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PaperclipPerfector  7d ago (text post)   27782 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 13, 2025

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To jump off of this post downthread about the vibe shift around tech vs. the-rest-of-society, with the TikTok ban fast approaching, I have some thoughts to share:

Edit: Interestingly, RedNote apparently has zero geographical siloing, and the CCP has been quick to breathe down RedNote's neck about it.

Will the left laser-focus on the negatives of Big Tech social media now that Twitter and Facebook are staking themselves out as unfriendly territory?

I would love to see it, given how unhealthy social media and tech clearly is for us. So far the left has championed social media apps being able to do as they please and being eager to give kids free access to social media. Shifting these attitudes can only be a good thing

TikTok isn't being banned due to "potentially spying on users".

There’s almost as much antisemitism on Instagram (have you ever checked out reel comments on anything featuring any Jewish person?) and nobody seems to care at all, least of all Zuck. Hard to believe that’s the reason.

The algorithms of TikTok purposefully pumped anti Israeli content though, unlike instagram - the CCP are on the side of Palestinians after all and love love love framing America as the The Real Oppressor for Whataboutism purposes

This has not been demonstrated except by pointing to the success of certain content tags. It's funny how that works, Israeli support when it is proliferated by the algorithm is organic, but when opposition to Israel proliferates and is very popular that is because it is "purposefully pumped."

Nobody has shown an iota of evidence that "TikTok purposefully pumped" opposition to Israel. If criticism of Israel on TikTok is more popular than it is on other Gen-Z platforms, you should wonder who exactly is "pumping" the algorithms in which directions.

Pointing to the success of certain tags sounds like an iota of evidence to me

Your claim is that the success of those tags is politically motivated by intentional manipulations to the algorithm, and to support that claim all you point to is the success of those tags. You're begging the question.

Sure, I don’t have solid proof but the idea the CCP would intentionally boost anti American content (which anti Israeli content functionally is) is not some grandiose claim requiring any evidence at all, frankly.

Some evidence would be nice, though. If you’re going to ban force divestment of a product worth billions because its owners are promoting anti-American propaganda, having literally any evidence that the owners are doing this seems pretty important.

I don’t even approve of TikTok but the reasons for banning it seems very dubious. We seem increasingly close to, “we are going to impose totalitarianism on you to protect you from totalitarianism”.

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anti American content (which anti Israeli content functionally is)

Lol, no it is not. Israel is not America. Americans should be very critical of Israel.

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The boomer normies blame anything bad on social media on TikTok and pretend Instagram is a benign platform that lets them see pics of their grandkids more efficiently. It doesn’t have to be perfectly rational to be the reason.

And zoomers think TikTok is fun and Instagram is for hot girls™ to post alluring images.

TikTok has pleeeeenty of soft core porn (a friend told me this)

Oh, absolutely. But it doesn’t have the overriding reputation among zoomers that this is all that’s there the way instagram does.

The boomers aren't entirely wrong? Instagram is a perfectly functional social network that's reasonably good to stay in touch with people, stapled onto a constant feed of slop; as far as I know, TikTok is just the feed.

Funnily enough, Facebook is better for that purpose, but you have to go where the people are and, as such, FB has become an AI infested wasteland.

We still use FB to post for the grandparents and their friends. It seems basically fine for that.

Yep, Facebook is still very fit for its original purpose (keeping tabs on friends and family through pictures and posts). It's just that the filler that they give you for the other 99 times that you check your feed during the day is lower quality than the algorithm-selected stuff from the other platforms.

Fair. The main other platform I use is Instagram, mostly for arts and crafts ideas. I am extremely sick of the videos with people slowly turning their canvases around, then cutting off just as the painting is revealed, as though it were a strip tease, but that seems to be what Instagram thinks I like. I'm considering quitting. It doesn't seem worth retraining the algorithm.

Facebook is also pretty good as a local newsfeed for basic restaurant, weather, construction, etc news, and neighborhood group of largely Gen X and above. Lots of attractive neighborhood sunset pictures. But yeah, the reel clickbait stuff has been gettin gout of hand lately, and it just doesn't show me some of my actual friends, which is annoying.

