Anyone else concerned that Americans are embracing Chinese technology? A bit before Tiktok went down the app store showed that Chinese "Red," Tiktok type of app was at the top of the charts. Why wouldnt American users flock to American apps like Snapchat, YouTube, etc? Is it a bratty thing ... govt took away what I was using and so Im going to go all in and only use Chinese Tiktok competitors?
Also, with Threads at the top of the iPhone app store constantly yet I dont know anyone who uses it .. makes me wonder is there a way to gain the top positions in the app store? Either paying for it and or gaming the system via massive army of bots?
Conversely, why wouldn't we expect the rest of the world to abandon American technology? We have members of the current administration in Germany stumping for AfD, and all of the American tech giants are toeing the party line.
For the rest of the world, the risk and dangers of American interference in their elections appears to be more present and explicit than the dangers of Chinese interference.
I find it hard to empathize with your views that American political life is healthy and democratic, and China is corrupt and stagnant.
American imprisons 10 times as many of its citizens than PRC. Most of these people are imprisoned for ideological crimes ("Protestant norms say that you should not intoxicate yourself") or political crimes ("our system holds that no one is entitled to the necessities of human life").
Because the similar way of describing the US system is fundamentally untrue. There is no part of the US Constitution that specifies, by name, which party shall rule.
Could that change? Sure. Especially with so many people apathetic to what happens in China.
> Is it a bratty thing ... govt took away what I was using and so Im going to go all in and only use Chinese Tiktok competitors?
I wouldn't call it "bratty," but that is certainly part of it. My impression of the situation is that yes, folks flocked to a Chinese app because they were a) angry at the US government and wanted to undermine the purpose of the TikTok ban; b) equally angry at US social media services that are seen as being to willing to acquiesce to the demands of the US government in general and the current administration in particular, and c) ultimately unconcerned about who has their data.
I have a hypothesis about my point c, which is that TikTok's user population skews younger, and so we have a population of social media users who grew up with the understanding that their data and attention are packaged, sold, and analyzed by anyone and everyone; they're not concerned about the implications of giving data to China, and it strikes them as hypocritical for the US government to spend decades on data collection and only express concern when users decide to take that data outside the the US sphere of influence.
I agree with you. I actually had a nice group chat with some family members about this particular thing recently. This stood out in particular which my niece posted:
"The only thing China has ever done to me is sell me cheap stuff, which is great because the main way people get money who aren't rich are through jobs, and companies don't really want to A) have employees and B) pay them anything. Companies are controlling everything so everyone I know is poor and just going to get poorer. I don't know how China is supposed to be harming me through Tiktok. I don't know how China is going to use my data to hurt me. Honestly I don't know why people want data so badly when everyone's broke-why don't you already know that. The only chinese stuff I see on Tiktok are people cooking and burning incense. I would understand if I like worked for the government but I work at a fast food place so ... what are they gonna do? Get me fired from Mcdonalds? Lol you could have multiple felonies and still work at Mcdonalds. Now they're gonna take Tiktok away like they take everything else and it's stupid. The other stuff sucks-Facebook is for old people and dumb minion memes, I keep seeing dumb alpha male crap on YouTube, and Instagram doesn't show me anything new after scrolling on it for ten minutes. Why do like 3 companies have to control everything?"
Lots of fallacies and issues with those statements. We had lots of conversation after that. But I think that shows the general mood among those who are sticking with Tiktok. A lot of the value is that it's simply not Meta.
People are very aware that American tech companies want to control and exploit them as much as possible so there's really no difference to them between a Chinese app and an American app. Big tech trying to use its political power to force users into their platforms is an assault on our freedoms. You call it a bratty thing but I call it the only way the people have left to protest the enshittification of their digital lives.
Zizek has a very interesting argument [1] that is perhaps relevant here. (Lightly cleaned up transcript)
> Imagine you are a small girl or boy of, let's say, eight years. It's Sunday afternoon and your father wants you to visit your old grandmother. You, of course, detest it - she's old, senile, whatever. But then, if you have an old authoritarian father, he will tell you something like - and this would be, as Alenka put it, a good thing to do - he will tell you: "Listen, I don't care how you feel. Just do your duty, go to your grandmother and behave there properly." That's perfect, I claim, because you will retain your, let's call it, inner freedom. You will be furious at your father, but that's good for your long-term freedom.
> Now, what would a monster called post-modern permissive father do? He would not give you an order, but he would have told you something like this: "You only go to visit your grandmother if you really want to. Just remember how much your grandmother loves you." Now, a child is not an idiot, and he or she will know perfectly what this order means. Beneath the appearance of a free choice, it gives you a much harsher order. The order is not only "you must go and visit your grandmother," but "you must do it freely." You must really wish to visit your grandmother.
