Summary
Many Americans joining China’s social media platform RedNote are encountering strict censorship uncommon in Western platforms.
One non-binary user had a post asking if the platform welcomed gay people removed within hours.
Posts on LGBTQ+ topics, fitness photos, and sensitive cultural content have been censored, frustrating users unfamiliar with China’s moderation rules.
RedNote is hiring English-language moderators to handle the influx. While some users enjoy cultural exchange, others criticize restrictions.
Analysts see RedNote’s growth among US users as a soft power win for China.
Yep, hopefully they see that just because the US is shitty that China can’t be worse.
Then you have successfully fallen for china’s propaganda.
Living and working conditions in China for most citizens are horrific, far beyond even the worst problems we see in the US.
Source: have pooped through a hole in the bottom of a moving train in China, and also visited a foxconn jail factory.
have pooped through a hole in the bottom of a moving train in China
Sorry, but that sounds like an upgrade to me. Pooping has gotten so boring lately, but that sounds exciting! I’d pay good money to experience taking a miles-long dump.
Living and working conditions in China for most citizens are horrific, far beyond even the worst problems we see in the US.
Okay I hate China as much as the next guy but this can’t be true. CCP treatment of a small subset of its citizens is horrible, but they can get by despite that because they’re able to competently run the country for the rest of the population. There’s an implied consent here of the sort you typically see in stable dictatorships.
Ive been to China for work. Must be why they have mega cities there. Couldn’t be poor people exist in both countries. Never said I like the Chinese government.
And just what were they making in that Fozconn factory? Ohhh American electronics.
Not equal, China is better at censorship, tracking, and social pressure. They own the corporations and businesses. Go to other countries to kidnap their citizens that talked bad about them.
US corps own the government, not seeing how that’s better. Also, the US does kidnap people who they don’t like internationally as well.
What if we didn’t do oppression olympics and needless political division for 5 minutes. Every gov sucks in its own way, so do corps, but people, including Chinese people are awesome.
They suck and excel at different things. For example the US doesn’t have high speed rail while China doesn’t have military bases around the globe.
Actually the Chinese high speed rail is littered with issues. Safety is obviously an issue, most stories that escape the bubble and make it west are about steel quality in the tracks causing cracking and closures.
The other issue is economics. Sure, China has a lot of high speed rail, but a lot of it goes nowhere important, connecting small cities where a normal train line would have been more economical and practical for the sole reason of claiming more high speed rail than any ither country. This has lead to a huge expansion in the governments “hidden debt” to over 1 trillion usd from the rail line operator alone. This is only for laying the lines themselves does not even account for new trains or maitenance or stations and services.
Also, if the recognized speed of high speed rail is 125mph like wikipedia says, America has a decent amount, it just so happens large cities are spread apart across the continent and flying is more economical than high speed rail.
all the lulz
The fuck did they expect going to a Chinese platform
Well the tankies seem to think that China is actually a Utopia that the western governments are hiding from us, so naturally there shouldn’t be any censorship issues lol
People moving to Red Note aren’t tankies and I’ve only heard people who describe what tankies say that tankies think China is a utopia that our governments are hiding from us. Kinda like Ben Shapiro describing what “the left” people say or do.
lemmy.ca has some tankie instances defederated, so it would make sense why you don’t see what tankies are saying
https://lemmy.ca/instances
But I do agree that people using rednote aren’t tankies.
My question is how much of these articles are manufactured outrage. Like, I can’t imagine anybody expected anything different - especially since some of this stuff is censored already on American social media (especially LGBT related stuff), and the media has spent 50 years telling Americans how much censorship there is in China and the Great Firewall.
Probably 90% from my personal experience, I see loads of LGBTQ posts on RedNote. I wonder if they’re being sensored or just waiting to go through the moderation queue.
I could see English posts maybe accumulating negative sentiment scores or even just a lack of known words causing a post to end up in a moderation queue.
For reference sentiment scores are basically a numeric way of scoring a post. Words like “hate” get -10 points neutral words get 1 point, and positive words like love and friendship get +10 points. At least when I was in college, this was a popular way for social media to determine if they should push your content or not.
I said in another comment about what I learned from following a Chinese lesbian on Twitter is that with China it’s like “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” - you can say and do things that you could or should get in trouble for, but as long as you do it the right way, it’ll be overlooked.
There’s gay bars and a big lesbian scene in China, but there’s a common practice there, that used to happen in Europe and the US as well before the culture shifted, where lesbians get married to men - either gay guys or just a guy they have an arrangement with - to fulfill the cultural obligation expected of them to get married, and then they basically live their own separate lives.