The pro-Palestine content tags to pro-Israeli content tags were like 93% to 7%. Full disclosure I'm not an Instagram user but I seriously doubt Instagram is as threatening to the Gen Z perspective of Israel compared to TikTok.

Hard to believe that’s the reason.

Once again, you are not taking people at face value. Hundreds of Jewish organizations lobby for the ban, and people directly involved admit that the Jewish lobby was decisive in the matter which had previously stalled after failing to get enough support. It is the decisive reason, they even admit this.

people directly involved admit that the Jewish lobby was decisive in the matter which had previously stalled after failing to get enough support. It is the decisive reason, they even admit this

In the interests of fairness, it would be quite nice to have a source for this, too.

I covered this months ago when the Ban was gaining support.

You have ADL chief Jonathan Greenblatt in panic proclaiming "We have a major Tiktok problem" and saying that they have to work together to solve the problem... which they have now done... Then later you get lobbying by hundreds of Jewish groups to ban TikTok:

Jewish Federations of North America, representing hundreds of organized Jewish communities, said its support for the bill is rooted in concerns about antisemitism on the platform.

One of the most prominent Jewish groups in the country has thrown its support behind a fast-advancing bill that could lead to the massively popular video app TikTok being banned in the United States...

Jewish Federations of North America, representing hundreds of organized Jewish communities, said its support for the bill is rooted in concerns about antisemitism on the platform. The Jewish Federations and the Anti-Defamation League have accused TikTok of allowing antisemitism and anti-Israel sentiment to run rampant.

“The single most important issue to our Jewish communities today is the dramatic rise in antisemitism,” JFNA wrote in an official letter to Congress. “Our community understands that social media is a major driver of the drive in antisemitism and that TikTok is the worst offender by far.”

Before the ban acquired enough support, the Times posted an article called Why TikTok Needs to be Sold or Banned Before the 2024 Election which hardly mentions anything about some national security threat from CCP, and instead under the heading "Why it Matters" complains about the portion of pro-Palestinian hashtags on the platform and the spread of antisemitism:

TikTok says users decide whether to post and engage with content on #FreePalestine rather than #StandWithIsrael. But, content moderation decides what posts stay up, what gets taken down, and what accounts get banned from the platform. And it’s TikTok’s algorithm that decides what circulates and what doesn’t.

For anyone who doubts the causal link between TikTok and the rise in antisemitic incidents we’ve seen on U.S. campuses: a November 2023 study conducted by Generation Lab, which I helped to organize, showed that people who spend 30 minutes per day on TikTok are 17% more likely to agree with anti-semitic statements like "Jewish people chase money more than other people do."

And on top of that you have WSJ and Economist admitting that the momentum from the support came from the Jewish lobby.

This is completely typical of @2rafa, and frankly a typical audaciousness of many Jewish people. We have leaked recordings of Greenblatt proclaiming that something must be done about TikTok because they have a GenZ problem. Then you have Jewish journalists posting "why TikTok must be banned" which includes alarmism over anti-semitism as the chief concern. Then you get organized lobbying by hundreds of Jewish groups to ban TikTok because of Israel, not CCP. After the political support for the issue starts to change due to that pressure, you STILL get people like @2rafa who just are unable or unwilling to see an obvious political play even when the means, motive, and opportunity are all crystal clear as day and directly admitted to by the people involved. You get Greenblatt saying on a secret call that "something must be done about TikTok" then you get organized lobbying by hundreds of Jewish groups, but @2rafa enforces the norm that nothing nefarious can be attributed to Jewish people.

And there's a 20% chance I'll be banned for posting this comment, but at this point people like 2rafa are just admiring the Emperor's clothes when denying that the TikTok ban happened because of Jewish lobbying. Even when the people involved directly admit what they are doing and why they are doing it.

Edit: Also why not throw a quite from Mitt Romney into the mix:

Driving the news: In a forum Friday at the McCain Institute in Sedona, Arizona Romney asked Secretary of State Antony Blinken why Israel and the U.S. have "been so ineffective at communicating" justifications for the war in Gaza, adding, "Typically the Israelis are good at PR."

