censorship??? there are a ton of other apps that do the same. China censors people and created a credit # for them to punish them if they dont act they way the gov wants you to act. What are u on about?
Omg china has a credit # for their people? Thats evil! Good thing we dont have a Credit Score in the freedom country. And yeah its not censorship if you can get around it! Especially if its shutting people’s communication down for our freedom and safety 😎🦅🇺🇸
An app has been shut down on the unsubstantiated claims that it was a tool of foreign influence but on the apparent reasoning that it was facilitating conversations that western social media is hostile to such as the Israeli extermination of Palestinians.
Whether or not you believe that the censorship was reasonable or if there is sufficient evidence of subversive foreign influence using the platform is possibly debatable, but the fact that it is censorship is not.
This is the third story I’ve seen today that was basically “Tiktok users flee service to other chinese service app you’ve never heard of”
So basically the usa banned tiktok, and now there’s 3 other tiktoks, all connecting the same amount of data for china, just through 3 different services instead of 1.
Sounds about right,
From my understanding, they singled out TikTok instead of addressing the actual problem they claim to care about.
[Edit, another comment says its any app with 1million users. So now there’s just going to be a hundred TikTok clones all under the same umbrella just different names.]
If they addressed the general problem it would also affect US social media platforms and they want to continue doing that when American companies do it.
I don’t want to rain on everyone’s parade but I think the law bans all apps with over 1 million users that are based in China, Russia, Iran, or North Korea (“foreign adversary controlled applications”) where you can make a profile and share content. WeChat would definitely count. So, Red Note is probably/possibly going away soon too. I guess VKontakte is Russian and still in the app stores.
The media is focused on creators and TikTok, obviously. But a WeChat ban would probably suck for people with grandparents in China since that’s the “everything app” there. (I don’t know what China bans but even if there’s other messaging apps allowed in China, teaching your elderly Chinese grandma to use a different app on a ~12h time zone difference is probably not a fun activity.)
I thought it was hilarious for the same reason, but I don’t think anyone in Chinese refers to that book as 小红书. It’s the 红宝书. I’ve never been to China and perhaps google/Baidu/Pleco isn’t going to perhaps pick up that kind of usage, but I think it is more of a cross cultural accident.
Meanwhile the mainstream will probably just focus on Instagram and its reels feature as pretty much all bigger creators crosspost everything there as well.
“I would rather stare at a language I can’t understand than to ever use a social media [platform] that Mark Zuckerberg owns,” said one user in a video posted to Xiaohongshu on Sunday.
but uh, why tf did they use tiktok in the first place
I am saying this because I saw this happen. Whenever I accidentally peek into a random’s phone on a bus, chances are the homescreen has a VPN app. The blocked social media did have a bit of a decline, but remain very popular, especially Youtube, which was likely the biggest drive for people to bypass the blocks. The lack of credit is more about them often choosing shady VPN services.
You can still connect to it, the app store has to take it down and it can’t be hosted in the u.s. assuming your ISP allows it, you can still access the TikTok servers outside of the u.s. but that’s going to cause a lot of traffic and ISPs will throttle it or block it completely.
You can still side load the app, not sure how iOS users are going to do that and that’s going to be the majority of people.
So you may or may not still be able to use the current app without a VPN until TikTok updates it or the OEMs push an update that bricks it.
They won’t freeze the assets until the company is officially barred from working here. They won’t just fuck around and blindly try to figure out what they’re doing, once they command Apple and Google to remove it from the App store, they’ll start freezing assets and stopping financial transactions. It’s just the nature of the beast.
We have a similar situation on Youtube - the site itself doesn’t pay the creators anymore. But everyone who had Youtube as a profession is still there. Some depend on a Patreon-like service, some on their own sponsorships.
Right? The tech-user bubble is funny, sometimes. The average TikTok user couldn’t care less about privacy, they care about having an app that delivers the experience they want. The reason many aren’t going to Instagram reels and Youtube shorts is because their algorithms and content are awful.
