Red Note or Red Letter?
Big Brother and propaganda are... well everywhere.
The TikTok ban is the crowning culmination of years of inexcusable ignorance by our government about social platforms and how tech functions at the most basic level. They've had decades to figure this out and simply have no clue.
Alex Winter
The other day I was contemplating the time long ago when we all actually looked forward to new features, new software updates, etc. because they promised something new that we wanted, because most of the features would be things that we needed. Crazy, right? One day I should write about that. Today, I am writing about the RedNote, though the story starts with TikTok.
Actually, the story should start a few days ago when it took everything I had in me to stay out of yet another social media bullshit argument, mostly along generational lines regarding whether the cost of a burrito is less than the ingredients in it. This discourse is going to haunt me for a very long time after reading things like "leftovers get boring" or that someone would purchase rice in quantities needed for literally one burrito only to be amazed at the simply cost factor when you buy in lets say uncommon size/portion.
The UberEats/DoorDash economy is still a fairly new phenomenon I am not sure how it is being culturally coded in real time or whether it really is a generational divide issue. The real problem as someone in the debate noted is that Americans only know how to talk about “anything” through the prism of economy. This is regardless of political or philosophical leanings. Americans by and large are consumers who were raised, trained and practically molded by the culture of consumerism, for vast majority of people, regardless of their age or politics, it is all about the “status.”
Status anxiety drives everyday discourse and majority of decisions. However, that is probably the only common trend among roughly 170 million US TikTok users. They are not a homogenous entity, except for the deeply inherited yearning for clout.
After last week’s oral arguments the SCOTUS upheld the TikTok ban. Yet, our long national nightmare is over 12 hours after it began! In the midst of the temporary “blackout,” TikTok, as a corporation decided to openly join propaganda campaign by claiming it must go dark, got publicly blackmailed by the President-elect, restored the services and thanks the said President. *eyeroll emoji*
TikTok is back, complete with a public message thanking Trump.
We know that it was Trump who initially launched the TikTok ban discourse. We know and I want to make this excruciatingly clear: TikTok DID NOT have to go dark last night and it didn't have to turn back on this morning. Both of those were voluntary actions that the actual law passed by the US Congress and upheld by the US Supreme Court does not directly touch. The law, the actual one, does not require that TikTok “go dark.” It ONLY prevents third party carriers from distributing it. So *the law* does not make the app “disappear” from phones that already have it.
This entire debacle was done specifically to benefit Trump and make sure everyone knows that it's he who saved TikTok. It's a very successful PR stunt for Trump that will also be incredibly profitable for everyone involved. It also demonstrates very clearly just how much the actual law, any law, actually matters to Trump and impacts his decision. That is to say, none at all.
I have never used TikTok, so my experience and knowledge of the platform is primarily based on the thousands of videos shared through other social media platforms… and the recent events. I am not going to write about the gray area of the TikTok ban from the technical or political perspective. There is plenty of that around written by people with much more experience and knowledge than me. All I’ll say is that one clearly negative in all this is a very common refrain - oligarchs, especially tech oligarchs are bad.
I am writing this because of one of the more common platform people attempted to escape from TikTok was Xiaohongshu or RedNote. I’ll admit to knowing absolutely nothing about this app/platform until this week. That is until I read the following two threads on BlueSky:
and
Before I write anything else, I deeply believe that Chinese social media and Chinese tech more broadly are a genuine national security concern, I ALSO believe the same is absolutely true about Meta, X, you name it. Lawmakers should focus on comprehensive regulations that protect private data AND preserve free speech.
However, as someone who spent a significant part of their life living in a country with cheap groceries and free healthcare, I have to say that the China presented in the two threads above is nothing more than a proverbial Potemkin village. Oh and that the propaganda in authoritarian regimes is always strong.
Claiming the Chinese propaganda tool is good by actually citing Chinese propaganda.
Honestly, my main takeaway is that Americans will buy any propaganda that tells us we don’t have to eat our vegetables and can have ice cream for dinner, whether it be from ChristoFascists or Chinese government.