"You have a social media ecosystem environment in which context, history, facts get lost, and the emotion — the impact of images — dominates," Blinken said.

Romney replied, "Some wonder why there was such overwhelming support for us to shut down potentially TikTok or other entities of that nature. If you look at the postings on TikTok and the number of mentions of Palestinians, relative to other social media sites — it's overwhelmingly so among TikTok broadcasts."

Thanks for the links, they mostly check out. The only thing I’d add is that every link emphasis that they believe the content on TikTok is unnatural: Greenblatt talks about an unnatural switch to using Iranian terms, the other links argue that the ratio of pro/anti Israel content on TikTok is significantly different to that found on campus polls (and is therefore evidence of foreign manipulation). This concern about artificiality is probably a fig leaf, I doubt that most of these groups would be happier if they could show it was organic, but I imagine it flipped a few senators.

If you get banned for extensive citations answering a direct question, I think it would just answer another question.

As he's not been banned can we consider that other question answered or will it be implied again?

It's only been a day, hasn't it

I wish a little that it was about spying on users. I wish more that it was about how TikTok is the worst thing humans have ever created. Hypershortform content is gigafrying the developing brains of young people, and then there are the peculiarities of its content. TikTok text-to-speech, obnoxious subtitles on every video, five hundred thousand shitty clips to the same fucking 20 seconds of a song over and over and over, TikTok dances, splitscreen videos of Family Guy clips and Minecraft because attention spans have apparently become that bad. Adolescents are mainlining psychic polonium just from all of these, and that's before we consider the psychic demon core that is social media.

Spying on users would be a good enough reason. I don't know how people respond with "My government is spying on me." Yeah but it's our government. It's a different and in many ways a far grosser abuse of power but at least you can say there are legitimate reasons for the American government to keep data on American citizens. There is no conceivable above-board justification for the Chinese government creating-via-numerous-cyberattacks a general database of American citizens and its existence alone is grounds to ban them from all American telecommunications.

It was probably expedited to congress because of AIPAC but that was long after Trump tried to ban it and well after the Biden admin had it investigated and banned from government devices. It also must be said that however much congress and their AIPAC handlers get their hackles raised about Israel and JQ shit, the actual power in this country, the unelected bureaucracy, is clearly highly invested in righties wasting all their time posting about jews. Look no further than that preeminent JQ voice of Nick Fuentes being a fed.

Regardless of the actual motive, absolute justification for the ban is and has been the CCP having a tool to introduce political narratives in a social media platform used by a massive number of Americans. It's not Reddit or X where they have to work with shills and botting, it's not /pol/ where they spam slide threads and run psyops like they did at the onset of the coronavirus. It's a platform they control where they can push the figurative button and suddenly millions of people are seeing the exact content the CCP wants them to see. Google does that too, but I know their reasoning, why is 'based China' doing it? It's not because they're ideologically lockstep. It's because for the last decade they've been waging a next-generation war on the American people by destabilizing our politics. I still don't get how this has been missed, after a year of seeing commentators on the right making incredible snipes of nefarious deeds being snuck by the masses, only Sam Hyde has voiced a fraction of the animosity we need to exhibit toward China, which begins with expelling every single Chinese national in this country, and even he softened that with using it to frame a joke about honeydicking.

It's because for the last decade they've been waging a next-generation war on the American people by destabilizing our politics.

Certainly, they've been trying, but I'm not sure they've been getting anywhere prior to TikTok. Certainly, Russia's had more total success (although Trump probably didn't ask for Russian help, it was given, and it was almost certainly given specifically because Putin wanted to stoke the fires of the culture war).

Speaking as a former reddit powerjanny, not that insider knowledge is necessary as the admins posted this publicly, the Reddit "Russian bot" story was a total fabrication.

Outside of the post by [see link], none of these accounts or posts received much attention on the platform, and many of the posts were removed either by moderators or as part of normal content manipulation operations. The accounts posted in different regional subreddits, and in several different languages.

