This is going to be an interesting experiment:
A widely used social network across the world WITHOUT american content.
Until now, the closest thing we had like this were national our regional networks like Russia's vk, but Vk was never truly popular outside Russian speaking countries.
Now we, for the first time ever, will have the situation where a social network has global reach but without american content.
Will it keep being a english first space? Will it survive/thrive? How the content is going to evolve? What does this means in terms of global cultural influence? Will we see internationalized Chinese content dominating it? Will this backfire for the US?
Tiktok is actually surprisingly national in how it serves its content. If you're outside the US you don't see most American accounts except the ones that go very viral.
Edit: I should clarify. This might mean most content you see is English, if you're interested in English content. However it matters where the video was geographically uploaded from. If you upload a tiktok video and check the stats you'll see most views are from your region or country.
Tiktok shows videos locally, then regionally and then finally worldwide if yoo have a big hit.
It would be interesting to know what fraction of the English content people see is posted geographically from within America.
Switzerland has just 8 million people, which are divided into two big language groups. And most people speak (or at least understand) English. So, it's natural for the algorithm to converge to content in English.
What I've learned is that since Switzerland has 3 official languages (German, French and Italian) children and teens at school focus on learning one of the other two regions they are not from.
In particular this leads to French and Italian cantons to be moderately fluent in each other's language. Strikingly when I lived in Lausanne, more people knew Italian than English. English was really not on their radar (plus, add that francophones are kind of elitist when it comes to languages and don't really like to consume content that is not in french).
In German speaking Switzerland proficiency in English was still subpar from most of the rest of Europe when walking in a shop or going to a restaurant.
Not to derail, but when I was in Switzerland, I found the German Swiss to be far more elitarian about NOT learning French, than the other way around. And French Swiss being a minority, they kinda got treated as other or less-than in the bulk of Switzerland. But all German Swiss are at least willing to try English, while the French Swiss tend to avoid English, so maybe that's where the vibe comes from?
For both you and OP, first of you, thank you for "elitarian", but even after reading the definition, I still think you both meant "elitist".
And even though I probably tend to agree with both of you, it's kinda funny to blame French or German speakers about being elitist against English speakers, of which native speakers are notoriously monolingual :-)
I don't blame anyone, I'm Italian and I'm fluent in French, English and Polish besides Italian.
I'm just saying that in the French part of Switzerland English wasn't a given among any generation and it neither was common in the German/Italian parts too if you exclude the expats.
And yes, francophone tend to be very elitist about consuming exclusively french content, regardless of them being from France, Switzerland or Belgium.
"Using your mother tongue is elitist" is bullshit on an epic scale.
It's litteraly your mother tongue man, everyone outside of the elite has a mother, and therefore a mother tongue, it's not expansive, it's your basic birth right.
Why don't people consume audio/video in a foreign language ?
I'm a polyglot myself, so I enjoy that very much, but the simple truth is that most people don't invest the time for becoming fluent in other languages in countries with a "big" language. Works for France, the US, the UK, Spain, Mexico, Japan or China.
Why ? Pretty obvious. Become fluent in a foreign language is a huge effort. Making that effort really only works if you either WANT to do it or if you NEED to do it. The WANT factor is the same everywhere but the NEED to learn a language is way lower if your mother tongue is in the top 5 - or top 10 languages of the world.
The only thing that is specific to French is that French & English have this weird shared history that makes the written langauges very similar and the oral languages very different. So a frequent compromise for french speakers is to become fluent enough at reading/writing, but quite bad at hearing/speaking.
+1 - parent commenter clearly takes too easily of an offense here. Even the French people in my inntercircle agree that there is some level of elitism.
I get the angle you're coming from, but in multi lingual countries where it's table stakes to be at least bilingual, an expressed rejection of not using language A over B is used often as a social cudgel.
Romansh is a national language, not an official one. (At the federal level) Which means that Switzerland considers it a part of it’s culture but that for instance laws and executive orders are not translated in Romansh.
As someone that lived there, and still returns regularly, it is kind of funny to have more fluency in three of those languages, kind of superficially understand the fourth, while many Swiss nationals have to switch to a non official language to understand among themselves when coming from different language regions.
Italian cantons usually focus on German and English, German rather learn English or Italian, French put up with English, and most stop learning the other official languages after the school year where they are compulsory.
Naturally a bit of stereotype, and each as a different experience.
> And most people speak (or at least understand) English.
This is wrong. In cities where there's a lot of tourism, they might understand. Most Swiss people only speak their local languages (German or French). As for those living in Ticino, they tend to be better polyglots.
About 40% of all Swiss inhabitants speak English at least once a week [1].
Anecdotally, I can't think of a single acquaintance younger than 50 years old that doesn't speak fluently. Everyone in Switzerland learns English at school for at least five years. Most even for seven years.
Some of my German speaking friends even talk in English to French speaking people, even when both have learned the other‘s respective language at school.
> Everyone in Switzerland learns English at school for at least five years. Most even for seven years.
We learn the other's respective language for 7 years, too. Yet, as you pointed out, people speak in English because there is no willingness to learn and apply the other's language.
Some of my friends speak English fluently, but I have a very hard bias as I work in IT. My whole family doesn't speak any language other than French. Most of the people I've been to school with don't come close to speaking English casually. None would watch an English content creator.
Due to the shared heritage between the English and German languages, perhaps it's different in the German-speaking region. If you ask someone slightly complicated English questions, they might not be completely lost - after all, some words share the same etymology. But Switzerland is absolutely not an English-speaking country at all.
English is quite common to speak among Swiss from different cantons, since they usually stop caring about the other official languages after the compulsory school classes.
I find kind of ironic that I have better fluency between the official languages than many of my Swiss friends and work colleagues.
I met plenty of people in Lausanne who didn't speak English, or at least didn't want to speak English (it is hard to tell, and anyways, it doesn't really matter). I visited Montreal shortly after my 2 year stay in Lausanne ended and I was surprised on how multi-lingual people were there.
Montreal is not representative of Quebec in general. Montreal itself is very multilingual and anglophone depending on what specific part you're in. In the very touristy parts of Montreal you won't even notice French "requirements". Leave the island of Montreal towards the rest of Quebec (i.e. not towards Ontario) and you will find less and less people willing or able to speak English very very quickly.
