security for the rich, they don’t want us plebes getting any ideas about what real justice looks like.
Removed by mod
What leads you to that conclusion?
Is it that surprising that your average person in another country is easy to get on with? I’ve been to a fair few different countries and the everyday people you interact with are lovely (except France).
It’s the fucking politicians you’ve got to look out for, and not just the foreign ones.