Karma distribution:

0 or less: 42

1 - 9: 13

10 or greater: 6

Max Karma: 48

Admins banned 61 accounts. It wasn't unusual for me to ban more spam accounts than that on multiple single days in any given month, and very often those accounts had already accumulated thousands of upvotes.

The American intelligence apparatus had highly politicized reasoning for depicting Russia as an adversary. They're also part of the true power in this country, so personally I just can't find credibility in their words. After all, I saw for myself the proliferation of the bot hoax on Reddit. I can't say with certainty China was or is shilling on the site, but I can say how I was on /pol/ more than anything else just after Wuhan was quarantined, and those coronavirus general threads had videos from China of things that never happened. If Chinese cyberwarfare finds value in sliding and psyopping /pol/ and fielding an army of "wolf warrior" bots on Twitter, it's fair to suspect them of doing the same on Reddit.

I'll also say, having been introduced to just a taste, Chinese meme culture is incredibly complex, brilliant, and funny, all this even passing through translation. Heavy state censorship in the information age is cleverness' perfect crucible and surely some number of those people take their talents to contribute them to the state. If they haven't been doing any of this and it's just all a series of unfortunate coincidences, I don't think it's because they're lacking citizens who know how to talk like Americans, argue like Americans, and truly so importantly, meme like Americans.

I'm not sure how this relates to my post. I was mostly talking about 2016 wrt Putin helping Trump (the DNC hack being Russian is TTBOMK uncontroversial).

As for propaganda, I'll just say that I've had a couple of instances over the years of mistaking RT for Western conservative thought, whereas this has never happened with Chinese media TTBOMK. And there are incidents that are frankly embarrassing like the Fourteen Demands.

the DNC hack being Russian is TTBOMK uncontroversial

Uncontroversial, as in fashionable opinion often repeated by talking heads, or uncontroversial, as in, proven with evidence beyond reasonable doubt?

Uncontroversial (this is the correct spelling, btw), as in "the Mueller report lays out exactly which Russian military units did it on which days".

The Mueller report does not allege that Trump asked for this.

In defense of Russia, there are a lot of non-conspiracy reasons that Russian conservatives might sound like American conservatives.

First of all, Russia is, for Europe, a pretty conservative country, and therefore its views are going to match up. They have similar concerns, and similar beliefs and similar hopes for the future. Therefore when a Russian says something conservative, it’s going to sound like American conservatives because— they agree, more often than not.

Second, unlike China, Russia is a European, Christian country. Yes they’re orthodox Christian but they are Christians and therefore when they talk about their values it matches up with conservative Christian values. Both groups want Christianity to be more prominent in society and things like gay, trans, and abortion to be if not banned, at least harder to get. When they explain their reasoning, they’re appealing to Christianity and to the Bible and traditional family values derived from Christianity.

Given just how much the two groups share, it’s not really all that odd to find them sounding similar to each other. Heck we can probably find conservatives sounding like AfD, not because German trolls, but because they share a concern about immigration.

Uh, Russia has the world’s highest abortion rate and IIRC there is no mainstream political party which sees it as different from normal birth control. The American religious right by and large actually practices their Christianity; Russia has a church attendance rate which is lower end of average for Europe. It’s true that Russia is homophobic and transphobic, but a bunch of that is the probably-accurate view that LGBT advocacy groups are vectors of American influence.

I’m not going to claim Russia is progressive, but it’s not a based conservative country either. United Russia may have slightly more in common with the GOP than with the democrats, but at the end of the day this is a corrupt imperialist power giving special rights to minority groups to keep the peace and operating off extreme centralization, state owned companies, and militarism.

If you want to see actual social conservatism in europe, look at certain Celtic regions(Hebrides, northern Irish Protestant bastions), Georgia, and the byzantine Catholic belt in the Carpathians(mostly western Ukraine, but also parts of Poland and Slovakia).

Russia has the world’s highest abortion rate

It's not true and haven't been for a long time. Just look at the current data.

Abortion isn't end all be all of being conservative. Plenty of prolifers argue on that basis that abortion "is racist because blacks have more if them", "is eugenics", "targets vurnerable women" and other such leftist pablum.