Until they think you're a tourist. If they hear you speak another language than English and you seem like you're a tourist, then almost every Quebecer will try his best to speak English even if it means using hand and feet to communicate.
But if they think even for a second that you're actually Canadian, then outside Montreal and even in some parts of Montreal you will be met with the full force of Quebecois pride and nationalism and you better speak French to them.
Y'all are both claiming that the major cities in their region are not representative because they are touristy? That's going to apply to most major cities. Tokyo not representative of Japan, New York not representative of USA, Dublin not representative of Ireland, etc.. But they are.
You definitely won't get 'Southern Charm' or small town feel in NYC. Of course, trying to nail down what exactly is American is gonna be hard to do.
I would definitely not say that if you go to Tokyo you can get the Japanese experience. You get some of it, of course but to say you can get a grasp or even a handful of understanding without ever seeing rice fields and gardens interspersed with houses, beaches with people fishing and immediately turning the catch into sashimi, towns where nothing new has been built since the bubble...
You can't see and feel that in the hustle and bustle, where everyone moves to get away from having neighbors who know all about you, where night is erased by the neon glow.
> You definitely won't get 'Southern Charm' or small town feel in NYC.
This is true but also because the US is geographically and culturally diverse this is impossible in any given city. And that applies equally to none-touristy cities. You're not going to get a broad sense of America from Oklahoma City, either.
The smaller and more homogeneous the country, the easier it is to generalize and get a sense from even a single sample point.
I am not claiming the big city is not representative of Quebec because it's touristy at all. Please read again. But let me try to explain again.
Montreal, never mind tourism, is more English than the rest of Quebec. Depending on which part you're in nobody bats an eye if you don't speak French to them.
In other parts of Montreal and definitely in the rest of Quebec, big city or not, you better speak French unless they think you are a tourist. You can be out in the Beauce but if you look, act and speak like a (non Canadian) tourist they suddenly try their best at English. Quebec City is definitely a city and representative of the rest of Quebec with regards to language (minus tourists). Montreal much less so. There are a bunch of small towns across Quebec that are also very English.
That exists in other provinces as well, where things are very French in the middle of an English speaking province. Acadia comes to mind. Manitoba has some French parts.
Well, it makes sense. Canada still has a significant English-speaking majority. Even if Québec in isolation has a French-speaking majority, there's a very large incentive for French-speaking citizens to learn English because their province is surrounded by primarily Anglophone regions.
There are also other factors at play. Montréal has a fairly large community of native English speakers and receives a lot of tourism from Anglophone Canada and the United States due to its status as the largest city in Québec (and second largest in Canada). It also gets a lot of immigrants, many of which are (at least initially) more proficient in English than in French.
I can't say I'm entirely familiar with the situation in Switzerland, but as far as I know the country has four official languages, none of which are English. It also doesn't border any English-speaking countries. It seems English is mostly used as a lingua franca for communication between citizens who don't otherwise share a language rather than due to the direct presence of native Anglophones. Also, Romansh aside, all national languages of Switzerland (French, German and Italian) are spoken in areas that directly border a country where that language is the national language (France, Italy, Germany/Austria). With Switzerland being in the Schengen Area, its linguistic regions may be considered to be part of a much larger individual linguistic communities, which I feel may also diminish the need to learn other languages.
> I can't say I'm entirely familiar with the situation in Switzerland, but as far as I know the country has four official languages, none of which are English.
The language of French Switzerland is French. You'll never hear German, Italian, or Romansch. If you only spoke German and not French or English, you really couldn't live there very effectively (only places like Bern or Basel are truly multi-lingual), yes you'll get your official docs in German but then what? I assume the same is true in German speaking Switzerland, and I have no idea about Italian Switzerland.
If a Swiss German and Swiss French met for coffee, what language do you think they would wind up speaking? Perhaps English if neither had comfortable fluency in the other language. Not to take away from your point, but English can get you really far in this world.
I'm sorry if this sounds offensive or derogatory. But as a Swiss person, I've never heard anyone call it "Alemannic". Whether it be foreigners, Swiss-French speakers or Swiss-German speakers, everyone called it "German".
> Swiss German (Standard German: Schweizerdeutsch, Alemannic German: Schwiizerdütsch, Schwyzerdütsch, Schwiizertüütsch, Schwizertitsch Mundart, and others; Romansh: Svizzers Tudestg) is any of the Alemannic dialects spoken in the German-speaking part of Switzerland, and in some Alpine communities in Northern Italy bordering Switzerland.
All Swiss-German is an Alemannic dialect, not all Alemannic dialects are Swiss-German, is how I'd interpret that.
It depends what you interact with. I tried it fresh today and it quickly decided I'm a Berliner muslim who likes Nigerian food because I lingered for a minute on something. That interest graph is very fast and volatile.
Uhh... that's kind of how these algorithms work. I presume you interact (i.e. don't scroll past) with a lot of the English posts. It's going to index on that and show you more English content. When I'm abroad, I might see a few posts in their native language but the algorithm will revert to showing English posts about the city/country once it realizes I'm not really jiving with Portuguese posts, for example.
An illiterate coworker of mine showed me his phone and asked for help. It was utterly amazing, he exclusively got videos from goat and donkey farmers. The most stunning part was that most of the videos were completely hilarious. People talking to their goat then the goat does what they say or the opposite on purpose.
I believe the algo is somewhat timezone based, too.
Very common for ppl to be served Chinese or asian influencer content after 12pm (EST). So common, in fact, most of the western users begin posting "whelp, time to go to bed!"
The majority of the content feels regional, though.
I would believe if someone said it was completely organic. It's just how Internet is and how social graphs build up. The typical American notion that the Internet is nearly 100% dominated by American English socio-cultural platform and English is the foundational language of the world's all cognitive processing is just an annoying megalomaniac hallucination.
English is used as a lot as a fallback language for inter-cultural exchanges. In that sense it's kind of dominating, but that's it. Intra-cultural communications happens in local languages, and even if that preferred language happened to be one of en-* locales, that only means everyone is functionally bilingual, and it doesn't mean cultural informational borders don't exist. Data still only goes through bridging connections.