Similar vibes as “Why are Twitter users going to Bluesky and not Mastodon? Are they stupid?”
Why should I care about who the US sees as the enemy? I was born here and I’m seen as nothing more than livestock for our capitalists, when they aren’t funding and supplying a genocide against poors halfway around the world.
No way I’m going to rejoin Metabook after 10 years now that they’ve gone full Nazi.
Downloaded Rednote. Cool app. Fuck the hometeam that chose to be the opposite of a society. It’s only the home team if it’s a team, it’s been made clear to most Americans that we’re just a bunch of rugged individuals at each other’s throats for oligarch scraps and we can get fucked and die to profit healthcare scammers.
I’d rather have my clicks profit our supposed enemy than us at this point with “friends” like my country.
So, regarding your distaste for genocide—you, uh…might want to read up on Tiananmen Square and the Uyghurs.
Also, I notice you didn’t mention any Fediverse (or other) alternatives. I’m not going to make any accusations, but what you wrote sounds a lot like astroturfing.
If your ultimate goal is to say, “Fuck the US,” fine, but if what you really want to say is, “Fuck capitalists and authoritarians,” you’re going about it all wrong. What you’re essentially saying is that you’d rather be punched by this other guy just because it’s not the one you hate. Meanwhile, you don’t have to be punched at all.
I have no idea who you’re referring to. The people that have said there’s ongoing human rights abuses against the Uyghurs, that collectively meet the UN definition for genocide, have nothing to do with TikTok or privacy. And if they made such a statement on the latter two, I would ignore it, since that’s not their area of expertise.
Is there a particular reason you’re denying that the Uyghurs are being targeted and that the survivors’ testimonies should be disregarded?
That’s not a point in either’s favor. That’s a moral wash.
I’d rather both nations failed, so something more humane can potentially take its place (and revolution over and over until that happens) but as an American, rejecting China means nothing, just as a Chinese citizen rejecting America means nothing.
Rejecting evil empires begins with undermining the one that you’re expected to support and be a loyal cog of. A Russian openly hating America or a Chinese person openly hating Russia is indistinguishable from patriotism/nationalism.
I can only hurt one empire materially, the one I materially live within. The Chinese have to reign in China, and the Russians Russia. The best I can do is my part not to strengthen or support the evil empire I was born under to the best of my ability.
I can only hurt one empire materially, the one I materially live within.
Right, but you missed the core of my point. If you don’t like either, you don’t have to support either. If that means going to a decentralized option or going without a TikTok alternative, seems like you’ll achieve your dual goal of not helping either terrible option.
From my perspective, being disloyal to my country’s attempts to monopolize the information I imbibe, and being counted as part of that mass movement directly is again more important than also rejecting receiving the social media of another evil empire that, again, would simply be seen as patriotism/nationalism/nothing at all. It doesn’t actually meaningfully benefit China, but it does very publicly, as a movement of people not just me, work as a demonstration of undermining the authority of the evil empire I do have some tiny insignificant influence in.
They’ll ban it of course, and there will be another one. And that continuous “We don’t respect you or your authority because you arent on our side” does over time diminish the misplaced faith some still have in our captured institutions. Unfortunately signing up for Lemmy over reddit’s greed or some scandanavian social media doesn’t send the same message.
It has to be an enemy evil empire for the powerful of our evil empire to take notice and be concerned at all. Otherwise, it’s akin to “protesting” with a permit at a designated protest zone out of the eyeline and profit operations of those you’re protesting, aka masturbation.
Well, you do what you think is best. I’m not trying to tell you how to live your life, and I think our goals are aligned, but it seems we’ll have to agree to disagree on what we each think is the best course of action.
Good luck out there. Gonna be a rough couple of decades.