So most likely what’s happening is people who don’t know the cultural do’s and don’t’s are getting censored for stepping over the line.
But LGBTQ stuff is censored all the time on other social media anyway, whenever they think they can get away with it, so it’s not like it’s all that surprising - especially when you add in China’s official stance on LGBTQ people.
These feel like they’re freaking out about something that everybody already knew was gonna happen, and omitting the fact that it happens elsewhere as well to make it seem like a big deal.
“I’m an American and have a right to free speech, no matter what country the service is hosted in!”
But what if there is no country that “allows” the speech you want to say? I want to call for the beheading of billionaires. I assume you don’t think I should be able to do that?
You are assuming TikTokers have any intelligence, morals, principle or talent (or even humanity)
On Lemmy it’s not, this place is filled with pseudo-intellectuals with no critical thinking abilities at all. They literally have no idea what a ban like this means. The problem is I can’t tell I’d they’re shills or worse, they really think this is a good thing cuz “le short videos bad”. I’m starting to think that only the worst people from reddit came here.
Anecdotally, most of my explore is lgbtq posts with plenty of comments and interaction. Some posts are many days old. I’m 100% sure there is and will be further censorship, but I’ve not really encountered it yet… I’ve also been seeing articles about there being a large amount of specific content (Luigi, guns, etc) that I haven’t encountered at all.
You’re on red note? I never really used tiktok, just stuck with shorts, but I’ve been considering checking out RN just for the interaction with Chinese folks. Sounds interesting. Do you reccomend?
I never used TikTok either! I’m not super into short video content. I had a macro photography account on IG about 5 years ago with 30k followers; I closed it after a lot of life obstacles but recently started shooting again. I’m not super into supporting Meta, so I thought I’d just see how RN is since it’s both image and video content. I’ve honestly been incredibly surprised! There’s a lot more user interaction in posts with so much of it being supportive. There are creators posting there whose content on other platforms would always attract negative and hateful comments - absolutely none of that so far on RN. The CN community has been very welcoming, patient, and helpful to new users. I definitely think it’s worth checking out, even if it’s just to get a glimpse of another culture!
I suppose the real question is whether most users will balk at this and move to a new platform, or just accept it.
My bet is that they’ll just accept it.
It would be interesting to see what the effects are. I’ve heard that TikTok is the only mainstream social media where leftist content isn’t attenuated by the algorithm. Don’t know if that’s true or not, but if it is, and if we assume Red Note is similar in that regard, and if you bet right, they’ll keep getting exposed to leftism without corpo platforms being able to stop it. Unless they do another ban. I’m curious whether there would be a point when the TikTok > Red Note users would realize that and refuse to go back to the corpo propaganda machines.
Out of curiosity, what leftist content do you see there that the “western” social media sites won’t allow on their platform?
I don’t think it’s so much that western social media “won’t allow” leftist content, you can certainly post it and share it, but the algorithms aren’t going to do anything to help it gain traction.
Pretty much all of my Facebook friends skew liberal, leftist, even pretty hardcore socialist and communist. They share their memes and post about politics, and I like and interact with that stuff in positive ways. The few political pages I follow myself are pretty much all left leaning causes- environmentalism, pages devoted to voting out Republican candidates in my local elections, LGBTQ rights, atheism, etc. and I actively block, unfollow, and when appropriate report (though of course the reports never seem to go anywhere) any sort of of homo/trans-phobic, racist, bullshit and any misinformation I come across.
I’m just about the furthest right of anyone on my Facebook, and I’m still pretty far left. I have a few hobbies and interests and such that tend to skew right-wing, like hunting, fishing, guns, etc. but I don’t really interact with any pages relating to any of that on Facebook, don’t post about those things, etc. and the way I approach and interact with those sorts of activities is very different than the way most conservatives do.
If you looked at my ads and recommendations though, you’d think I was some kind of truly insane redneck. Gun stuff, weird Christian tradwife quiver-full homesteader shit, very thinly veiled racism, homophobia, etc, muscle cars and big trucks (I think muscle cars are stupid, I do like trucks but not the big lifted monster trucks that it’s always showing me, I think a stock maverick is pretty damn close to perfect)
The only left wing stuff I see is stuff my friends are sharing themselves, and mostly it’s stuff they’ve posted themselves and not shared from anywhere else on Facebook. Their stuff’s mostly not getting taken down, but it’s not getting promoted to any wider audience by the algorithm.
Pro Palestine opinions get you banned, or de-prioritized on Facebook.
Pro Luigi content gets you a ban on all major US social media.