It tends to get people annoyed if you don't. Facebook user distribution is like 12% Indian and 6% American. Twitter is(was) 34% English and 16% Japanese. Bluesky was at one point 43% Japanese. If your feed ISN'T filled with Hindi, Chinese, Spanish, Japanese and so on, with only one in five or less made in English sent from US, your feed is tampered with. But otherwise that social media would be genuinely less useful.
Mastodon only had the raw feed and that drove European network operators insane, so much so that they effectively GFW'd itself.
My anecdotal evidence of watching TikTok usage on others’ phones while riding subway systems in Paris suggest there’s plenty of English-language content out there.
in Morocco most of the adults speak French and Arabic, so when they need to speak to an Englisher they get some kids over to help because they all speak English from TikTok
TikTok is surprisingly national at the surface level, but it is all coordinated back with the parent China based entities (ByteDance, Douyin, and the CCP), so that even if it is national, it upholds China’s national interests. See the story at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42739855 for more details. But basically, TikTok executives had to agree to let ByteDance monitor their personal devices, swear oaths to uphold various goals of the CCP (“national unity” “socialism” etc), report to both a US-based manager and a China-based manager, uphold the CCP’s moderation/censorship scheme, and so on. It is REALLY aggressive and unethical, but also reveals how subtly manipulative the entire system of TikTok is.
Do you think it would be possible to show this programmatically? As in scrape n posts from TikTok and Reels and show the first displays CCP tendencies?
Or is this like a general US freedom China dictator logic
Yup, but of course more than one person has to agree for this to actually happen. Which is not the case for other apps, like Twitter/X. If Musk wants to remove a government, he has only to promote "free speech" and let falsehoods and misinformation dominate his platform.
If a government can be removed easily with "mis"information then maybe it does not deserve to be in power in the first place. Maybe if politicians weren't habitual liars selling their votes to the highest bidder instead of acting in the interest of the people they are supposed to represent then those people would have some trust in them.
geopolitics aside could a turing machine identify misinformation / programatically check whether something is true or not? because even among humans there is no agreement
This is just not true. There are objective facts eg. the earth is round. We can all agree on this, and any information to the contrary should be banned.
The majority of us agree that racism is bad for society. Racist content should be banned.
Yes there are always going to be humans who think the earth is flat or has a core of cheese, but these people can be relegated to the fringes of society.
> This is just not true. There are objective facts eg. the earth is round.
The earth isn't round in many ways. It's vaguely spheroid but not a sphere and it has a rough shaped surface.
> We can all agree on this, and any information to the contrary should be banned.
If we can all agree then there is no need to ban anything. By definition, bans for information are means to suppress those who don't agree.
> The majority of us agree that racism is bad for society.
On the contrary, the majority seems to be very happy with racism. They just don't agree who you can be racist towards.
> Racist content should be banned.
I'd rather not have you or anyone else decide what is too racist to say. Especially when existing inforcement shows that "racism" often includes factual but inconvenient information. I do not support banning facts.
> Yes there are always going to be humans who think the earth is flat or has a core of cheese, but these people can be relegated to the fringes of society.
There are many more people that have much more reasonable (and often provably true) views but are going to be targetted with the speech policing your kind wants.
You are conflating strong Chinese Communist control of the business with how the content behaves. TikTok is full of content that would put a Chinese person in prison.
See this 2019 article outlining Chinese Communist moderation policies that (obviously) were attached to the app when TikTok was new, but were removed for non-Chinese user communities.
There's a Chinese creator on there Huey Li who just made a whole video about that as part of a story about how, now living stateside, he can no longer write in his mother language
I actually had to check if TikTok was subject to the French protection laws on localized media quotas. I see it applies to Netflix et al, but not directly to TikTok.
Yeah thats why Netflix has to produce so much french content, they need 60% of their content to be french but there is not enough lol. Thats how we got call my agent
> This is going to be an interesting experiment: A widely used social network across the world WITHOUT american content.
China has had such social networks for a long time. Their Weibo and Xiaohongshu are two prominent examples. Weibo started as a copycat of Twitter, but then beats Twitter hands-down with faster iterations, better features, and more vibrant user engagement despite the gross censorship imposed by the government.
My guess is that TT can still thrive without American content, as long as other governments do not interfere as the US did. A potential threat to TT is that the US still has the best consumer market, so creators may still flock to a credible TT-alternative for better monetization, thus snatching away TT's current user base in other countries.
To directly answer the question, Rednote is not generally used outside China, and the point about these apps being representative of "global" social media apps is false.
It's called Dispo. You probably haven't heard of it because it became almost irrelevant a few weeks after launch. #1 on the app store doesn't mean a whole lot.
I agree. But I'm just saying that #1 on the app store doesn't preclude something from being a fad and my guess is that in 1 month's time, no one is going to be talking about RedNote outside of Chinese communities.
How many of those downloads originated in China? Genuine question, I read the article and it doesn't say. Apple's App Store is available in China, and China's population alone could be skewing those numbers.
It received some popularity among TikTok refugees from the US and subsequently also from around the world by users who got curios about what the fuzz was all about.
Yeah, me neither. Some analysis said the absolute number is large but the percentage is still small. And the migration is more about protesting. Xiaohongshu will need to come up with better monetization schemes too.
I think it will be a temporary phenomenon. Tiktok people arrived on RedNote last week and were jaw-droppingly amazed at videos of flashy modern Chinese cities, natural wonders (Guilin mountains), beautifully dressed young men and women, tasty food, Luigi fandom, and cute cats.
For many it was a revelation that the US government/media complex has been systematically lying to them about China. They are arriving at an acceptance that the US is a shabby declining empire dominated by a corrupt elite and heartless broligarchs. Always a good thing to bump up against reality, imho.
However I think that the US-based population of Tiktok refugees will subside once the novelty effect has worn off. Probably shrink by half in a month. Hopefully there will remain a positive lingering effect.
> many it was a revelation that the US government/media complex has been systematically lying to them about China.
The rational and data-based take is that the CCP censors negative content about China on Red Book. See [1], [2] and [3] from David Zhang, and you can verify this on your own.
> They are arriving at an acceptance that the US is a shabby declining empire dominated by a corrupt elite and heartless broligarchs. Always a good thing to bump up against reality, imho.
Try making this comment about China in Red Book and see how long it lasts.
