With a TikTok Ban Looming, Users Flee to Chinese App ‘Red Note’

Meet the new app, same as the old app.

This is the third story I've seen today that was basically "Tiktok users flee service to other chinese service app you've never heard of"
So basically the usa banned tiktok, and now there's 3 other tiktoks, all connecting the same amount of data for china, just through 3 different services instead of 1.
- 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.
  
  To be fair, the law is broad enough that it could target these other services as well pretty easily.
  
  your edit sounds like the fediverse model
- 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...

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.
- 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.

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
- People aren't as principled as they like to think they are.
- 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?
  
  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.
  
  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 😎🦅🇺🇸
  
  Says the person that is clueless on the Chinese credit system
- Aww man, the government here won't let me use the reeducation of undesirables as a smokescreen to produce fast fashion in my chattel-slavery styled sweat-shops :(
  Wah wahh
  
  Are they banning temu?

Those users:
- I will always upvote Kung Pow!
  
  Good ole wimp lo.
- "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!

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
- 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
  
  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.

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 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.
- 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.
  
  Way to much credit for the average user.
- “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

From the frying pan into the fire. Well done.
- They don't view it as a fire or frying pan, obviously

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

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
  
  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.
  
  Who like all of them? Why?

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
  
  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
- 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 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?

fucking idiots
- Why? Cuz Chinese bad? Stolen data bad? I think you don’t understand that there is no safe data. It doesn’t matter who is taking it but your data is owned by someone. If not the Chinese it’s the US government. If not them then you’re phone provider. If you purchase ANYTHING, that store is collecting your data.
  
  Not Chinese bad, Chinese government bad. because the Chinese government has so much control, Chinese companies can't be trusted. yes, stolen data is bad. I know that data is being stolen anyway, but tiktok has historically been very bad about it. however, i was reffering to them moving from one shitty Chinese platform to another even more shitty and even more Chinese (as in controlled more by the Chinese government) one, when there are platforms that are from places that do not have an authoritarian government able to control any company if they so choose. of course something like instagram (reels) or youtube shorts isn't much better in terms of data theft, but who has the data does matter no matter how hard you're coping.
  
  What if that's what they were talking about? That's it's idiotic to ban it given everything you just said.
  
  People keep making this argument comparing TikTok to American social media companies when talking about data.
  What is hard to understand? Americans are fine with other Americans or American companies having their data. Americans are not fine with China having their data.
  It is pretty simple.

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.

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.
- 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.
  
  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.
  
  Sounds like a problem for the TRILLION dollar military industrial complex. I’m sure they can spare a few bucks to solve that issue.

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

I look forward to the people who don't realize that Red Note will just get banned too.
- I don’t think they care. For most, this is just a middle finger to the government
  
  Middle finger to the US or Chinese government?
  
  The problem is that that sometimes if you give the government the finger... you might not get it back.

Rednote is very cool. Very nice people and no ads. It’s almost weird that I haven’t seen any ads, even for Chinese products.
Starting to notice all these American apps are full of trolls, racists, and ads. So many people parroting shit they read on Faux News about China bad and about safeguarding their data. There is no threat.
The oligarchy is the same in China and the US. Corporate powers and billionaires running everything. The moment we as people realize that borders are made up and governments are meant to divide us the better we’ll be as a planet. Might even learn something from each other.
Anecdotally my daughter is learning mandarin in school and I’m taking this opportunity to learn some and bond with her over it. Very cool.

Reject modernity, everyone go back to ~~forum boards~~ usenet lol

I read online somewhere, that you will still be able to have Tiktok. It will only be removed from the App stores. Then gradually faze out the site itself later. So, you have some time to get on the site. It won't be completely offline on January 19.

And those people will turn around and cry about privacy issues. The cycle repeats...
- No one on TikTok cares about privacy
  
  he does ☞ https://www.tiktok.com/@mor10web
- Most of them are joking about reuniting with their Chinese spy
  
  Right? The tech-user bubble is funny, sometimes. The average TikTok user couldn't care less about privacy, they care about having an app that delivers the experience they want. The reason many aren't going to Instagram reels and Youtube shorts is because their algorithms and content are awful.
  Similar vibes as "Why are Twitter users going to Bluesky and not Mastodon? Are they stupid?"

"NOOOO the foreign man who's been fucking me is gone, I MUST find a new foreign man to fuck me or I will die!" -Idiot humans
- foreign man
  Why „foreign man”? Why not „Capitalist”? Or „Megacorporation”?
  Foreign people are not the only ones who are fucking you over.
  