I can only hurt one empire materially, the one I materially live within. The Chinese have to reign in China, and the Russians Russia. The best I can do is my part not to strengthen or support the evil empire I was born under to the best of my ability.
What you can do is not grow the ones you can’t hurt.
Zero good will come from using this app. If you want to support something positive go sign up for Loops and use the Fediverse alternative rather than support genocidal empires in any form.
Why try to hype this as a trend?
The number of people in the comments celebrating censorship by our own government while also claiming China is authoritarian is insane.
censorship??? there are a ton of other apps that do the same. China censors people and created a credit # for them to punish them if they dont act they way the gov wants you to act. What are u on about?
Omg china has a credit # for their people? Thats evil! Good thing we dont have a Credit Score in the freedom country. And yeah its not censorship if you can get around it! Especially if its shutting people’s communication down for our freedom and safety 😎🦅🇺🇸
An app has been shut down on the unsubstantiated claims that it was a tool of foreign influence but on the apparent reasoning that it was facilitating conversations that western social media is hostile to such as the Israeli extermination of Palestinians.
Palestine and Gaza were specifically cited by congresspeople as an inspiration and justification for the ban. It is plainly censorship. That’s not really debatable.
Whether or not you believe that the censorship was reasonable or if there is sufficient evidence of subversive foreign influence using the platform is possibly debatable, but the fact that it is censorship is not.
People aren’t as principled as they like to think they are.
From the frying pan into the fire. Well done.
This is the third story I’ve seen today that was basically “Tiktok users flee service to other chinese service app you’ve never heard of”
So basically the usa banned tiktok, and now there’s 3 other tiktoks, all connecting the same amount of data for china, just through 3 different services instead of 1.
Sounds about right, From my understanding, they singled out TikTok instead of addressing the actual problem they claim to care about.
[Edit, another comment says its any app with 1million users. So now there’s just going to be a hundred TikTok clones all under the same umbrella just different names.]
Due to the network effect, having a hundred apps instead of one is a big negative.
If they addressed the general problem it would also affect US social media platforms and they want to continue doing that when American companies do it.
your edit sounds like the fediverse model
I suppose. I was thinking more of 1 Chinese company just spinning up a hundred copy/paste apps.
Honestly, I don’t even believe these articles. At some point it just starts to sound like they are making things up.
I mean, this is real easy to fact check. Open whichever playstore you prefer and sort by most downloaded. Red note and 8 will be up there.
Meet the new app, same as the old app.
I don’t want to rain on everyone’s parade but I think the law bans all apps with over 1 million users that are based in China, Russia, Iran, or North Korea (“foreign adversary controlled applications”) where you can make a profile and share content. WeChat would definitely count. So, Red Note is probably/possibly going away soon too. I guess VKontakte is Russian and still in the app stores.
The media is focused on creators and TikTok, obviously. But a WeChat ban would probably suck for people with grandparents in China since that’s the “everything app” there. (I don’t know what China bans but even if there’s other messaging apps allowed in China, teaching your elderly Chinese grandma to use a different app on a ~12h time zone difference is probably not a fun activity.)
Russia is no longer an adversary with the incoming administration, Putin owns Trump and their interests are now are own.
Their interests are his interests, not ours.
Wow. They really went with Xiao hong shu?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotations_from_Chairman_Mao_Tse-tung
I knew Xiao Hong shu translated to little red book, but I didn’t put two and two together until now. That’s freaking hilarious
I thought it was hilarious for the same reason, but I don’t think anyone in Chinese refers to that book as 小红书. It’s the 红宝书. I’ve never been to China and perhaps google/Baidu/Pleco isn’t going to perhaps pick up that kind of usage, but I think it is more of a cross cultural accident.
Those users:
I will always upvote Kung Pow!
Good ole wimp lo.
We trained him wrong. As a joke.
“Hold on. Stand still as I do a back flip over your shoulders so I can kick you in the face bro.”
“Ok bro”
I do recommend the movie, if you haven’t seen it!