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I feel very differently. I don't like China's government and I would hate to live in China, but at the same time, I definitely view the US government spying on me as being more dangerous than China spying on me. After all, I am a US citizen, so it is very unlikely that China would do anything to me no matter what kind of information they had on me. The US government, on the other hand, could do all sorts of things to me.

I mean, there's the "how sure are you that you are immune to tailored propaganda" issue and there's the "how sure are you that they can't figure out something to blackmail you with" issue. But those aren't the big points. The big points are:

  1. If the CPC says TikTok will be a malware vector, it will be a malware vector. A state-level malware vector, at that, which means zero-days and probably hardware/firmware backdoors (do you own any computing devices made in Mainland China?).
  2. You might not care about what the CPC knows about you, but what the CPC knows about the Chinese diaspora matters to you because knowing whether a given expat is toeing the party line is a key part of being able to control him by threatening his family, and you want there to be less enemy agents in the USA (there will be some anyway, but TikTok is more scalable).

Chinese families are small due to low TFR and chinamen make good immigrants- it is trivial to grant visas to all the clan of chinamen in the west whose enemy agent status actually matters.

That only solves the problem if both they want to come and the CPC lets them come. Obviously, by the point of them being explicitly hostages, the CPC wouldn't let them emigrate.

‘Chinese expats or their children being granted a security clearance or background checked for sensitive work are asked to provide a list of relatives who will immediately be granted visas upon completion of the process’ seems to solve the process- presumably the CCP isn’t preemptively taking hostages. It’s just when they need something. And these kinds of security checks already ask to disclose ties to foreign nationals and discriminate in otherwise unconstitutional ways- it’s not a huge stretch.

In any case, orientals in general seem to love America even before you get to the ‘totalitarian polluted and poor’ aspect of red China; I have a hard time imagining grandma and brother in law are passing up an opportunity to move and massively increase their standard of living.

Yes, I didn't articulate the point as well as I could. I think the best I could say is this: every bit of excess data collection by the US government is horrifying, as is all of that with regard to Five Eyes. Nominally about terrorism, maybe they've even stopped a fair bit, but I do often wonder if it's the NSA more and less behind the hacks of conservative websites and if it's also the NSA carrying out doxxes of certain individuals before laundering it through chosen contacts for parallel constructions.

Still, however dark the purposes are of our government as they collect such data, the severity is matched and multiplied when asking: but why does China want it?

It could be reciprocity, if the US government maintains a database of every single Chinese citizen. Do we? I think I would have heard that as a retort, "The US government is doing the same thing with Chinese citizens" is, to me, much stronger than mentioning USFG domestic surveillance. To the point I would consider it entirely exculpating if we did it first.

Small point but I imagine that split-screen videos of Family Guy and Minecraft are ways to elude automated copywrite detection. At least, Youtube Family Guy clips have weird oddities like that for that purpose.

Fair point about specifically the Family Guy mashups, but I've come across videos of whatever bigbrain podcast audio overlaid on whatever game, and that I'm confident is about attention spans.

By the way, it's "copyright", not "copywrite" because it's about who has the right to make copies of a work.

I wish a little that it was about spying on users. I wish more that it was about how TikTok is the worst thing humans have ever created. Hypershortform content is gigafrying the developing brains of young people, and then there are the peculiarities of its content. TikTok text-to-speech, obnoxious subtitles on every video, five hundred thousand shitty clips to the same fucking 20 seconds of a song over and over and over, TikTok dances, splitscreen videos of Family Guy clips and Minecraft because attention spans have apparently become that bad. Adolescents are mainlining psychic polonium just from all of these, and that's before we consider the psychic demon core that is social media.

I mean, I agree, but banning TikTok wouldn't do anything at this point. TikTok was the first, but once it proved that the thirty-second video + infinite scrolling model was much more popular and addictive than regular video, it didn't take long for other websites to copy it (YouTube Shorts, Instagram Reels, etc.). You need to ban the format, not just a single company.

