Wait, people are really just moving from one chinese spyware app designed to sow discord and destabilize western societies to another chinese spyware app designed to sow discord and destabilize western societies?
The US politicians have destabilized the whole country. The apps just gives a place to be vocal. The US uses our data against us we just ignore it because they say they don't.
How comes that whenever one criticizes Tiktok there's always gonna be multiple comments screeching ”BuT fAcEbOoK aNd TwItTeR“ though nobody said they weren't also garbage? And funnily, if you criticize any of those two, someone comes screeching ”BuT tIkToK“
If sowing discord means posting pictures of food and just generally being nice to one another, I'm not sure the status quo being disturbed is worth protecting.
Oh no it turns out that Chinese people are friendly and normal this will surely be the downfall of the West.
The problem with TT isn't it's content, the "food pictures and people being nice to each other" you referenced, its with how TT uses its algorithm to influence its users and the risk of them misusing the data their app collects.
Well yes and no, people are moving to it, mostly as a form of protest IMO
I highly doubt it was "designed" for sowing discord and such, RedNote was very much intended to be a local Chinese SM. Most of the app isn't even in English last I saw, just Chinese and they're rushing to hire "English-speaking" moderators rn
They are very much designed to sowing Chinese discourse and push the capitalist hyper-consumption life style. In fact RedNote is famous for being toxic and anxiety-inducing among Chinese community, partially due to its root in product promotion:
Xiaohongshu was founded by Miranda Qu and Charlwin Mao in 2013 as an online tour guide for Chinese shoppers, providing a platform for users to review products and share their shopping experiences with the community.
They are also anti-competitive and consumer-hostile:
Xiaohongshu strictly prevents advertising and linking to external websites or apps. Actions such as sending WeChat contacts in posts or DMs or inquiring about prices of goods can lead to account suspension.
And most westerners don't see this side of rednote, because rednote give western users special treatments, i.e. because of western privileges:
Following the growth in users from the United States, Xiaohongshu was said to be exploring adjusting its content review processes as American influencers began sharing posts.
On 14 January 2025, Xiaohongshu announced that it would direct users to more "positive" content in line with a November 2024 directive from the Cyberspace Administration of China.
It is funny to see those so called "communist" rushing to defend the very embodiment of capitalistic hyper-consumption in China, and the only thing shielding them from such toxicity is their own privilege.
Well, people are moving from what they see as an innocent funny video app to a much more obvious chinese controlled app in protest. Basically trying to call out the hypocrisy of the government banning tiktok when all these other apps exist.
Most people do not realize how much info tiktok gathered from you and which shady state governments it filtered into.
It's funny though because the tiktok ban doesn't target tiktok, it targets any foreign controlled app above a certain number of users. So as soon as red note gains a bunch of users it will be killed as hard as tiktok.
That's of course unless both governments don't enforce the law, like they both have said they aren't going to do.
Everyone that moved to rednote absolutely knows their data was scrapped by Tiktok, including contacts and general behavior on their phone.
We're 30 years past that mattering. Every corporation and thus every government with money knows what you masturbate to and what makes you laugh. They all know where you work and what your net worth is. If they don't it takes less than a dollar to find out through your advertising id report.
None of the major data brokers refuse to sell to specific governments.
That's nice that you enjoy a much less expansive library of entertainment and practically no social interaction. Most people think that's too large of a tradeoff in a world where corpos have all the information about you from birth.
Hope you trust your VPN provider, that's the most common single point of failure given your ISP is collecting and selling all of your data.
I've been satisfied with IRC, that was social enough for me as an autistic kid yes. I've not had the luxury of developing a high standard of social interaction for my daily life.
I understand normal people are not willing to give up those unnecessary things like centralized and profiteered software. I think it's hilarious and laugh at them:) I enjoy the 3 or so friends I text regularly and the people I meet in real life. I understand most people aren't willing to live within those means, but that doesn't make it any less funny.
Like the ones in the EU that just don't get enforced?
Btw, banning a platform can and should be a consequence for not adhering to robust privacy laws (for example after too grave and/or repeated offenses).
Banning apps as a consequence sure, but we know that this has everything to do with the second cold war and nothing to do with actual privacy concerns.
Yeah, I know. But again, Tiktok is not only bad for bad privacy (and inb4 the next strawman: no FFS I'm not saying Meta and Twitter are not doing the same shit or that them doing it is fine).
I'm in full agreement that it's one of the worst offenders in privacy violations. I'm not going to defend the company. I don't think the app should be banned though, politicians took the easy way out because they don't understand social media enough to regulate it and saw an opportunity to keep playing the geopolitics game. We need to organize and fight for privacy rights.
Yes, you know the dozen billionaires that will be in the executive branching in 3 days, or the hundred or so billionaires that completely control the US government?
At this point I think the 'spyware app that sows discord and destabilize western societies' is built into every corporately owned and controlled social media network.
It's not social media any more .... it's just basic 'spyware to sow discord and destabilize society'