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.
Are they allowed to talk about tiananmen massacre I wonder.
Are they allowed to talk about &%$!@$+×# &%;%$ I wonder.
Whats that?
You know, the LALILULELO!
I hope that west taiwanese citizens will realize just how bad their government is.
Removed by mod
west taiwan is behind the US in every sense.
You should go on the app and talk with actual chinese people.
The hexies are so excited about this too. They’ve got a thread up (erroneously) hoping that Americans will now stop believing that Chinese people are bad, because they can’t face the truth that Americans (who aren’t magats) only think the Chinese government is an authoritarian shit show and have no problem with regular Chinese citizens.
Thank you for vigorously following Hexbear to spread misinformation about it on .world. Defederating really helped clean up the narrative.
Dumbest shit ever. let me run to the PRC for my entertainment. Like was TikTok really that good? I never used it, other than the time long ago when it was first getting traction and my coworker asked me to get into her 12 yr old daughter’s account (super easy BTW) and see what she was doing on there. surprise! nothing but 30 year old men following her and watching her doing dances. I never touched it since.
what do you expect though the USA is picking groups of people to threaten, the American dream is dead they brag that the economy is doing so good when most peoples lives have gotten worse every second of our lives is being monetized of course the people will look elsewhere
Don’t worry. Once Trump’s back in, the Democrats will suddenly notice we’re in a recession. We’ll start seeing it acknowledged soon.
Dems showed last election they’re not even willing to promise concessions to their voting base, so if you can’t actually do anything to help people afford groceries, how can they use the economy to campaign? Just go “Trump is terrible for the economy! We’re gonna be good for the economy”?
Youtube and Instagram tried for years to lure in Tiktok users, and they failed so badly that even with Tiktok potentially getting banned, people would rather switch to a different potentially sketchy Chinese app.
That they specifically went to another sketchy app is what gets me the most.
I could name tons of social network alternatives that are decentralized, give users control but for some reason those are sidelined as everyone suddenly wants an account on app they never heard off a few weeks ago and its main selling feature is that is at least as insecure and censored as tiktok…
It’s genuinely superior to tiktok though, the algo rewards like 1% of the ragebait, uncredited reposts, and deceptive posts that tiktok does. If they reverse the ban, I’m not going back.
the real reason why the government tries to ban apps is because it gives an unfiltered look at people the government has tried to demonize for years
LOL, the irony is that red note is censoring posts from those “tiktok refugee”.
It is such a western privilege to think that they can avoid unnecessary censorship and big tech monopoly by moving to Chinese platforms. When Chinese knows full well that they don’t have such choice.
To further the irony, the west actually have abundant options to avoid censorship and big tech. Yet people think they are “less usable” than google translating (big tech monopoly btw) your way into a censoring Chinese big tech monopoly…
LOL, the irony is that red note is censoring posts from those “tiktok refugee”.
If they’re applying any special moderation to tiktok refugee tagged posts, I’m not seeing it. I’m seeing a lot of people say not to discuss politics, but I’m also seeing a lot of posts asking Chinese users specifically about stuff like social credit systems and other weird perceptions or asking about what crazy perceptions Chinese users have about Americans (like that we can work at a restaurant for 3 months and afford to buy a house??).
What’s the difference between censorship and moderation in this context?
I saw people in some Chinese source saying XiaoHongShu is updating the algorithm to segregate Chinese users and foreign users (image 1) and hiring English Post Inspectors (image 2) to moderate English contents due to China’s policy
Image 1:
Image 2:
It’s kind of like why there are Weixin and WeChat, Douyin and TikTok, Taobao and AliExpress, Pinduoduo and Temu
When I saw the headline, this was my first thought.
But damn, it could have been something cool if reality wasn’t so fucking predictable and ugly.
I mean, imagine a reality where a bunch of humans end up using the same service like that, between two countries at odds, and they realize that they have a lot more in common than they thought possible. It could be a bridge that changes a world.
Well, that world, because it sure as hell isn’t the one we’re in
So Lemmy?
I’ve seen a bunch of companies claiming us users are flocking to them. I guess we shall see where users end up
Most likely banned because the rules on that app are insane. It’s made for chinese people abroad and the chinese government does not want a bunch of foreigners there anyway.
It seems similar to tiktok; nudity is not OK, but sex-adjacent stuff like bondage is just fine. Art is fine as long as the genitals and nips are censored.
If anything, the chinese government should be thrilled by the idea of Americans seeing that chinese people are just like them and learning first-hand that 90% of what they thought they knew about China was just racism and western propaganda.
I mean yeah TikTok heavily buried criticism against the Communist Party as well, but it wasn’t flat out banned to talk about how a state deals with religion. It is on Red Book (actual translation of the chinese name of the app and yes it is named after Mao’s “Mein Kampf” type of book)
They are probably not all that thrilled. They’re completely censoring their internet and run own, chinese speaking apps abroad to stay in control of the narrative and their citizens. Having a bunch of friendly Americans hop on the app to show them how we’re all just humans on this silly planet is kind of a nightmare for the bureau of propaganda in Beijing.