Oh, yep, I love Kung Pow! It was one of the more memorable ones growing up. It’s tupid fun watching it every time.
Meanwhile the mainstream will probably just focus on Instagram and its reels feature as pretty much all bigger creators crosspost everything there as well.
The instagram reels and YouTube shorts algorithms are utter shit. I’ve tried, but holy shit there’s some crap in there.
Not with a ten meter cattle prod for me, anyone willing to indulge Zuck’s midlife Nazi crisis deserves him.
I’m waiting for by Loops verification mail but I’d say the average Lemmy user has not that much in common with the average TikTok/IG user.
but uh, why tf did they use tiktok in the first place
The instagram reels and YouTube shorts algorithms are utter shit. I’ve tried, but holy shit there’s some crap in there.
In all likelihood, Red Note will be banned banned, probably before the Red Note devs add a built-in translate function.
Meanwhile the mainstream would probably just download whatever VPNs they can.
Way to much credit for the average user.
I am saying this because I saw this happen. Whenever I accidentally peek into a random’s phone on a bus, chances are the homescreen has a VPN app. The blocked social media did have a bit of a decline, but remain very popular, especially Youtube, which was likely the biggest drive for people to bypass the blocks. The lack of credit is more about them often choosing shady VPN services.
You can still connect to it, the app store has to take it down and it can’t be hosted in the u.s. assuming your ISP allows it, you can still access the TikTok servers outside of the u.s. but that’s going to cause a lot of traffic and ISPs will throttle it or block it completely.
You can still side load the app, not sure how iOS users are going to do that and that’s going to be the majority of people.
So you may or may not still be able to use the current app without a VPN until TikTok updates it or the OEMs push an update that bricks it.
I wonder if Tiktok would respond by making their mobile webapp better in this case.
By the way, if the traffic is throttled and not outright blocked - that would mean things like GoodbyeDPI would be likely possible instead of VPNs!
Connecting to it isn’t hard, But they won’t be able to pay people, so the US content will just get starved out.
I’m not actually seeing anything preventing creators from being paid, they’re just going to lose the majority of their u.s. audience on the platform.
They won’t freeze the assets until the company is officially barred from working here. They won’t just fuck around and blindly try to figure out what they’re doing, once they command Apple and Google to remove it from the App store, they’ll start freezing assets and stopping financial transactions. It’s just the nature of the beast.
We have a similar situation on Youtube - the site itself doesn’t pay the creators anymore. But everyone who had Youtube as a profession is still there. Some depend on a Patreon-like service, some on their own sponsorships.
Youtube has backed down a lot, but they’re still paying their golden geese.
Spiffing britt has let a new recent video payouts out of the bag, a good multi-million hit view video still nets him around 20k.
I meant because of sanctions they don’t receive anything from Youtube itself. Yet they go on.
Ahh, well, we’ll see I suppose.
I look forward to the people who don’t realize that Red Note will just get banned too.
I don’t think they care. For most, this is just a middle finger to the government
Middle finger to the US or Chinese government?
The problem is that that sometimes if you give the government the finger… you might not get it back.
deleted by creator
And those people will turn around and cry about privacy issues. The cycle repeats…
No one on TikTok cares about privacy
he does ☞ https://www.tiktok.com/@mor10web
Most of them are joking about reuniting with their Chinese spy
Right? The tech-user bubble is funny, sometimes. The average TikTok user couldn’t care less about privacy, they care about having an app that delivers the experience they want. The reason many aren’t going to Instagram reels and Youtube shorts is because their algorithms and content are awful.
Similar vibes as “Why are Twitter users going to Bluesky and not Mastodon? Are they stupid?”
Why should I care about who the US sees as the enemy? I was born here and I’m seen as nothing more than livestock for our capitalists, when they aren’t funding and supplying a genocide against poors halfway around the world.
No way I’m going to rejoin Metabook after 10 years now that they’ve gone full Nazi.
