Technology

Meet the new app, same as the old app.

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.

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.)

The number of people in the comments celebrating censorship by our own government while also claiming China is authoritarian is insane.

The problem with the American government trying to propagandize us against China is that there is currently nothing that they can say about China that is not effectively the same or WORSE in the United States.

But China spies on their citizens…

Yeah, that’s the NSA.

They can’t Google Tiananmen Square. They don’t want people knowing their history…

We’re trying to ban history books right now because we don’t like that white people look bad during the slave trade.

But China doesn’t have freedom of press…

All of our press sources have been bought up by billionaires who also contribute enough campaign contributions to effectively own all of our politicians so that they can control which laws are passed as well as control the narrative surrounding those laws.

China doesn’t have freedom of speech…

The United States is officially banning a platform on January 19th that is used by millions of Americans to communicate and share ideas!!!

But China has massive amounts of human rights violations…

Forced birth is a war crime that is happening in America RIGHT NOW. Child marriage is legal in the United States right now. Our prison system is legalized slavery. There is a reason that we have one of the highest incarceration rates in the world. It’s because it’s legalized slavery. The 13th amendment to our constitution says “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” Convenient for a nation that imprisons black people at more than FIVE TIMES the rate of white people.

China is condoning/committing a genocide…

That’s fucking laughable. Smile and say that to America’s indigenous peoples. Say that to Palestine. Say that to Congo. Say that to Sudan. Fuck it… Say that to ANY COUNTRY in the global south.

But the working conditions for the Chinese people are terrible…

We haven’t raised the minimum wage in 15 FUCKING YEARS! The minimum wage is still $7.25 per hour, meaning you could work a full time job and still only make $15,080 per year. BEFORE TAXES!!! With basically no guaranteed benefits. And on top of that, the government is actively banning an app that is a secondary source of income for people.

There is really not much we can say about China right now, in a negative light, that we cannot find some equivalent here in the United States. And on top of that, at least China has universal healthcare. At least China has public transportation. At least in China, they’re not having their kids shot to death on a daily basis. At least in Chin/ they have managed their homeless population. Do you know how we manage our homeless population? We throw the In prison. We take our veterans and turn them into slaves. In China they give them temporary housing and a job.

I’m not going to sit here and condone the awful shit that China is doing and I do not have any desire to live/suffer there, but if you wanted American citizens to actually believe that we are better than China, then maybe we should actually fucking BE BETTER THAN CHINA.

I’m going to miss TikTok. Some of the smartest, kindest, most generous people I’ve met in my whole life, I met on TikTok.

Those users:

Meanwhile the mainstream will probably just focus on Instagram and its reels feature as pretty much all bigger creators crosspost everything there as well.

From the frying pan into the fire. Well done.

Wow. They really went with Xiao hong shu?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotations_from_Chairman_Mao_Tse-tung

I'm not really one for Tik Tok, but I went on REDNote to see what it was about and it was incredibly wholesome seeing American and Chinese people getting to interact as normal human beings and understand each other without it being filtered through our governments. Even if they don't shut down Tik Tok, they're gonna have to shut that shit down. Can't have future soldiers seeing their "enemies" as humans.

fucking idiots

More likely people will just install/update tiktok outside of Google play and apple store.

To be honest if I had a choice between if America was allowed to spy on me or China was allowed to spy on me, at this point I really don't care. In the past I would have said America spying on me is better than China spying on me if only because fuck China because they have an iron grip on the video game industry. But since I hate short form videos, fuck all of them.

Why try to hype this as a trend?

In a way I would feel more comfortable with china having my shit posting data than an American company. At least if china has it, there is slightly less of a chance of them selling the data to a data set deanonymizing company who in turn sells my data linked to me to like an insurance company who jacks my rates because I said their CEO should get Luigi'd. What is china gonna do to me if I never go to China and exist largely outside of their sphere of influence?

After Chinese spyware banned, users of banned Chinese spyware migrate to not-yet banned Chinese spyware.