Americans are joining the Chinese social media app en masse to protest an imminent TikTok ban.
- American users have flocked to Chinese social media platform Xiaohongshu in defiance of security warnings.
- Chinese and American users have engaged in surprisingly friendly conversations about each other’s lives.
- The influx of American users could burden Xiaohongshu’s censorship mechanism, experts say.
Between a choice of “you will never be arrested for anything, ever, no matter how heinous” vs “You can be arrested at any time for any reason or no reason, at the whim of your government” I cannot say with confidence which of those is worse.
Out of my perspective, one system punishes overlords and the other doesn’t. I know what you mean regarding the prohibition on critics of the system / important people / journalism / science … but if we strictly compare the US with China in terms of billionaire punishment, China wins…
And regarding the massive steps the USA takes towards an autocracy, I would say the other aspects of the argument won’t hold up much longer.
It seems like we need to go through this shit to finally get our star trek future.