Comparing Quotations by Mao to fucking Mein Kampf, you are an unserious person.
And also the exact kind of person who would benefit from going on rednote and talking to these people instead of believing whatever bullshit you’re told about them.
It’s a mass murdering dictator’s propaganda book and nothing else. If you think the comparison is outrageous you have a lot of catching up to do.
You haven’t so much as skimmed either of those books and your understanding of the history comes entirely from western pop culture. You are not a serious person.
A lot of assumptions and not a single argument.
You are not a serious person
Never heard that expression. Is it a direct translation from Chinese? Odd thing to say repeatedly.
Yeah, this honestly sounds like a press release with made up “users”. Definitely part of a marketing campaign.
Nah, I am on xiaohongshu. Its fucking crazy. Most of the mandarin speaking audience woke up to their app filled with english. There is a running joke on the site now about US citizens “colonizing” the app. It is silly and in good fun but I cannot stress enough how real the influx of users is. Some brits are even moving there because so many Americans they follow did. I have seen multiple chinese citizens have their account jump from a few hundred followers to 30k in an hour or two. I mean you can hop on and see for yourself, it is free. It has actually been really wholesome so far and I hope the vibes continue to be good.
With all due respect, this comment is exactly what a faked “Grass roots marketing campaign” would write. But your account has an extensive post history, so thats a lot more effort than a typical astro turf account.
Also, inflating subscriber numbers and view counts wouldn’t be out of the question either, remember Facebook video…
I just talk like that. Is it so hard to believe that there are plenty of Americans who would flock to a genuinely chinese owned social media out of spite or just bc it is funny? I haven’t even seen an ad on the site so I don’t think they are making enough money to astroturf nor can I find a reason why they’d want to.
I dont mean that your tone is bot like or anything, just that they would want authentic voices.
I do find it hard to beleive, because look at the reddit and twitter transitions. They either took years (bluesky is only barely starting to gain notability, and I’m not convinced that isn’t also doing astroturfing) or never happened (Lemmy userbase is a rounding error). Getting people to switch social media is very difficult. And tiktok isnt even banned yet.
Also, just because there are no ads, doesn’t mean that no one is propping up the business. Someone is paying to keep the servers running and lights on, and an astro turfing campaign isnt that expensive. Social media companies either grow or die.
So if your liking this new site, power to you, but I suggest you enjoy it while it lasts, because its going to have to become profitable somehow, and that is never good for the users.
Also, just because there are no ads, doesn’t mean that no one is propping up the business.
There is a shopping tab, and ads are allowed as long as it’s declared I think. Undeclared sponsored content gets bans.
My phone failed whenever I tried to buy something (just testing to see what it would do), and I haven’t seen anything that stood out as an obvious ad.
From the article somebody further up posted up, rednote has had about half a million downloads from app stores in the US.
TikTok’s US consumer base is about 136 million if my memory of what was said on NPR a couple mornings ago is accurate.
While I am sure that number will be growing, a lot of the feeling of everybody moving to redhorse appears to be astroturfing.
Like… they had a 50,000 person live event that sounds awfully a lot like like a recruitment seminar/product orientation.
This isn’t organic.
As someone who is experiencing it as it happens, it feels like the most organic thing I’ve experienced on a social media site. I’m sure that a huge part of why I feel the way I do about it is because I’m being served the content I interact with and I mostly interact with english content. However, I see PLENTY of faces I recognize. I don’t think it’s outside the realm of possibility to say that many americans responded to the tiktok ban with spite and chose an actual chinese social media bc fuck em.
To be clear though, it isn’t organic. The American government gave it an impetus.
I get that it is the most organic thing you have ever felt, but that should be itself something that makes you raise an eyebrow.
A foreign language service that does not cater to you, in a language you don’t speak, and theoretically has none of your prior data is perfectly catering a social media experience tailored individually to you, and doing it on a level that no corporation who has been targeting and grooming you for 20 years has been able to achieve.
Either your comment itself is inorganic and mere advertising promising impossibilities, or you are a genuine person offering such extreme praise but we need to be skeptical here.
You aren’t saying the app is good. You are saying it is the best experience you have ever been provided, and if that is the case, this app has some explaining to do on how they achieved that.
Genuine or not, your thoughts on the matter are weird, so weird that it becomes hard to even respond to.
It really isn’t that good at catering to me tbh. I say it feels organic because I am connecting with people in a genuine fashion that feels abnormal for social media. That is likely due to it being very new and the large rapid influx of americans. If it knew me like tiktok did my experience would be very different but it is still good just inna different way. I understand that americans are very hesitant about using chinese software but I can’t grasp the source of uneasiness. Its just a social media. I like being able to interact with people so different from me.
Thank you for giving me your opinion.
I will try to have an open mind about it going forward.
I am happy with loops for now though. No longer having the algorithm I don’t miss it. I don’t miss 7 ads per hour, all of them for jedi pajamas or dhubai chocolate that costs $50 per bar.