  Why „foreign man”? Why not „Capitalist”? Or „Megacorporation”?
  In this specific case, the man fucking them over is banned because it's foreign. The position of domestic man fucking them over is not vacant so they only need to find a replacement for the position of foreign man fucking them over.
  
  The foreign capitalist/imperialist app ran by a despot who approved this app for me to useeeeeee.
  
  OK then, foreign communist megacorporation & government

I’m kind of surprised by the response in the comments. Generally I think Lemmy is anti Tik Tok and I don’t understand why. You don’t have to like the shit but why do people have to be so negative about what other people do with their free time?
I think people here are just trying to be edgy and hate tik tok because it’s popular.
- I'm in the camp that thinks in 25 years there will be some regretful studies about how attention span demolishing apps like TikTok and yt shorts fucked civilizations progress for the next 150 years. I'd agree with you if I only cared about my lifespan and what happens inside of it. Some people want to see progress across the centuries even if we don't get to live it. TikTok is a sign of regression, whether there is good content or not.
  
  That is a terrible mentality that is essentially “your generation bad, my generation better”.
  People have been saying the same thing about any new technology. They said it about phones, they said it about tv, they’ll say it about literally anything. To boil down a generations problems to an app is ridiculous.
- Lemmy is Anti-Tiktok, but Lemmy is even more Anti-America
- Tiktok is Chinese spyware, that's been caught again and again to send user data to servers in China. How can anyone in their right mind not be outspoken and negative about this shit?
  Users leaving tiktok in favor of xhs are totally insane.
  
  I understand it perfectly, if american companies harvest their data, their govt is only a step from having it, and companies over here have immediate use of that data.
  If the chinese companies have it, the chinese govt has it, and then what? Is china gonna prosecute us internationally with the info? At minimum they are making the US companies and govt crawl to china for the data they so desperately want.
  Like, the US gets more use of data on US citizens than China would. Maybe if the concern was improving the security of american apps and data I would see the point, but seeing how many american companies continue to get away with it, it is blatant "America Good, others Bad"
  
  It really puzzles me that many people in this thread that don't know to what degrees an authoritarian country censors their dada, never lived in one, and can't read their language, somehow think giving your personal information to that one is better. Being able to discuss such things is already a privilege. If your bag has to be searched twice a day just to be able to commute, I thought you will at least feel uncomfortable.

Why should I care about who the US sees as the enemy? I was born here and I'm seen as nothing more than livestock for our capitalists, when they aren't funding and supplying a genocide against poors halfway around the world.
No way I'm going to rejoin Metabook after 10 years now that they've gone full Nazi.
Downloaded Rednote. Cool app. Fuck the hometeam that chose to be the opposite of a society. It's only the home team if it's a team, it's been made clear to most Americans that we're just a bunch of rugged individuals at each other's throats for oligarch scraps and we can get fucked and die to profit healthcare scammers.
I'd rather have my clicks profit our supposed enemy than us at this point with "friends" like my country.
- So, regarding your distaste for genocide—you, uh...might want to read up on Tiananmen Square and the Uyghurs.
  Also, I notice you didn't mention any Fediverse (or other) alternatives. I'm not going to make any accusations, but what you wrote sounds a lot like astroturfing.
  If your ultimate goal is to say, "Fuck the US," fine, but if what you really want to say is, "Fuck capitalists and authoritarians," you're going about it all wrong. What you're essentially saying is that you'd rather be punched by this other guy just because it's not the one you hate. Meanwhile, you don't have to be punched at all.
  
  China is and has committed genocide.
  The US is and has committed genocide.
  That's not a point in either's favor. That's a moral wash.
  I'd rather both nations failed, so something more humane can potentially take its place (and revolution over and over until that happens) but as an American, rejecting China means nothing, just as a Chinese citizen rejecting America means nothing.
  Rejecting evil empires begins with undermining the one that you're expected to support and be a loyal cog of. A Russian openly hating America or a Chinese person openly hating Russia is indistinguishable from patriotism/nationalism.
  I can only hurt one empire materially, the one I materially live within. The Chinese have to reign in China, and the Russians Russia. The best I can do is my part not to strengthen or support the evil empire I was born under to the best of my ability.
  
  The same people that sold you on Uyghurs is also telling you Tiktok is about privacy. They are lying about both
- Christ, dude. It's not that serious.
  
  Fuck lemmy.world for being shit! I'm joining Hexbear
  Is the shit take vibes I'm getting here from Allonzee