Can you post a video about use of gutter oil in China on Red Book? You can post a video about drug use in SF on Twitter and not get banned.
> If China is so developed, why does it fight for developing nation status?
Because overall, China is still much poorer than the developed world (Western Europe, USA, Japan, etc.).
China has some amazing infrastructure and beautiful cities, and many cities, like Shanghai, Beijing and Shenzhen, are now quite developed, but on the whole, the country still has a ways to go.
> The rational and data-based take is that the CCP censors negative content about China on Red Book. [...] Can you post a video about use of gutter oil in China on Red Book?
There is heavy censorship in China, but there's also heavy propaganda about China in the US. Case in point: the videos you linked to come from Falun Gong media, run by a Scientology-like cult that somehow has tons of money (maybe from a 3-letter agency) to spread their own propaganda in the US.
> Will we see internationalized Chinese content dominating it?
This is a weird fantasy, but it brings up an interesting point. The complete lack of Chinese influence on global pop culture. Especially when compared to Japan or Korea, countries with a fraction of the population but many, many times the influence.
I wish the CCP didn't wall off their citizens from the rest of the world in the name of protecting their own power. Think of the creativity we are all losing out on.
> The complete lack of Chinese influence on global pop culture
The CCP has tried to get their culture out there, it just has not been successful at the visually obvious scale of Japan or Korea. But their culture is definitely getting out there, and I think we often don't spot the Chinese influence on something unless some journalist finds out and writes an article about it.
Some of their influence is leveraged in business deals, with several movies being altered by the demand of the CCP, and these changes persisting in worldwide releases, not just the Chinese-released version of the movies.
Some of their influence is leveraged in video games- Genshin Impact is a famously successful Chinese game. There are some competitive Chinese teams in various pockets of e-sports too. Tencent also owns several video game developers, and occasionally uses their influence to change parts of a game to please the CCP.
There is a Chinese animation industry (print and video), and occasionally they get a worldwide success. I remember being surprised when I found out that "The Daily Life of the Immortal King" was Chinese- you can tell it isn't Japanese but lots of people guess that it is Korean.
I became so interested in ancient Chinese mythology after playing black myth wukong. Also my cousin is watching cDramas all the time and she intends to marry Chinese guy… So I think the soft power is there already, whether we like it or not. but I think it’s good to have competing content instead of being fed whatever powers that be think is good fur us
It basically asks "Why can't China make a movie like this?" Kung Fu Panda was a love letter to Chinese culture, and it connected with people worldwide.
I think it comes down to government censorship. Art is expression and unapproved expression is seen as a threat to a dictatorship.
It makes me sad to think of all the Chinese art we have missed out on because of the insecurity of a government.
Most of the art, music, literature before the twentieth century were created under censorships of authoritarian regimes, and they don't lack vitality. Creativity often thrives under constraints.
The main difference is the classics were often created by a single person, while modern entertainment are created by large groups through industrial processes. The latter are capital-intensive, and investors are risk-averse. The bigger the market, the bigger the investments, the bigger the risks, and censorship is not insignificant a risk.
I think as the cost of production shrinks with technology, there will be an explosion of "high-production-value" works created by smaller groups or individuals, many from the "soft-authoritarian" countries. Traditional entertainment industries may gradually fade away, or pivot to some new medium.
Mostly true but the exception is K-Pop, which as I understand was the creation of a project by the South eKorean government. There was a severe financial crisis in the late 1990s where the country almost went bankrupt. Desperately seeking sources of revenue, the government funded K-Pop groups which eventually become a global phenomenon (BTS et al). At least that is what some Koreans have told me.
I think that’s what’s being implied by creating. Whatever people create and is allowed (or tweaked by) under a repressive regime that is. The government sets the guidelines and censorship and the subsequent content has some peculiar characteristics of the government policies.
I am Korean, and what you are saying is a lie created by anti-Korean people in Japan. Do you really think it makes sense for a government experiencing an economic crisis to desperately seek revenue sources and hope to overcome the crisis by funding a cultural industry that hasn't even succeeded yet?
I've always wondered about this, turns out there's a wikipedia entry for it
> To protect the South Korean culture industry, the South Korean Ministry of Culture received a substantial budget increase, allowing for the creation of hundreds of culture industry departments in universities nationwide.[21] It has justified its financial support for Hallyu, estimated to be worth US$83.2 billion in 2012, by linking it to South Korea's export-driven economy.[22]
It's completely different to say that the government took the lead in an industry that didn't exist before and to say that it provided support to an already successful industry. Of course, what I said was wrong refers to the former. In fact, the government supports all industries to some extent, so that can't be a label.
As someone who wants to learn Chinese, I think about it all the time. Watching Chinese shows just isn't as fun for whatever reason. I was telling my wife the other day I have met so many people who credit Friends for why they can speak English.
That's soft power right there.
I've had to resort to watching anime on Netflix with Chinese dubs - anime is good because people actually talk slower and usually use simple language. When I watched Three Body (Chinese version) the dialogue was impenetrable lol
Thanks I'll take a look. It will be funny if I end up with a Taiwanese accent around my Dongbei in laws but I've spent enough time in china to remember the mainland accent tbh
Three Body is a science fiction television series and I think sci-fi often involves complex vocabulary and abstract concepts, making it a tough choice for language learners
I guess so but it also has slower lines too especially for comedic delivery. The cultural references are good (now dated because Friends is 20-30 years old) because after learning a language, cultural references are next when it comes to fully being able to converse
But it's also highly visual. I forget where I saw it, but someone showed people an episode of Friends without any audio, and they could still understand the plot based on the overly dramatized physical communication.
I'm not surprised. It's extremely accessible in ways I wouldn't necessarily find engaging anymore given my very scarce time for watching media but that kind of accessibility is perfect for a show in a desired second language
Also the humor is very...basic. My theory is a show like Seinfeld with it's double and triple meanings didn't get popular abroad, but Friends and How I met Your Mother did.
I think the simplicity of the humor is the reason.
As a Chinese American, this is the real reason people don't know about China.
To be honest, most of the movies/shows China creates sucks. They're Marvel-esque CGI fests with awful storylines.
Meanwhile, Japan and Korea are creating awesome media.
