Meet the new app, same as the old app.
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.
You are correct - I had forgotten (been quite a while). I still think it’s funny but thanks for pointing this out.
But 宝 (Bǎo) means “precious” or “treasured” and 红宝书 probably only gets translated as little red book because it sounds better in English.
It’s an obvious cultural reference.
https://collection.sina.cn/yejie/2015-01-21/detail-ichmifpx5063889.d.html
The article is about a bookstore in Manhattan, called “Little Red Books” though. Your link is an abbreviated translation of this article, which you might notice from the link at the bottom. I don’t know if that serves as the kind of linguistic evidence that’s called for here.
From the frying pan into the fire. Well done.
They don’t view it as a fire or frying pan, obviously
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.
Due to the network effect, having a hundred apps instead of one is a big negative.
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.
To be fair, the law is broad enough that it could target these other services as well pretty easily.
The law is broad enough they could target Discord.
That seems like a bit of a stretch since it’s US based company. I guess some of its investors could be based in China though.
Russia is on the list too. But that’s the point. They can declare that an owner is compromised, no matter what citizenship they hold.
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.
XiaoHongShu is much older than tiktok, it started shortly after facebook, though resembles more a mix of Twitter and Instagram.
XiaoHongShu was founded in 2013, Facebook was founded in 2004…
Your sense of time is a bit warped…
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.
My assumption is everything everywhere on the internet is already assumed to be fair game for spying, scraping, training, whatever.
At this point the interests seem more about serving than gathering information - hence the political games to control specific platforms now.
If you are on TikTok then both can spy on you. Before your traffic can go to china it has to go through the US.
More likely people will just install/update tiktok outside of Google play and apple store.
Rumor has it that tiktok will be unplayable with accounts linked to an American SIM card
That… would be interesting. I wonder how they would implement that, and what else they decide is worth that restriction. Curious to see it play out
Edit: helpful info from Toms Hardware
https://www.tomsguide.com/computing/online-security/what-will-happen-if-tiktok-is-banned
You can’t open douyin (the Chinese Tiktok) with a non-Chinese SIM present. So implementing it on the software side would be trivial, if google was to enforce this change software-sided.
The block is trivial to bypass though, all you need to do is use wifi while disabling the SIM slot in your phone settings. My wife is Chinese, and I had to figure that out for her.
Maybe that’s an Android thing?
My wife uses douyin on an American SIM all the time. She had to get someone from the mainland to type a pin for her when she first installed it, but there wasn’t any hardware based attestation on iOS
Possible, yep. We are using two phones anyway, one for all the Chinese crapware and one for the serious stuff, so it doesn’t affect daily life. Still a major nuisance though having to revert to those steps.
Any China market tablet can install douyin even without a SIM, most even come with it installed by default.
Tiktok is going to be paradise without all the US problems in everybody else’s internet. It’s going to be the best social network ever
That is actually a really funny point I hadn’t thought of.
Yeah. Think about it. If you’re English speaker user, sooner or later you get bombarded qith content from the US and people’s solutions for it are always the same : just don’t use insert social media app that much until the elections are over. But the drama bever stops
The app will stop working in the US. Doesn’t matter where you get it from.
Isn’t that what a VPN is for?
If someone is savvy enough to install from outside of the normal install mode especially on iOS, wouldn’t that imply that they are at least aware of a VPN?
I can’t imagine anyone using a VPN just for TikTok. Not to mention free vpns are garbage and don’t work well.
There are lots of good free vpns out now, so it’s not unlikely. People that spend hours on it can follow a guide for 10 minutes. It will lower the amount of people on it for sure but anybody who wants to can bypass it easily. It will probably mean more for creators and stuff, and their us bank accounts maybe won’t be able to accept money from tk if they’re sanctioned.
Tiktok got banned in India some years ago and it doesn’t work if you sideload, or even VPN somehow. But pretty much the next day instagram launched their reels things and people jumped ship without talking about tiktok anymore…
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.
