Comment by tivert

> Obviously Meta is shooting itself in the face. The entire national security propaganda farce has been transparently seen through, and most American internet users know that its really about corporate lobbying and Meta trying to maintain its grasp on American social media monopoly. The fact that Bytedance has a connection to China is a convenient angle for US Congress and media. But American TikTok users are actually responding out of spite — “fine we’ll go directly to China and hand them our data personally”.

That's frankly bullshit. It smacks motivated reasoning of the form "I like TikTok therefore everything that keeps me from what I want is bad/wrong/a lie/etc." Though I wouldn't be surprise if it's getting repeated so much in the TikTok bubble that it becomes easy to believe through repetition.

TikTok got banned because of the national security angle, and because it very unwisely decided to poke Congress's eye in a way that emphasized the reality of that, right when they were considering the bill.

When there's a serious concern you can manipulate Americans, it's really dumb idea to go manipulate Americans into doing something in a very public way.

> For the last 48 hours, millions of Tiktok users have started migrating to Xiaohongshu in droves. This feels very different from every previous Mastodon or Bluesky wave. This one feels sticky. Everytime I refresh my feed, there are hundreds of new videos saying “Hello from America, I am a Tiktok refugee”, and I have been refreshing my feed every few seconds for the past day.

> The reason why this is sticky and working is because these posts are receiving comments. Roughly half are in English and are usually some kind of mix of welcoming them or a snarky joke that they’ve re-connected with their Chinese spy. The other half of comments are in Chinese, making American users have to translate them using ChatGPT or Google Translate.

That doesn't sound sticky to me. It sounds like a small fraction of the US TikTok users using weird logic ("TikTok is Chinese therefore Chinese social media apps are good") then making first posts. IIRC, Little Red Book is closer to Instagram, so it's no like they're even going to be getting a TikTok-like experience.