Congress can't legislate video length and I don't think it's necessarily the format. Shortform itself is not fundamentally bad, comedy is perfect for clips, same for sports and video games. Where these degrade is the race to the bottom in algorithm-pleasing content, and AI customer retention could be legislated against. The scientific data on the destructive nature of social media piles by the day, so there's a compelling health interest, and a law that flatly prohibits AI customer retention wouldn't fall afoul of other constitutional freedoms, it's not what they're randomly pushing, it's that the content is being randomly pushed, and these are multinational corporations engaged in interstate commerce, so even a very scope-limited interpretation of the Commerce Clause would find some degree of congressional authority in regulating such practices.

From there, it's simple. No endless scrolling, the sites can't serve unsolicited content based on, for example, the notion a user might want to watch a video, and especially might thus want to keep watching videos. For YouTube Shorts and others this would mean a user could go to their subscriptions and watch all the new Shorts, but when they watched them all, that's it. For Instagram and others it would mean no generic "explore" pages. It can't show you something because it thinks you might like it. It could possibly serve content analyzed as objectively or justifiably similar. If I enjoyed an hour-long history of whatever, I could ask it for other hour-long histories of whatever, but it wouldn't be analyzing clicks, view-counts or retention in its pushes. It would just be "Here's 25 videos of measurably similar content." Same for searching, no more "related" no more "you might also like" no more "users also searched," literal searched text in the title or the video transcript, limited tagging to prevent abuse in the video descriptions, and nothing from the comments. Ideally it should be suddenly very easy to search YouTube and be so specific or maybe so wrong that it returns no results.

And of course, a categorical prohibition on minors using the internet. This law wouldn't be targeted at the minors exactly, nor their parents. It would be targeted at corporations with astronomic fines for violations. I wouldn't be surprised if Google is already anticipating exactly such a law and has at least the framework for DeepMind-powered age-based captchas, because the only question I have is if their analytics determine with >99.99% accuracy any given user's age, or age bracket.

In fact, it's not even being "banned" at all.

The law signed in April mandates a ban on new TikTok downloads on Apple or Google app stores if Chinese parent ByteDance fails to divest the site.

Users who have downloaded TikTok would theoretically still be able to use the app, except that the law also bars U.S. companies starting Sunday from providing services to enable the distribution, maintenance, or updating of it.[...]

"We go dark. Essentially, the platform shuts down," TikTok lawyer Noel Francisco told the Supreme Court last week.

https://www.reuters.com/technology/tiktok-preparing-us-shut-off-sunday-information-reports-2025-01-15/

There is a relevant in that first sentence. Let's try it out with different subjects and objects to see if we would call that a ban:

  • The law signed in April mandates a ban on liquor sales at Total Wine if bottles are not labeled.

  • The law signed in April mandates a ban on Toyota produced in Japanese-owned factories rather than American-owned factories.

  • The law signed in April mandates a ban on cheeses if the milk is not sourced from FDA-inspected farms.

I would not describe these as "bans". They impose requirements (divestment from ownership by an adversarial government in this case). Perhaps they're bad regulations, but they aren't bans on the products in question. That ByteDance is apparently going to elect to sunset the application rather than take the money and run is strongly suggestive of the real value being non-monetary advantages to the Chinese government.

TikTok, as it exists today, is getting banned. You can call it an attempted expropriation if you want.

What of intent?

If the intent was to ban TikTok, they would have just banned TikTok. The intent was to stop having one of the most used social media applications in the United States owned by the chief adversary of the American government.

I disagree, because singling out one business like that with no justification is illegal in the American system.

You have to make tortuous arguments to meet a predicate that allows you to do what you ultimately wanted to do. In this case national security.

The question then is: according to their own statements, is it likely that the justification offered by American politician in this case is in good faith?

I don't really care on free speech grounds personally, but if you want to argue it you have to address TikTok's own argument, which is that this ban is in bad faith.

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It isn't singling out a business, it's singling out an owner.

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PAFACA does expressly name ByteDance and TikTok but they're given as examples in its purpose, which is banning social media platforms owned by foreign adversaries such as the CCP. The Commerce Clause gives Congress plenary authority to regulate foreign trade and that's original intent, it's also a fundamental power of all sovereigns. Banning any foreign social media is nothing more than an embargo, and embargoes are intrinsically legitimate exercises of constitutional and sovereign authority.