Honestly, you’re probably better off without tiktok. Short form video is bad for humans, and it’s much worse if it’s not educational
I’m genuinely sorry for the potential friends you’ve lost, but tiktok was not a good thing… An American controlled version wouldn’t be better, I hope you double down on the fediverse
The Greeks complained about the youth using paper instead of writing chalk on stone.
The British complained about the youth reading books.
Things change man
deleted by creator
Tik tok is banned what a great observation /s
Short form media is still around and not banned via Instagram snapchat and YouTube shorts.
Do you need it spelled out more? More examples? More details?
Can you find a way to be smarmy?
deleted by creator
O I’m self righteous AND indignant? Man thanks for your virtue signal pointing out MY self righteousness. That’s a SUPER useful skill I’m glad only one person like you exists on the internet. /s
deleted by creator
You actually tricked yourself into believing this isn’t all about shutting down competition to American companies or stopping people’s (especially young people’s) power to disseminate even remotely left leaning views that could gain traction and threaten the oligarchs.
I mean even the politicians who back this bill state as much, so I’m not sure why you think this is about national defense. American citizens are just under as much threat as before, but now they have one less way to express themselves. Ain’t that great. /s
deleted by creator
It can be a corporate move to out competition AND also improve security. These are not mutually exclusive.
to protect the people from outside influence and to protect national defense.
Thats just not true, otherwise we wouldn’t be welcoming a South African who illegally immigrated to the US and has some serious international conflicts-of-interests with US interests control a major social media platform.
deleted by creator
strawman gonna strawman.
Hardly a strawman! We have a major social media company in the US, that is controlled by a foreigner, for their own, and for foreign interests, and impacting our elections with measureable results.
So, obviously, this move wasn’t done to prevent such a thing from happening, just to prevent certain countries from doing it.
you act like it’s the current administration that let’s Elon do whatever he does, but it’s the incoming administration (Trump) that is allowing that.
Our current admin has done nothing to stop it, and therefore allowing it.
Why are all the US Gov accounts STILL on Twitter?
deleted by creator
are you even taking this seriously? did you not even comprehend what I said or are you just blindly responding hoping for a “gotcha”?
That aint a “gotya”, that’s proof it has nothing to do with preventing foreign interests from influencing anything. Because we have a foreign interest influencing it already: Musk.
not obvious, and just because you say it with more conviction doesn’t make it true.
So, we have other large social media networks, that are rife with foreign influence, that already influence the US’s internal politics… But yet, banning tiktok was to prevent it from happening?
Its either true, or its not. And in this case, its not true. The sole reason was to keep China specifically, and it only arose because people in the US were learning about shit that US supports. Which the US doesn’t want.
by that logic, then you’re just as guilty for allowing them to do nothing. so what gives you the right to complaint about it if you haven’t done anything to stop them?
Except, they’re not trying to stop foreign influence. They are trying to stop one country, and they only took notice because of news that is damning to the US.
there are so many reasons why but you’re just too emotional and inexperienced to see them, but I’ll point out a couple just so you can see how absurd you’re being.
And… with all your excuses… How come nothing is being done still? Its not new that Elon is a fascist. And it’s not new that Elon is in bed with several foreign interests that are hostile to the US… In fact, its at least 6 years old news at this point.
But tiktok. home of the Pro-Palestinian content is what is being gone after now. Not the Fascists running Twitter, or Facebook… Wonder why that is? Could it be their political donations?
deleted by creator
The number of people in the comments celebrating censorship by our own government while also claiming China is authoritarian is insane.
Both can be true. I’m against banning TikTok, but I also think TikTok is absolutely terrible and nobody should use it. China is authoritarian, and this ban by the US is wrong. I say this as an American.
Why is it terrible? Have you ever even been on it? Most people I’ve encountered that say it’s terrible or it’s brain rot or something along those lines have never even been on it, they’re simply parroting what they’ve heard other people say
How do you know heroin is bad for you? Have you tried it? You can’t say it’s bad unless you’ve tried it.
I’ve seen people scrolling on it their whole time on public transportations on materials worse than the worst of TV commercials, like they were in a trance. I know people who using it for at lease an hour every day before bed, and admitting they don’t know what they get from it, just boredom. From what I know, it’s like brainwashing for people who don’t know what to do with their lives.
