American TikTokers Get a Taste of Chinese Censorship as They Rush to RedNote | Hacker News Reader

American TikTokers Get a Taste of Chinese Censorship as They Rush to RedNote

wsj.com

https://archive.is/2025.01.20-171628/https://www.wsj.com/wor...

Yesterday, my mom asked if people elsewhere are really better off than in the US. She downloaded red note to keep up her digital crack habit. Apparently she just sees healthy, happy Chinese people at fancy restaurants with low bills in clean cities with public transit and futuristic technology.

How's that any different then the US? Generally people post the best version of themselves on social media. Also, the US is known for exporting the American Dream and American culture as being great.

...that's the point.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias

As Burnie Burns pointed out on Morning Somewhere this morning... wasn't the censorship when the US banned tiktok that led to this in the first place? China censors certain posts, the US banned a whole platform.

> China censors certain posts, the US banned a whole platform.

This statement implies that China does not ban platforms. This is false. China bans Facebook, Wikipedia, Google, Netflix, Steam, LinkedIn, to name a few.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_blocked_in_ma...

> China censors certain posts, the US banned a whole platform.

China also bans entire platforms as well. If America had functioning consumer protections we would have outlawed platforms like TikTok, Facebook and Instagram years ago, but we don't. Our technocrats kiss ass like it's their legally wedded wife and end up getting political exemptions because they grovel nicely: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cj4d75zl212o

The issue isn't reciprocity - that's always an absurd whataboutism excuse. The issue is that TikTok is a state asset, and since they refuse to be anything but an organ of the Chinese Communist Party they cannot persist in a market that prioritizes fair and equal competition. We've already seen how TikTok is weaponized against democratic nations: https://kyivinsider.com/russia-and-china-just-rigged-romania...

Is banning a company or product the same as censorship?

Yeah, when that company or platform contains/provides speech

> when that company or platform contains/provides speech

This neuters the word "censorship."

We "censor," per this definition, fraud, false advertising, libel, slander, et cetera. Our system of allocating spectrum for radio or nearly-century old media foreign-ownership rules [1] similarly fall afoul of this definition.

[1] https://www.fcc.gov/enforcement/areas/foreign-ownership-unau...

What if a company fails to abide by the laws it's supposed to follow in order to be a company though?

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