China has long banned foreign social media companies from operating in its borders, and in 2021 passed severe restrictions on companies taking data on Chinese citizens outside its jurisdiction. If TikTok were willing to keep its US data in a US subsidiary that operated entirely domestically by employees under US jurisdiction, we'd be having a different conversation, I think. IIRC Facebook et al already have to keep EU data within the EU too under GDPR.

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One thing I do find interesting is the sanitization of "Little Red Book" into RedNote. On one hand, it seems unnecessary, as a large group of potential users would be quite aware and supportive of the overt reference to Chinese Communism. On the other hand, it might just be because "Little Red Book" is a shit name when translated literally.

Is the name just a meme, or is there some non-ironic use there?
The Chinese confuse me with this. I've seen fanfiction authors argue by going "I think it is you who fail to understand the fundamental tenets of marxism-leninism" in apparent perfect seriousness.

I would guess that the name is in earnest. My own interpretation is that it essentially is implying that the app is like a vade mecum. Just as everyone used to carry around the Little Red Book that carried all sorts of wonderful wisdom, so too will everyone now carry around our app.

I get what you’re saying, though. I had a similar moment when I was watching some Chinese YouTuber who was doing a travel video about a museum founded at the site of the border between the Chu and the Han. When he was discussing why the Qin fell, he was sure to explain that it was due to the “contradictions within Qin society”. I didn’t know if he intentionally put it in there as a signaling mechanism or if concepts like this have just become standard tools of thought for Chinese people. It makes you wonder how non-Westerners react when they see how positively peppered our own discussions are with words like “marginalization” and “normalization”.

My own guess is that you have some number of small true believers who are very much intentionally lacing their speech with these words, and a much larger proportion who just get a vague good feeling when they use these words, something like “look, I’m saying something smart/morally correct/timely”.

It makes you wonder how non-Westerners react when they see how positively peppered our own discussions are with words like “marginalization” and “normalization”.

Your newspeak dialect makes my skin crawl.

Yeah, that makes two of us. But I find it repulsive because I’m enmeshed within the culture wars surrounding its use. But what does, say, some random Chilean think if he sees some Anglophone Twitter user memeing like

Normalize wearing sweatpants all day, because I’m too lazy to dress nice

or something? (Note: I am clearly incompetent at writing Twitter memes, but certainly you’re familiar with the genre that I’m pointing at.) Would the Chilean think “huh, isn’t it weird how this person is using that word?”

If you haven't noticed from my use of pronouns (heh), I am a non-Westerner. It passed beyond thinking “weird” in comparison to the English I was taught, it's to the stage of some interstellar invasion uncanny valley. “Black bodies” is perhaps the top contender, but the whole dialect leaves me very, very uneasy.

Yah I found it bizarre how a week ago it was “RedBook” and now it’s “RedNote”.

My gf is pissed because all her content got replaced by ugly selfies from Americans.

As am I. RedNote used to be really nice for finding hidden spots while traveling or getting a general Chinese sense of things. Now it's all "Hello from America, please teach me Chinese."

To me this is just a microcosm. Foreigners (in this case, literally) coming into our community and not only not integrating into our culture, but actively destroying it. A quite delectable piece of irony.

Wait why are tiktokers going to rednote? AFAIK instagram has virtually identical functionality if desired. Why rednote?

I saw someone say that the Instagram reels algo pushes more polished and professional videos compared to the more casual and viral style of tik tok. (I've never used any of them myself).

Presumably as a middle finger to the government for banning TikTok.

It wouldn't surprise me if TikTok had started pushing content suggesting it, but that's a pure guess.

I haven't yet seen an explanation for why, either. Maybe the meme about TikTok being a foreign influence vector was precisely the motivation for people seeking out a more obviously-Chinese app? RedNote has been flooded with left-leaning Western users whose brand of leftism is alien and even dangerous to China's brand of leftism.