So you have your nose so far up in their business you know exactly what app they’re watching and what type of materials they’re consuming? I’m going to wager none of the things that you just claimed you’ve ever witnessed
Why, don’t you know there’s a thing called observation?
There’s also this thing called making the shit up
Looks like where your heart truly belong is Mao’s China or Stalin’s Russia. You’ve commented quite a lot of things.
I know that advertisers love that TikTok knows when a user desires your product. I wonder why they can target you so well? All state sponsored social media, X and Meta and company as well as TikTok, should be avoided if you don’t want corporations and capitalists and authoritarians having that much information about you. If you hate corporations trying to sell you things, maybe don’t use a dopamine and social habit tracking app that’s designed to sell ads to play on your fears
I have never received targeted advertising on tiktok. I can’t remember the last time I had seen an ad on there.
oh bless your heart 😌
Apologies for the southern passive aggressiveness, but I believe you may not notice how much content is an ad
They could listen to a Joe Rogan podcast the exact same way. They’re on public transport, what the fuck else are they going to do but look at their phone or listen to something with headphones?
I have to admit, you are right. If there is nothing been stuffed into their minds, most people really don’t know what to do with themselves, just like Montag’s wife from Fahrenheit 451. But there are differences between actively seek something you interested in than going blank and let the algorithms do the job for you. I thought people in Fediserse mostly against the idea of the latter. Otherwise, you will go to Tiktok or something.
Once you’ve spent some time the algorithm learns what you like. For example my feed is a lot of indie music, civil rights, and table top role-playing stuff. Once it gets enough information on the stuff you like you don’t really need to do more than swipe past the ads.
Where do I begin:
- China has more-or-less direct control over the app, and China is an enemy of the US
- extensive tracking
- it’s designed specifically to be addictive instead of beneficial
Other SM apps do 2 and 3, but that doesn’t mean TikTok is okay, it means those other apps are also terrible.
Where’s the evidence then?
I’m guessing you’re talking about the first point, so I looked into it and it seems China only owns a “golden share” (1%?), which doesn’t seem big enough to really cause problems. That said, I don’t know much about Chinese business, so maybe there’s still something there. But that’s just speculation, not evidence.
That said, that doesn’t change my opinion of it being terrible, because the last two points still stand. They also apply to domestic social media apps as well.
I’ll repeat it again, I don’t think it should be banned, but I also don’t think anyone should use it.
That’s the thing, the last time the government did something this sweeping without showing it’s evidence, me and a few hundred thousand of my best buddies got sent to Iraq.
Banning a SM app is nothing like declaring a War on Terror. For the record, I opposed both, as well as the War in Afghanistan. I’m sorry you were sent to fight in a pointless war.
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 😎🦅🇺🇸
Ours is an actual credit system based on money not theirs… they want to control and brainwash you and I gotta say they are doing an amazing job! In a few days this app will be gone hopefully! Also if it was about money they would have sold it they didn’t cause they know its a tool they need to keep brainwashing people.
Why don’t you go on rednote and ask them about social credit? They have a search function where you can see other posts tagged as much.
Google works better!
Instead of asking chinese people living in china about a system which supposedly exists in China, you’d rather just keep listening to western propaganda?
It just works better… you know what I asked it??? Well here is the answer - * TikTok may be banned in the U.S. by the end of this weekend.
You clearly dont even know what their system is. Their only “credit system” is the sesame seed thing that two of the big companies use its not a government thing punishing you for wrongthink. Also to think we’re not brainwashed in the US is ridiculous.
America and China are the two most propagandized countries but at least they have the excuse of not being the most powerful country for the last century while still actively committing multiple genocides and denying their citizens healthcare or housing.
You live in china? If not you should move there!
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.
Says the person that is clueless on the Chinese credit system
Tell me how great tik tok is and how great the chinese credit system is…. Pls
It’s no one’s job but your own to filter through propaganda. And everything you’ve claimed is propaganda.
Bye tik tok
It’s not going anywhere
Tiktok = brain rot
deleted by creator
People aren’t as principled as they like to think they are.
deleted by creator
Are they banning temu?
