- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
American Tiktok users would rather use ACTUAL Chinese spyware app than Meta. XiaoHongShu (meaning “Little Red Book”) and ChatGPT (for translating the Mandarin only app) are currently #1 and #2 on the App store.
The rednote move is mostly a form of protest. People are fully aware its a dumb idea for privacy.
It’s a bad form of protest, because it doesn’t do what protests are meant to do, but okay.
Protests are about bringing visibility about an issue to a wider audience right?
Tons of news coverage, anyone on the app store or play store are seeing the App at the top of the charts, sounds like visibility to me!
Protests have to do more than that to be effective. This issue is already incredibly visible just because of the news media covering the ban. People already know. So the protest doesn’t get people’s attention.
But a good protest provides a lens through which to put the average person in the shoes of those people who are detrimentally affected or trying to effect change.
It also usually inconveniences the institution being protested against, and the people not personally involved to incentivize them to help with a movement.
This doesn’t really tick any of the boxes of a protest from what I can tell but I’ve seen the word protest used to describe it several times.
I’m happy to listen to what the aims of this protest are and what they hope to achieve. Nobody yet has given me much of an answer.
You’re actually one of the few people who have bothered to respond who even seems to know that visibility is an important component of a good protest.
Plenty of discussion happening on tiktok about the reasons and methodology for this, which is where it’s being organized from.
Keep in mind that mass adoption of rednote will force the US to ban it as well, which provides another opportunity in the future to bring more visibility to the authoritarianism by which the US government is operating this ban. It also sets a precedent for any other things the US government might target. There’s a lot of speculation that other games and apps owned partially or majority by ByteDance will be next, like Epic games, League of Legends, etc. If the rednote jump proves to be a successful method for continuing the conversation, then gamers and users of other services that are banned in the future could see that as a blueprint for their own acts of civil disobedience.
We will see what happens, but if every time the US government bans an app or platform, the people just move onto something even worse for the US governments desires (and especially if we move to something that won’t give profits to US companies), then it becomes a tactic the US government will have to abandon. So, more accurately, this is a large act of civil disobedience. Wanna ban tiktok? Great, we’ll just go to an actual Chinese-influenced place that actually has Chinese government surveillance
It isn’t as good as blocking city infrastructure, no, but it’s certainly going to make a lot of shareholders of Meta and other US social media angry that people aren’t flocking back to their apps. It also stands a chance of ensuring US officials who signed the tiktok ban and then bought Meta stock won’t see a profit from their actions.
A protest on the streets isn’t likely going to move the needle on tiktok. The only successful street protests (and barely successful at that) on a national level in recent times have been the BLM protests. The Free Palestine protests haven’t been unsuccessful, but they also haven’t really moved the needle either. Protesting on the streets runs an ever increasing risk of police violence and retribution by the surveillance state. And with the trump administration signaling it plans to green light further police violence against protesters, up to bringing in the military, that may not even be viable in the future.
Moving to something like Loops would absolutely be a better option, both because of it being part of the fediverse and therefore not controlled directly by any government, and because it’s not likely to get banned. The fact that rednote will absolutely get banned once it reaches the threshold of users is not going to endear anyone who doesn’t use tik tok to the movement. You don’t explain what they’re organizing or how the move to rednote makes the government look bad. If people don’t care about tik tok they aren’t going to care about rednote or the government banning it as well.
The US Government is not going to get tired of banning these apps. It doesn’t cost them much of anything. The “tik tok” ban already has the terminology built into the relevant clauses to ban any app beholden to a hostile foreign power that is a threat to national security with a certain number of users. They’ll just add this to the list. People will use a VPN and give their data to China or Russia or whoever and get hacked because the average person is stupid about online security at the best of times.
This doesn’t inconvenience the government, doesn’t inconvenience the average person who doesn’t use tik tok, doesn’t really detrimentally effect anyone but the people protesting, and I can’t even say it’s bringing awareness because nobody knows that’s the plan. People are moving but the motives are opaque to those who don’t use the app/aren’t active in the movement.
You haven’t explained how this “protest” actually ticks any of the boxes for being an effective protest and that makes me think you probably don’t have that answer which is fine.
As for public protest “in the streets” I certainly wasn’t suggesting that because I don’t think that will work in this instance.