The whole narrative about the US gov trying to "hide" China isn't really true. There are a ton of viral videos on YouTube about how great China is. And we welcome Chinese immigrants every year.
The real problem is that China itself doesn't execute when it comes to soft power.
Highly recommend Three-Body, the Chinese version of the Three-Body Problem. I enjoyed it much more than the Netflix adaptation, much closer to the source material, and more of a slow burn. Episodes are available on YouTube with subs (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-UO8jbrIoM).
Isn't the disillusionment of the main scientist related to the violent abuse of the CCP (and he loss of faith in humanity) core to the reasoning of why she reached out to the aliens, despite their warning? How do they restructure something so core to the plot?
Yeah, I mentioned 三体 in a parent comment. It's a great counterpoint to the "high fructose" Netflix version. And interesting to see the American character portrayed by an American actor...dubbed by a Chinese voice actor. (Just be prepared to fast-forward the musical interludes.)
True that. My wife watched a few Chinese dramas, but they're quite boring compared to k-dramas or japanese shows. I find them annoying and full of propaganda. Only the historical ones are borderline interesting. Also the CCP crackdown on celebrities didn't help.
By contrast, there's now a very good k-drama with Lee Min-ho happening in space or the Gyeongseong Creature horror drama with Park Seo-joon.
I did see some good Chinese movies, mostly out of Hong Kong. Wong Kar-wai directed a bunch of good ones but they all predate Xi's regime and the takeover of HK.
One of my favourite contemporary artists is Ai Weiwei, who has gone missing in 2011 only to finally reappear four years later. I understand he now lives in Portugal. Got his book on my night stand, 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows.
The only good Chinese language films were all filmed in Hong Kong, directed by people like Wong Kar-Wai. In the Mood for Love is widely considered one of the greatest films ever made.
Chinese cultural (and censor) sensibilities are why big budget US movies are almost universally boring and terrible these days. Authoritarian societies aren’t exactly known for creating good art.
There are many good Chinese language films, not all of them Cantonese. You're forgetting about Taiwanese directors (Edward Yang, Tsai Ming-liang, Hou Hsiao-Hsien) and mainland sixth generation directors (Jia Zhangke, Lou Ye). There are also works by less known authors such as Bi Gan, Hu Bo, Xinyuan Zheng Lu - very unique and impressive.
One should not throw around ignorant blanket statements. There's a wealth of amazing Chinese language movie made outside of Hong-Kong, and yes, good artists can exist under authoritarian regimes, a prominent example of which would be Soviet cinema and literature.
For better or worse, I think CCP has long been on the backfoot in international propaganda just because what passes for persuasive narratives in authoritarian contexts falls flat to global audiences fluent in western entertainment and media culture.
Of course they have modernized, but most actual influence obtained thus fair (e.g. international olympic committees covering up investigations, stopping the NBA from venturing criticisms) has come from projection of soft power rather than being on the cultural cutting edge.
I'm resentful for not having BYD here to offer affordable vehicles. The vast numbers of people who are now boxed out of the middle class could desperately use the help of a vehicle that doesn't cost them $700 a month.
I've never considered there to be one, although I'm open to the idea.
It's easy for me to recognize an Ameican pop culture or an Anglo pop culture, and the favor each show for certain imports over others, but those don't seem nearly so universal as your usage of "global pop culture" suggests.
Latin, Arabic, Russian, Chinese, French, Indian/South Asian, etc each represent huge "pop culture" markets of their own but also each have their own import biases.
Encountering a Chinese song playing a cafe in Latin America. A popular movie with global appeal. Or even people being aware of cultural trends. I feel like culturally, China is a bit of a black box.
Latin America is so insular, they don't even really play US songs in cafes. (Of course this varies between countries, Chile has more foreign culture, Peru has less.)
What do you mean by "global" pop culture? Maybe you mean "the west"/European/American pop culture. Being Vietnamese, I and my friends grew up with Journey to the West which at the time was bigger than Star Wars, Three kingdoms which is a lot lot bigger than Game of Thrones, and a lot of Jin Yong's movie adaptations. Star Wars the force is like normal thing in Jin Yong's novels. It's not a "complete" lack of. Sure you have heard of Monkey King, Lu Bu or Guan Yu, Cao Cao? They also won an Oscar long before Korean did. Sure they lose to Japanese's Pokemon but everyone lose to Pokemon really not just China.
China's pop culture having moderate success on directly boarding countries is not really proof that I am wrong. Given it's size, i'd say that's an example of how it fails.
Maybe it's late but no, China's pop culture is not having a "moderate" success on neighboring countries because they tried and failed but because those neighbors actively resist it. They had culturally dominated over neighboring countries like Japan, Korea, Vietnam for hundred of years. See every Korean "historical" movies and you see Chinese culture everywhere. What you're seeing now is the active effort of those countries to stay as far far away from Chinese culture as possible. Imagine you successfully invade China and getting assimilated as the result. That's the Mongols. Thanks to Persia or whatever middle country between China and Europe, Europe did not get infected by Chinese culture. Now ironically thanks to Trump the west is resisting China's dominance before getting infected like Pokemon or KPOP or K-drama.
Recently Marvel Rivals came out and became really popular (developed by Chinese studio NetEase Games). Other than that, there have been talks about Ubisoft going bankrupt and being sold to a Chinese company, but those are rumors as far as I can tell.
The fact that the IP for that amazing book was bogged down in political and mafia-connected controversy, delaying it's global spread for almost a decade, that all kind of proves my point.
I think you are a bit too premature: China has at least one(usually dozens) competitor for literally everything America has. You just don't hear about everything in the US.
Think of any industry and there is probably a Chinese competitor that is trying.
Tesla -> BYD
Google -> Baidu
Starbucks -> Luckin Coffee
IMAX -> China Film Giant Screen or maybe POLYMAX
Finally Disney -> Possibly Beijing Enlight Pictures
They released an animated film Ne Zha in 2019 that according to wikipedia was "the highest-grossing animated film in China,[16] the worldwide highest-grossing non-U.S. animated film,[17] and the second worldwide highest-grossing non-English-language film of all time at the time of its release. With a gross of over $725 million,[18] it was that year's fourth-highest-grossing animated film, and China's all time fourth-highest-grossing film.[19]"
Ok I'll admit part of the reason people don't hear about these companies is that they are still too half baked. But look at BYD, they started off producing junk but this Chinese mindset of grinding and rapid iteration has put them to be super successful today. Why couldn't that kind of happen with their Disney competitor?