I read somewhere that it was very much “all organic. In fact, it actually started, like most American viral trends, with black TikTok users." Fascinating to understand why many people like Chinese apps more. TDLR: they aren't built around ads.
There are arguments defending all of this Chinese propaganda from seemingly real people and are being shared by more than a few folks with very significant followings. One such argument that is in itself a piece of propaganda, was a young gentleman claiming that it cost him $40 to get a CT-scan at one of the top hospitals in Shanghai. Technically, that all could be true, I simply don’t know, but without context, citing such a factoid is nothing but propaganda. A few years ago I had to get an emergency dental surgery in India. What would have easily cost me $25,000 or more in the United States (and that’s with pretty good insurance) was only $200. Incredibly cheap for me, but for an average person there? That’s an entirely different story.
My instincts were more than correct when I saw this skeet:
Yes, watch until the very end!!!
Similarly, there is another video in which a young man talked about what could be discussed politically. With dry humor he said that it wasn’t true that in China they couldn’t criticize the government since they criticize OUR government all the time.
This is so incredibly familiar!!
There was a famous joke in the old Soviet times about a gentleman from Soviet Union telling a journalist from the West that it’s not true that there is no dissent in the USSR and government is not allowed to be criticized, as he makes his living coitizing Reagan’s government on TV every day.
Erin Reed wrote “For the: "But China!" crowd... For gen Z, it's not China pushing guns in schools, its not China causing massive wealth inequality in the United States, its not China denying people healthcare for billionaire's profits. They see Zuck, Elon, the and the govt as way more dangerous to their lives.”
All of these are very good points, except… that they are NOT MUTUALLY EXCLUSIVE. China can be very bad, while we are lied about the realities of every day life in China. Western tech oligarch who made a full Nazi turn are very bad, while there are some very authentic and nice people on RedNote who sincerely welcomed the TikTok refugees.
Americans and Westerners in general are rarely aware how much the illusion of normalcy persists under an authoritarian regime. There is no other way to survive. You can have a radically unfree society while most people, most of the time, just go about their lives. I lived in such a society for 1/3 of my life! There are books and studies and journals written on this!!!
But let me remind y’all that Mitt Romney explicitly said the rationale behind the TikTok ban was pro Palestinian content. The renewed push last year was explicitly to help Israel conduct a genocide without scrutiny on social media. Now Republicans are trying to ban on adult content and want to ban RedNote.
The TikTok ban which is now seemingly a hostile takeover/bribe, the Musk Twitter takeover, the Facebook moderation policy changes - this is all an in increasingly intensifying global fascist crackdown on free speech...
Digital sovereignty is more important than ever.
Kat Tenbarge writes that “If TikTok does go my post mortem includes that it supercharged the casual misogyny campaigns that existed to manufacture backlash against MeToo.” I won’t get into the it, though she is absolutely correct. I will point out that misogyny is foundational to fascist or any authoritarian regime.
In the end, if we as consumers are pressuring a private business not to do business with a bigot: that is fine. If we are collectively pressuring advertisers not to advertise on a Nazi website and cause it’s new owner to literally tell the advertisers to “fuck off:” is also fine. We can and should point out and laugh at homophobe and racists and misogynists and mock them viciously.
We may not like a private service moderating speech they find harmful, but as long as the moderation is well defined is not bigoted or biased, that is still fine.
The line is when the government does any of those things, which incudes pressuring or bribing aforementioned tech oligarchs into helping track and crackdown on dissent, or worse. Only an authoritarian one does such things. Like the one I grew up with. Like the one in China, where the ToS for RedNote states that you are NOT allowed to say anything but positive things about China. Like the one that will be inaugurated tomorrow….
The world is not divided between East and West. You are American. I am Iranian. We don’t know each other, but we talk and we understand each other perfectly. The difference between you and your government is much bigger than the difference between you and me. And the difference between me and my government is much bigger than the difference between me and you.
And our governments are very much the same.
Marjane Satrapi.