> So you see, this nice example of how - and this is basically what also Alenka described as that situation - "do whatever you want," etc., where the apparent freedom of choice masks a much harsher choice.
> People are very aware that American tech companies want to control and exploit them as much as possible so there's really no difference to them between a Chinese app and an American app
I mean, if that is indeed their rationale, then our civics education really does suck.
Or, perhaps they have made a reasoned determination that their own government does not represent their best interests, and are less concerned about the impact a foreign power thousands of miles away has on their lives.
Giving a totalitarian regime access to the device that more-or-less holds your entire life and acts as a perfect surveillance portal to your every move decidedly falls more on the unconcerned side of the scale.
Unless, of course, they didn't make a particularly "reasoned" determination like you said.
> learn to read yourself before lecturing people about education
Some of us consider the USA to be an authoritarian regime. And without a doubt as someone living there they have massively more influence over my life.
poof China has all my data - what do they do with it? Vs the USA where there is documented proof that the NSA was used against Vietnam War critics etc.
> Some of us consider the USA to be an authoritarian regime.
Some of us have a definition of "authoritarian" that is different from that of reality. I've lost count of the number of political dissent posts I've seen towards both sides of the political spectrum in the United States on American-based social media platforms.
And if authoritarianism is really a problem, why double down on the governments you give your data to?
> And without a doubt as someone living there they have massively more influence over my life.
Compared to the influence that the Chinese government has over the Chinese people, it's minor. That also goes for the governments of most places China has strong ties with. Strengthening their sphere of influence in the US is not the act of those who have concerns over authoritarian regimes influencing their lives.
> poof China has all my data - what do they do with it?
They're a rather imaginative bunch when it comes to cyber offensives, so let's imagine one ourselves.
They could scour your contacts and content for dissidents abroad, using that information to inform those operating one of their extralegal international "police stations" as to their whereabouts. [0]
Now, let's stop imagining. Let's see what they have been confirmed as actually doing with it.
They could collect geospatial data and combine that information with other personal details to compromise the security of people who work in sensitive places. This has actually led a number of nations, including Norway, Belgium, Canada, New Zealand, and the UK to ban TikTok from being installed on devices with access to government networks [1]
It's worth remembering that the US only banned the TikTok app - they could have continued operating in the US through a mobile webpage, but decided not to and threw a fit until Trump rearranged (perhaps extralegally) the law banning the app. Why? Because apps give far more access to devices than webpages, which have sandboxed processes and other checks on what code can access. If keeping American eyes on TikTok was the one and only goal, that app would have been a sacrifice that they were willing to make. The fact that they had to have the app tells me that they may have wanted the extra access that native apps afford.
> Vs the USA where there is documented proof that the NSA was used against Vietnam War critics etc.
I'm not saying the American intelligence apparatus has clean hands. If that's the concern, then again, cut back on social media and apps that collect unknown quantities and qualities of data, instead of opening up more accounts to totalitarian governments that have a long history of using censorship and surveillance in a very straightforward way to achieve their political aims.
Hey I'm all for not using either, that's what I do. And I get banning it on government phones. They ought to ban almost everyhring on those, but especially foreign controlled apps. And I don't like what China does to their citizens either.
But you'll never convince me that the main reason for the ban wasn't to replace Chinese propaganda with American / Billionaire propaganda and tbh that one's less charming.
And if your imaginative worst case scenario is that they use my data to root out and extrajudiciously kill ex-Chinese dissidents in America then idk why that would be a problem for me since I don't know any of those. I do know some American activists, though.
I can easily invent way more damning fantasies of what the US Govt could do to me, a US citizen, if they had an admin willing to subvert constitutional norms and more visibly use the PRISM surveillance tools.
You think the purpose of civics education is to teach young people to trust American big tech and the American government above foreigners regardless of evidence??
I think the whole Deepseek fiasco revealed a lot about where the American technology world is at, which is funneling huge sums of money into tech monopolies. If Chinese companies disrupt American monopolies, to me that's a good thing.
I mean, the company happens to be Chinese but I don't think that's why anyone is using it. The "little red book" app was a flash in the pan because it was hyped as a successor, but the download charts are ephemeral.
The reason that TikTok is winning is because it is a superior app in pretty much every way to its competitors (reels or shorts). The UI is clean and simple for producers and consumers, the interactions are all well done, and most of all, the content is all there, with some cross-posted to the others but mostly for larger channels that can afford to invest in boosting their reach.
You can bemoan its addictiveness or whatever, but don't pretend that it's a bad app that people use because they are desperate for Chinese propaganda. It's so much better that the US government is actively trying to kill it so that the domestic alternatives have a chance.
Also, with Threads at the top of the iPhone app store constantly yet I dont know anyone who uses it .. makes me wonder is there a way to gain the top positions in the app store? Either paying for it and or gaming the system via massive army of bots?