Another thing that might be happening is the literal closing off of the world into two spheres. Western US led and Eastern Chinese led. As we are seeing with BYD, they are taking over all the non western markets(and some western as well) but the US has essentially slammed the door shut on them (they haven't actually but made it impossible to enter with their tariffs). Maybe the Disney competitor will take hold in the non western aligned world?
Honestly its a shame they are not open or democratic. The idea of watching or even being part of a rising country that is building their empire is fascinating to watch. Will they collapse due to demographics or these fundamental issues like communism or will they make it? Unfortunately for many people, the only option is to stick with the US and work to keep the ship afloat as there is no place for them in China.
Chinese nation state hacking groups also literally break into American Fortune 500 companies and US aerospace/defense companies to steal R&D and tech to then use themselves + give to private Chinese industries. That sure does help them a ton when they dont have to do any research and can just steal and copy instead.
Thats true...you can only go so far with that though and thats probably why many of their industries haven't really met the par yet.
But at the same time they have eclipsed the west in certain industries such as commercial nuclear. That mentality is there in their industries that havent met the par yet and that was a major point I was making in my previous comment.
As far as I understand, they originally licensed the AP1000 but expanded upon the design enough that they have ownership over the new design and they use that now.
> The complete lack of Chinese influence on global pop culture
Hah, but in 3D fantasy animation - called Donghua - China has every other nation beat handily - even Japan. There are 3D Chinese animations shows like "Soul Land" and "Battle Through The Hewavens", "Swallowed Star", etc that a significant number of people watch all over the world.
"Soul Land" got animated? Which series? I hope the first, the second (or third?) series with that million-year-old white caterpillar was awful.
In any case: that manhua is one of the least bad stories, but the singular focus on "advancing to the next level" (incredibly popular in Chinese stories, for some reason) gets quite dull after a while. It's just that "Soul Land" manages to somewhat mask it; reading much of anything else Chinese is like going up an endless staircase (get trashed; level-up; reclaim face by trashing the baddies; loop).
This definitely wins by numbers - my local anime site features chinese 3d shows too and there’s a lot of them. But the viewership isn’t that good still, judging by the comments and voting.
This is precisely what i'm talking about. A country of 1.4b with a film industry that gets billions in state subsidies and they best they can do is mild popularity of a few films on their physical borders.
Let's be real, the top talent in China flocks to the tech world – internet, manufacturing, the whole shebang. Entertainment? Not so much. That industry's heavily regulated, you know? Look at what they've achieved: drones, electric vehicles, solar power, robotics... You could even say China basically "outsourced" entertainment to the West and East Asia.
Suppression can only go so far against really impressive works. Consider how even the Iron Curtain had trouble keeping them out, and today's USA has no such walls, but instead, an impressive cultural industry of its own. (Or was that your point ?)
I think they meant that because content is siloed already by language barriers, the only ecosystem that would be affected by the removal of US users is the English-speaking subsystem.
That said, the English-speaking world clearly extends well beyond the US and English commonwealth countries nowadays. Also, a lot of videos don't have any dialogue and can also cross the language barrier.
There will be a small category of content that will disappear. For instance, my fyp was full of Chinese fashion content (by choice) so I'm sure there are other categories of content that non-Americans consume that are American. Whether it's Movies or Music or whatever.
English is literally the most commonly spoken language in the world. No language in the world will fit your criteria if you want more than two thirds of the global population to speak it.
A quick search seems to confirm this. A few sites list the number to be around ~1.3 billion people who speak English at all, with around ~360-380 million being native speakers. For example: https://www.babbel.com/en/magazine/how-many-people-speak-eng....
1/3 of the global population is at all, there’s only 380 million native English speakers.
US, UK, Canada, Australia is where you find the bulk of native speakers. In say Germany or whatever they may become fluent but it’s relatively rare for German parents to be speaking English to each other in casual conversation next to an infant’s crib.
> there’s only 380 million native English speakers
Not how a lingua franca works.
There are 1.5 to 2 billion English speakers [1]. By far the largest number of people to speak a single language. Most of them are in America [2]. (If you count English learners, No. 2 is China [3].)
But this number is dubious as it's largely from self response. Here [2] is a list by country. So 25% of Thais, 50% of Ukrainians, 50% of Poles, and so on "speak English."
In the sense of being able to say hello, thank you, and introduce themselves that is probably true. But "my name is Bob" maketh not a common tongue. If we narrowed it down to the percent of people that could hold a basic conversation, the number would plummet precipitously, likely leaving Mandarin at the top.
What I'm saying is that those are people counted as "knowing English" since the typical way such things are measured is self response. Nowhere remotely near the peecents stated for many countries is accurate.
China's also been pushing Mandarin lately and claim 85%.
You know, they weren't the one to bring it up and their point seems to have consistently been that the majority of the global population does not speak English.
> You know, they weren't the one to bring it up and their point seems to have consistently been that the majority of the global population does not speak English.
While that has consistently been their point, it's also wrong.
Their bar for "speaking English" is "Native Language". Absolutely no one uses that as a bar when talking about how many people can consume content in $LANGUAGE.
> 1/3 of the global population is at all, there’s only 380 million native English speakers.
1/3 of the population speaks English “at all” (by which they mean speaking fluently, not learning) and 380 million people (roughly 5% of the population) is native.
Not trying to throw shade at anyone but it’s really... not hard for a reader to pause a little when one reads something that sounds wrong; it’s possible the reader misread. It’s even in the guidelines under different words:
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
There was a lot of failure to follow to this guideline in this comment thread.
Plurality of the world (25%) and a larger plurality of the internet-connected world (37%, [1]) speak English. (Granted, most of TikTok’s market now probably doesn’t speak English.)
There are only about 400 million native English speakers. You can't just add up the population of English speaking countries, because that excludes immigrants living in these countries, and people born there who did not learn English as their first language.
As for people who learned it later, even in Europe, only about 40% self-identify as being able to speak English. If you visit places like China or Indonesia, you'll soon notice that very few people know more than a few basic words in English once you leave the tourist areas.