Downloaded Rednote. Cool app. Fuck the hometeam that chose to be the opposite of a society. It’s only the home team if it’s a team, it’s been made clear to most Americans that we’re just a bunch of rugged individuals at each other’s throats for oligarch scraps and we can get fucked and die to profit healthcare scammers.
I’d rather have my clicks profit our supposed enemy than us at this point with “friends” like my country.
So, regarding your distaste for genocide—you, uh…might want to read up on Tiananmen Square and the Uyghurs.
Also, I notice you didn’t mention any Fediverse (or other) alternatives. I’m not going to make any accusations, but what you wrote sounds a lot like astroturfing.
If your ultimate goal is to say, “Fuck the US,” fine, but if what you really want to say is, “Fuck capitalists and authoritarians,” you’re going about it all wrong. What you’re essentially saying is that you’d rather be punched by this other guy just because it’s not the one you hate. Meanwhile, you don’t have to be punched at all.
The same people that sold you on Uyghurs is also telling you Tiktok is about privacy. They are lying about both
I have no idea who you’re referring to. The people that have said there’s ongoing human rights abuses against the Uyghurs, that collectively meet the UN definition for genocide, have nothing to do with TikTok or privacy. And if they made such a statement on the latter two, I would ignore it, since that’s not their area of expertise.
Is there a particular reason you’re denying that the Uyghurs are being targeted and that the survivors’ testimonies should be disregarded?
China is and has committed genocide.
The US is and has committed genocide.
That’s not a point in either’s favor. That’s a moral wash.
I’d rather both nations failed, so something more humane can potentially take its place (and revolution over and over until that happens) but as an American, rejecting China means nothing, just as a Chinese citizen rejecting America means nothing.
Rejecting evil empires begins with undermining the one that you’re expected to support and be a loyal cog of. A Russian openly hating America or a Chinese person openly hating Russia is indistinguishable from patriotism/nationalism.
I can only hurt one empire materially, the one I materially live within. The Chinese have to reign in China, and the Russians Russia. The best I can do is my part not to strengthen or support the evil empire I was born under to the best of my ability.
Right, but you missed the core of my point. If you don’t like either, you don’t have to support either. If that means going to a decentralized option or going without a TikTok alternative, seems like you’ll achieve your dual goal of not helping either terrible option.
From my perspective, being disloyal to my country’s attempts to monopolize the information I imbibe, and being counted as part of that mass movement directly is again more important than also rejecting receiving the social media of another evil empire that, again, would simply be seen as patriotism/nationalism/nothing at all. It doesn’t actually meaningfully benefit China, but it does very publicly, as a movement of people not just me, work as a demonstration of undermining the authority of the evil empire I do have some tiny insignificant influence in.
They’ll ban it of course, and there will be another one. And that continuous “We don’t respect you or your authority because you arent on our side” does over time diminish the misplaced faith some still have in our captured institutions. Unfortunately signing up for Lemmy over reddit’s greed or some scandanavian social media doesn’t send the same message.
It has to be an enemy evil empire for the powerful of our evil empire to take notice and be concerned at all. Otherwise, it’s akin to “protesting” with a permit at a designated protest zone out of the eyeline and profit operations of those you’re protesting, aka masturbation.
Well, you do what you think is best. I’m not trying to tell you how to live your life, and I think our goals are aligned, but it seems we’ll have to agree to disagree on what we each think is the best course of action.
Good luck out there. Gonna be a rough couple of decades.
Agreed on all counts my friend, and best of luck to you as well.
What you can do is not grow the ones you can’t hurt.
Zero good will come from using this app. If you want to support something positive go sign up for Loops and use the Fediverse alternative rather than support genocidal empires in any form.
Christ, dude. It’s not that serious.
Is the shit take vibes I’m getting here from Allonzee
The only vibe I’m getting is “edgy 15 yo who just learned about politics”