Why try to hype this as a trend?
because “red note” paid them to?
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?
Yeah, China doesn’t have jurisdiction over me. I don’t have to worry about the CCP showing up at my door to harass me for what I post. But it’s a very real threat from the US feds.
I mean you do, that’s what the Chinese police operating in the United States thing is about.
No, it’s sinophobic propaganda.
No that actually happened boss.
It isn’t about you. China doesn’t care about you. If they have a computer tracking cell network info of groups of soldiers, they can glean actionable information about US military posture. They can do large-scale data analysis on the information they have and get a startling amount of information. They can also use it as a vector for injecting their favorite form of aggression against the US, soft power. They can’t defeat the US in a fight, but economic and cultural warfare is a vulnerability in the US where the battleground is far more level. The incoming administration has indicated it plans to further increase the US’s military strength, which is functionally untouchable as it stands and is more than ready for the fight nobody plans to bring against it, while weakening the actual fight we are seeing. The US is objectively safer, however little, against the machinations of the CCP with tiktok gone, but it is a band-aid on a firehose. Also, the CCP is clearly ready for that move given the move to Redbook, likely stoked by CCP operators under the guise of “haha let’s go to another Chinese app, that’ll show 'em!” because Americans are very easy to predict and manipulate…they are born and raised to be manipulated. It’s rough, but quite interesting to see play out.
Sounds like a problem for the TRILLION dollar military industrial complex. I’m sure they can spare a few bucks to solve that issue.
But that’s my point. china doesn’t care about me. American data gobblers care very much about me because I exist as a consumer in their sphere of influence and am far more likely to be exploited by said data.
Do they actually? I mean why can’t I sell my days. If I quit the big tech companies and paid for the equivalent services, could I sell that data at a auction? Not having a go at you, just wondering how much our individual data is actually worth.
Could you sell your own personal data at auction? Maybe. It depends on who is buying the info and what they stand to gain or mitigate their risk if you want it in corpo speak.
Car insurance already does this by giving discounts for having a gps tracker connected to your car. These things give data like location, speed and g forces. If you drive outside of their parameters your rates go up. So your driving data is worth whatever the discount they give and that’s just a fraction of your data.
China would have more of an investment in the information on people they DO care to get than the US would have on any information scraps it could collect from tiktok that it doesn’t already have from hundreds of other sources.
Meanwhile the mainstream will probably just focus on Instagram and its reels feature as pretty much all bigger creators crosspost everything there as well.
Not with a ten meter cattle prod for me, anyone willing to indulge Zuck’s midlife Nazi crisis deserves him.
Not with a ten meter cattle prod for me
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.
the average Lemmy user has not that much in common with the average TikTok/IG user
The fact that they managed to clone the most idiotic and brainwashing platform on the internet proves that they are pretty average.
Meanwhile the mainstream would probably just download whatever VPNs they can.
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.
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 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!
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.
“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
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.
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.
No sarcasm, I’m happy that you agree. But we have no power to stop whatever the fuck he’s going to do, so we’re just talking semantics.
It’s any app they can point to as being controlled. It does not matter where it is based. As an example they could allege that one of the owners of Discord has Russian contacts and is therefore controlled by a foreign adversary. (He was born in Kharkiv, Ukraine; where contact between Russians and Ukrainians wasn’t uncommon before the current war.)
Congress can request a briefing but if they want to prevent a fire sale they have to pass an entirely new bill amending the law.
And this article is so transparently an ad for Red Note it’s ridiculous.
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.
I wonder if they’re actually chinese troll farms
Who like all of them? Why?
For those unfamiliar:
The 50 Cent Party, also known as the 50 Cent Army or wumao, are Internet commentators who are paid by the authorities of the People’s Republic of China to spread the propaganda of the governing Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The program was created during the early phases of the Internet’s rollout to the wider public in China.
Insane to me that people can be this xenophobic. Wholesome Chinese people? No internet troll farm.
China paying entire offices of people to be friendly, entertaining, and educational to foreigners online would be cool actually.
After Chinese spyware banned, users of banned Chinese spyware migrate to not-yet banned Chinese spyware.
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.