IMO first-or-not is moot. It’s estimated that around one billion people speak English to a reasonably fluent level. Included in that is many of the commonwealth countries in which English often holds second spot as a lingua franca (eg. India). It’s an incredibly global language.
this is horseshit. Canada, the US and the UK alone have - minimum - 400 million. Australia has 25 million, Ireland 5, New Zealand 5, then there's the Anglophone African nations, plus a lot of the Carribbean. Nigeria on its own likely has 100 million native speakers of English
Not all Nigerians can speak English. But there are a lot who can. It honestly felt about 50/50 to me. And I see some other commenters saying that 60 million Nigerians have some ability to speak it. (But you need to think of that like if I was to say 60 million Americans have some ability to speak Spanish.)
However, even for those with some facility with English,I don't know that I'd classify it as their native language.
As I've said, you can't just sum up populations. About 20% of the US population are immigrants. A lot of them won't speak English as their native language.
Only about 60 million Nigerians speak English. Hausa is the most commonly spoken native language. Just because English is the official language doesn't mean that it's people's native language.
I'm not just making stuff up. The 400 million number is from The Ethnologue, a source which linguists generally consider as reliable.
I'd like to see their working for that number. Let's say we subtract 20% from Canada + the UK + the US, we get ~320 million. add Nigeria and Uganda and you have easily 400 million. That's without Australia, Ireland, New Zealand or any of the African or Caribbean countries.
There aren't that many native English speakers in Nigeria and Uganda. To me, it looks like your back-of-the-envelope calculation will come pretty close to 400 million.
That’s at all, there are only ~380 million native English speakers.
Of that 1/3 (of the global population) a significant percentage have extremely limited skills, though the threshold is above knowing a few random words.
By coming from different country their native language (IE what language they heard as infants) more closely resembles that country than America. Note I said 47 million and there are more than 47 million immigrants.
There are also some native born Americans to immigrants who also don’t have English as their first language and People born in China whose first language is English, but that’s ever smaller refinements on a specific estimate.
> ~47 million Americans aren’t native English speakers having immigrated from a non English speaking country.
Your link says 46M total which includes native speakers. So it does not state how many non-native speakers. (not that it would matter as most would be proficient english speakers, just pointing out you're exagerating and your numbers are wrong)
The question of your native language is answered long before any of what you’re talking about here. A 20 year old isn’t time traveling to have different parents when they take an exam.
I presume the US market is the dominant target market for ads / influencing, a quick google search suggests it is 75% of the global spend. So the other issue is not just losing US influencers but all influencers will take a haircut. I don't know how much of popular content is paid for by such revenue but taking a 75% haircut could put a real damper on content producers - especially those who make it a full time job. I don't know if that'll make it better with an increase in proportion of more organic content. I personally don't use TikTok - I waste enough time on HN.
There is an additional separate issue that influencer is a coveted 'career' for many children (~30%), so not only would it wipe out many jobs it'll kill their dreams. I guess like cancelling the space program at a time when kids really wanted to be astronauts.
I think there is a lot wrong with society and TikTok is part of it - but that's a much longer discussion for some other time.
If so, good riddance. The good point of TikTok is that the videos appear genuine and wholesome. Not the hyper-optimized for monetization crap YouTube Shorts show you. I much prefer the videos with kids goofing around on icy streets over the American narrator telling me some bs about some great baseball player.
I think charming/wholesome videos are nicer than ragebait/hustle culture videos, even if both have been just as ruthlessly optimised. Optimisation isn't the problem.
Sometimes dreams are all they have - especially if they're young.
I think we have to understand the reality that the economy today is not what it once was, not even close. I think a lot of people are looking to the influence trade since they see the corporate / political / economic future as failing them and they want to carve out something on their own while the getting is good and while they still can. Sure some just want to be famous but others appear to have a very realistic view of their prospects both as an influencer and elsewhere.
Hopefully the US tech industry is not so schlerotic that they're unable to clone it and offer a competitive alternative. Given TikTok has demonstrated there's a huge amount of money to be made in that space. Although given how awful Google Shorts and Reels' recommendation algorithms are in comparison, maybe there really will be no replacement.
This was covered in a recent podcast. Apparently TikTok classifies videos on many more factors than e.g. Youtube and other US companies. China can do this because they have a cheap pool of many users who can perform this activity.
The podcaster felt that with AI capabilities getting better day by day (maybe - that's another discussion) that this multi factor classification could be automated. It seems not to have been done yet AFAIK.
You'd think with all the H1Bs the US is importing some of those could bring in some recommendation engine expertise.
The truth is that the recommendation engine is power and people drawn to power in the US were too quick to abuse it driving out the old hands - and once institutional knowledge is lost it's hard to get back.
There are such products. Outside of America whatsapp is a dominant social app but its use internally is almost mute despite being an american social app.
Tiktok america is over 50% of tiktok revenue I think that more than anything else would choke out growth world wide.
I don't think it will survive because non American cultural exports are not quite there yet you have to be born outside the US to understand the reach of Hollywood/cultural export as an opinion shaping tool
But then again Telegram survived and they had to resort to kidnapping the CEO so if it does survive the US pretty much gifted that space to a geopolitical adversary
But I'm pretty sure Langley/MD folk thought about this and are betting on it not surviving
How will YouTube shorts, and instagram stories pivot? They already aren’t seen as true rivals, but maybe they can change or spinoff a third brand. The gold in TR has always been its algorithm. Maybe they can fake it. How easy will it be to circumvent via vpn? Will other English content on tt skyrocket? Eg uk and Canada.
Yes, but it's also singularly focused on its core experience rather than being a bolted-on experience that is confusingly blended into an ecosystem where it's not the primary experience.
I'm really at loss at how bad Google is at algorithms considering how pioneering they have been in selecting engineers based on their algorithmic skills and their immense contributions to the whole ML sector.
I can let Spotify play on its own for hours and it will be just right...Even with songs I know nothing about, it's just very good.
I tried Tik Tok once and I could see how easily it could pick content.
But Youtube and Youtube Music are a disaster. Youtube Music is a decent service, but it's hard to get suggested anything really.
Youtube Shorts are a disaster. Sure I like the Sopranos, I find some Joe Rogan's interview interesting and sure I like the NBA, but that's virtually all it feeds me, even if I start scrolling away to other topics.