Like I said, we will see if it ends up having an effect. In the absence of other valid options, becoming ungovernable is the only reasonable option. Perhaps you have better ideas? I don’t know if it’s going to make a difference, but I’m not about to pretend I’m any better equipped to plan action to fight the constitutional abuses of the US government with a loosely organized group of social media users.
Tiktok users are aware of this, especially the ones participating in this.
It’s not just about rednote, either. The other compinent is boycotting Meta products. There is also a simultaneous effort to push people to follow tiktok creators on YouTube or bluesky, and not on facebook/threads/Instagram. There is also a mass understanding that this is all interim and not long term.
Loops is 0% ready for people. I’m on loops. I hope it’ll be viable in the future. It’s taken loops months to send out beta access invites. How in the world could it handle several thousand up to 150 million users RIGHT NOW.
The fediverse isn’t viable yet for the vast majority of people, especially creatoes with big followings. It can’t even keep up in moderating for its existing user base, it doesnt have rhe tools that people with thens of thousands of followers would need to sort through their interactions, and it couldn’t handle a mass influx of millions. Especially loops. Even Mastadon would cumble if its userbase went up by 50 million right now.
The fediverse is absolutely a long term solution and I’m hopeful for it, but there are some major gaps in onboarding, moderation, and scaling that prevent it from being a viable option rn. As it grows stronger it’ll be able to serve that need.
There are up to 150 million Americans on tiktok, and basically any creators of significance are widely talking about this there. You could go see yourself. If only 1/6 of the user base sees the information that means the average American is 6 degrees or less of separation from someone who does care. Its got a wider reach than you think. Just because you don’t understand the method of organizing doesn’t mean it’s bad.
So, these users likely already were not using meta (reels etc), or YouTube for the purposes of Tik Tok style short form content as users but as content creators who were doing so this hurt them more than it hurts the platforms they’re boycotting. Leaving Tik Tok hurts Tik Tok more than it helps them, yes, even as a form of protest. Apple and Google are still gathering information about you through your phones, and meta will literally follow you around the internet using cookies and trackers wherher you use their apps or not.
What I would like to see personally is these users, and internet users in general, take their personal internet data privacy and security seriously (regardless of whether it’s against apps like tik tok that are foreign, or meta/Google etc all which are domestic).
I have lots of ideas but most of them involve forcing the issue on internet privacy laws by lobbying the government and voting out elected officials who don’t want to do things like repeal the Patriot Act and subsequent legislation that allows the government to spy on people. Leveraging this ban against the federal government to sue for the right to data privacy would be a good idea as well. The argument probably should be that this bill foments the idea that this scale of internet/app data collection is harmful, and if it’s harmful in the hands of a foreign adversary it’s just as harmful in the hands of the federal government who have countless times leaked the sensitive information of citizens. Voting in younger politicians is also a form of protest. Lobbying not just for data privacy but for a non-government entity to audit any decisions made by the AG and such investigations would be a start as well.
I actually agree that Loops is not ready for this number of users to descend on it, and if they tried the platform would very likely go belly up. That’s why I said like Loops. I would love for it to be fedi related but there’s more than a handful of other apps from places like Japan and the EU that would work. It doesn’t have to be the fediverse, much though I wish what you say about us being ready for prime time wasn’t true. I don’t disagree with you there.
It’s not about tik toks reach. I know from long experience that reach is the only problem. Tik Tok’s reach with its userbase probably will not translate to the apps they’re targeting for protest specifically because of how those apps moderate (and censor) specific content. Some Tik Tok users have already been banned from rednote for the content they post and comments they make.
I’m not downplaying the users, their number, or that they are trying to protest by taking these steps. I’m pointing out that the apparatus to thwart what they’re doing is basically already in place, and if this isn’t the long term plan they may as well abandon it now because the government is not going to change their mind about this ban just because it seems like “work”. The idea that the government will get tired of using resources to ban these apps before the people do is just not reasonable, unless they’re planning to do this til the end of time. And people lose interest in these kinds of movements pretty fast. We only have to look to the whole reddit fiasco to know that the user base of 150 MIL is not going to stick this out for a long period of time so long as they can find something reasonable to switch to. There’s a lot of users who post the same content to meta, Google, and insta already, on top of posting that content to Tik Tok. Those creators will likely be cutting off revenue streams and harming themselves to push this protest and if that is their only source of income it’s fairly unlikely for them to do that long term. To be frank, that math doesn’t add up.