That's another thing that I've found quite amusing during this whole thing. The West, by and large, have no idea how "based" China truly is. It's always quite funny to me (China born Chinese living in California) when I hear the people here talk because they really have no clue how far they are from the norm in the rest of the world (or at least from China, which is much closer to the rest of the world than these people are.) Most Chinese people fucking hate gays. Most Chinese people absolutely fucking hate Indians (Although Westerners are coming around on this one). Most Chinese people don't even have a conception of transgenderism in the same way Westerners do.

The "TikTok" ban covers any social networking app controlled by a foreign adversary with more than one million American users, and at the discretion of the President. So if Red Little Book (the actual literally translation of Hongxiaoshu) picks up a million American users at the discretion of the President they can also be forced to sell or be forced off the app stores.

Also AFAIK this is only being kicked off the app stores and being forced to not do transact with American businesses. Existing installations will keep running, albeit with no ad revenue from American businesses.

Oh yeah, I forgot to ask this question: does the US Government have an opening to put the screws on Google and Apple vis-a-vis their mobile app stores?

Those are pretty important chokepoints for public exposure, and that Google and Apple have made walled gardens that make it easier to choke out anyone the government doesn't like.

An app store or internet hosting service that continues to enable distribution, maintenance, or updates for a banned application could be subject to civil penalties of up to $5,000 multiplied by the number of U.S. users who accessed, maintained, or updated the application. A foreign adversary controlled application that fails to provide user data as required could be subject to civil penalties of up to $500 multiplied by the number of affected users.

Interesting. I guess if I didn't mind the risk of financial ruin I could test my idea that operating a proxy is protected speech.

I think there are a few lenses with which to view the "TikTok ban": you can call it protectionism for American social networks, but I think in practice it makes more sense as a tit-for-tat response to a tightening global market for social networks. Many other countries have, at this point, adopted measures attempting to limit the exfiltration of their social information. Europe has GDPR, which attempts to apply extraterritorial jurisdiction to its citizens against (largely-American) multinational corporations. China simply banned American companies like Facebook and Twitter, requires its allowed networks to be subject to state surveillance, and has tried to place limits on foreign companies collecting data on its' citizens.

Until TikTok, the United States has never found itself needing these things: all the other major networks are domestically-controlled, and probably aren't shipping user data to potentially-hostile nations for cloud processing even if it wasn't explicitly banned previously. For all the concerns about "surveillance capitalism" here, I think simple "trade war retaliation" is a much easier angle, and Trump's positions on those elsewhere suggest that either he'll try to leverage the ban for something in return (unlikely: I can't see China unblocking Facebook) or let it go into effect. I don't think this is a sympathetic battlefield for even absolutist libertarian-minded free-tradeniks to take a stand.

This makes more sense than "they can use it to spy our citizens."

There are data brokers that operate in the open that will sell you nearly everything TikTok could collect about you. Having access to an app would give you a bit more, like real-time geolocation data rather than stale geolocation data. But for targets where that matters you'd be better off having your intelligence agencies compromise the target's phone. Anyone with reason to be paranoid about the Chinese government spying on them would not have TikTok installed anyway.

That, and cultural conservatives seem to really hate TikTok for whatever reason. I don’t know if it has anything to do with anything in particular. Trump has to make cultural conservative noises and deliver some token victories and this is an easy one.

I think to some extent cultural conservatives are doomed to always hate whatever new thing "the kids" are into. A few decades back it was heavy metal and skateboarding.

Which isn't to say it's the only reason, but I think it's one of the larger elements at play.

cultural conservatives

There's a well-established overlap between cultural conservatism and traditionalism, and a further overlap between traditionalists and the intellectually lazy.

"Just parrot whatever came before uncritically, everything new is bad" is the easiest social heuristic to follow, even more than "tear down everything that came before, everything old is bad", which is why progressives have a cultural advantage over traditionalists. (People think intelligence is just reversed stupidity for a reason.)

It's always been difficult for defenders of freedom to argue against the national security predicate, but you're allowed to argue against the draft because they did.

Just because States are colluding against their people to grab total control of cyberspace doesn't mean that you should let them.

That's a surprisingly-reasonable frame to look at it from, I hadn't considered that until now.

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