I feel like Youtube Shorts follows the same logic as youtube where whales skew recommendations. So yeah, you get feed the same shit over and over as the rest of users.
OTOH, with tiktok I got surprised of how much "viral content" is tailored to me. I mean in the sense that I get a huge amount of videos from different trends from different creators, that indicates should be a big thing but then I realize that people around me, heavy tiktok users, barely get recommended or even not aware of.
Wish this was a thing for youtube as well. I’d like a breathe of fresh air from either my bubble or the logged out frontpage that s is not political and cultural propaganda, no /s.
American dominance in english speaking media is really tiresome.
It will take ages for that to happen. AFAIK the "ban" only really removes it from app stores, I don't think it even requires store owners to force it off of phones that have downloaded it already.
I wonder if it's more of a deactivation pending XYZ, with a readiness to flip the on-switch back on if there's a policy change in the U.S. (which it seems like there might be).
True enough but I don't think that will be fast either. The main reason to update would be features and they can keep the old version of any APIs up to support US customers. Other than that the only reason they would have to update is any breaking changes in Android/iOS which are a lot rarer these days afaik since they're both so mature as OSs.
I remember pre-Musical.ly TikTok here in Japan, and it was MUCH better then. In fact, it noticeably degraded when Musical.ly was folded in.
American social media culture revolves around money and sex in a way that isn't as popular in Korea/Japan/S. Asia—roughly speaking, the original scope of TikTok's userbase, since Douyin has always kept Chinese users separate.
Don't get me wrong, there's plenty of garbage social media content in Asia, but it's more boomers and gen-z era that consume hentai/money flexing/politics/etc., so that nonsense was almost completely absent in the early days of TikTok, when the users were mostly Asian teenagers and young adults trading choreography, in-jokes, and showing off their video editing skills.
I main duckduckgo, but I use Yandex more than Google these days. Incredibly useful for stuff power people in the US want to censor (and I suppose, Google is useful to russians for the exact same reason).
I don't think US content will disappear from TikTok. Most viral creators know how to use VPN. No one's gonna leave such a huge pile of eyeballs on the table.
India also just banned TikTok, I wouldn't be surprised if bans became widespread outside of America with any country worried about China's geopolitical power.
First, I still don't think the ban will actually happen. The current administration will punt the issue to the next and Trump has already signaled he wants to save Tiktok, whatever that means. That might be by anointing a buyer that he personally is an investor in. Tiktok may choose to still shutter in the US rather than being forcibly sold.
But there's a biger issue than loss of American content should this come to pass: the loss os American ad revenue for the platform and creators. A lot of people create content aimed at Americans because an American audience is lucrative for ad revenue. If that goes away, what does that do to the financial viability of the platform?
A worrying angle is that Elon is essentially subservient to the CCP because of Tesla’s presence in China. Remember when Tesla signed a pledge to uphold socialism at the behest of the CCP a couple years back? It’s also why Elon - who claims to uphold free speech, capitalism, democratic values, etc - will NEVER say anything negative about China. If Trump is close to Elon, and Elon is easily influenced/controlled by the CCP, it really undermines the independence of US leadership. I am concerned this next administration will be soft on China in all the wrong ways, including not enforcing a ban that has been legally instituted and upheld unanimously by SCOTUS.
To your point, why is it rumored that China is exploring selling TikTok to Musk and no one else? For as many topics Musk goes off on rants about that he ends up having very little knowledge on, he never says anything about China.
If Musk plans to uphold Communism in China and Democracy in the US, does that not mean "peace in our time"? WW3 pushed back 4 years? The alternative I've been hearing is that warhawks are being stuffed into the federal government this season.
Trump doesn't seem to understand that there's a very real possibility that Tik Tok tuned their algorithm to support Trump because he's their best chance at survival. He's being played and doesn't seem to care as long as he's popular on the platform.
If a US-based alternative appeared which not only substituted performatively, but also monetized creators and influencers enough to put everyone else to shame, people could not help but notice and migrate there in droves.
It would be pretty cool if there was a respectable capitalist with enough money, or if that won't do it then a bigger more-respectable political organization or something, and Tiktok would be nothing but a memory of how things used to be before they got better.
Think about it, a social force or financial pressure strong enough to reverse unfavorable trends, even after they have already gained momentum.
And all it takes is focusing that pressure in an unfamiliar direction that could probably best be described as "anti-enshittification".
I’d worry that such a platform would be used to reverse social trends unfavorable to the owner, instead of social trends unfavorable to society in general.
It also seems… sort of bad if an individual has the ability to be strong enough to reverse a social trend, right? So we basically would have to expect one of the trends they should reverse to be… their own existence. In general it is unreasonable to expect individuals to be so enlightened as to work against their own existence, I think.
This is why I can't wait for Loops to enable real federation, because it distributes this over a number of instances and isn't putting all the eggs in one basket.
At least in Germany, for Gen Z, Facebook is quite dead and Instagram co-exists with TikTok, both with >70% of the cohort [1] using them. There is no clear winner. Anecdata, but for freshmen, TikTok is way more popular.
TikTok-based social media campaigns also e.g. managed to unexpectedly swing an election in Romania (for Georgescu, was later annulled).
Why do you think Instagram is immune from being used in social media based campaign? The only difference between TikTok and Instagram is the recommendation engine they use
... I do not think that it's immune? I don't see where I implied this, sorry if I was unclear. ^^'
This specific campaign was done via TikTok, though, and had massive impact, which shows that TikTok has heavy usage and is popular, outside of the US and China.
(I'm not American, I have no horse in this "ban foreign TikTok" race. :D)
Sorry me neither english no good the thing I'm trying to understand why do you think they used TikTok over YT shorts or Instagram Reels? What makes it better suited from a coding POV usage numbers suggest comparable MAUs for all three
Until now, the closest thing we had like this were national our regional networks like Russia's vk, but Vk was never truly popular outside Russian speaking countries.
Now we, for the first time ever, will have the situation where a social network has global reach but without american content.
Will it keep being a english first space? Will it survive/thrive? How the content is going to evolve? What does this means in terms of global cultural influence? Will we see internationalized Chinese content dominating it? Will this backfire for the US?