Users with an addiction (which describes a large number of social media users full stop), will try to get their fix elsewhere eventually.
The American apps and the government will be happy to wait them out. I think people should use their system against them.
Hell, if creators got together and put in a bid to buy Tik Tok, that would be a better protest because at least then they’d be collectively attempting to save it.
To address some specific points:
Absolutely agreed. But as you also discuss, there’s only so much individuals can do so long as the US lacks real privacy laws. Even those of us who do our best to de-google and make our online lives as private as possible can not truly avoid the surveilance state- just make it less easy for the surviellance state to gather info about us.
Good news! This is the core of TikTok’s legal argument in front of the supreme court right now. And I’m sure that people with the funds and connections are planning on pursuing this strategy in the future, too, but these kinds of legal solutions take time.
They aren’t leaving tiktok. They’re in both places.
That’s fine, people aren’t jumping to rednote to actually move their content there for the long haul. No one is legitimately thinking this is where everyone will move and they’ll pick back up as if nothing had happened. It’s simply a method of civil disobedience that has an added benefit of cultural exchange.
Everyone jumping into Rednote is aware of this.
It would certinally be neat, but there’s no way the userbase could do this. Even if enough people got together to put up the capital, there’s a whole suite of regulations and funding nonsense that would get in the way. The law text gives the president a lot of leeway in how the sale is handled, so even if the people put up the money the president could just say “nah” and ban it anyway. This also requires ByteDance to even agree to the sale, too. So far, all indications are that ByteDance is planning on just letting things shut down according to the law (which also bans any US companies from hosting or providing services to a company that has been banned) It’s clear that the ideal resolution that congress wanted was for tiktok to either go away (as it is now) or be purchased by someone who could add it to the toolbelt of corporate america and bring it under the thumb of the surviellance state. A group of citizens purchasing the app to preserve it is not one of these outcomes that congress is expecting nor would tolerate long-run.
I think you are fixating on Rednote here rather than seeing Rednote as a component of the efforts at hand. It’s a minor item, it may be short lived, and it’s absolutely not the thing anyone is viewing as the stone that will break the back of the ban law. It’s not easy to know for sure how many are making accounts, but it’s most likely less than 1 million so far, which is obviously a drop in the bucket of the tiktok user base. MOST of the organizing on TikTok is not focused on Rednote, and instead of trying to ensure there are lines of communication for people to find each other elsewhere once the ban hits, because nothing else could be done in such a short span of time once it became clear the ban was actually going to happen.
For now, the secondary goals are focused on trying to ensure Meta doesn’t gain as a result of this, especially since it bankrolled the lobbying efforts for this ban, congress members have invested in Meta in anticipation of the ban, and because Meta is worse with data collection (and sells the data to china anyway). We’ll see if that happens, but between Bluesky, the account closures as a result of Meta’s awful moderation rollbacks, and the long-held distaste for Meta by TikTok users, it’s certinally possible.
I know you’ve drawn some comparisons to reddit, but it’s really not the same. Reddit didn’t go away by government action, and it acted on it’s own to disgruntle it’s user base, and even then, it wasn’t the entire user base. It is absolutely not the same. I know we all love to view the lemmy migration as a big deal here, but in the grand scheme of things, it didn’t change anything for reddit as a corporate entity and there was little fuel for continuing the conversation. We moved. We set up something that works for some, doesn’t for others. The same is true of the multiple Twitter -> Mastodon+ migrations. Enough people moved over to the fediverse to establish a much more sustainable userbase and allow for more innovation, but no one in social media is looking at the ~11 million Mastodon users and thinking “wow, we gotta win them back”. The fediverse is a long-term game when it comes to the future of social media and in it’s present state, it may not even be that future. But it might (along with BlueSky, assuming it doesn’t enshittify too) inspire the next-gen solution that does pull people off of centralized social media.
Successful acts of protest and change require a multi-pronged effort. Some efforts fail. Others are successful. Many efforts seem like failures until the downstream effects become more apparent years later. Some of the most successful acts of protest during the civil rights era were viewed at the time as silly and counter-productive, but now we view many of those things as instrumental in bringing about change.
I think a lot of people in the TikTok world who are organizing around this situation would agree with your broader points. Tiktok, after all, was a haven for organizing on behalf of progressive efforts in human rights, privacy, and other areas. I certinally agree with your sentiment and concerns as well.