Comment by delecti
4 days ago
"Fetish" is the wrong way to look at it, but it does seem connected. The explanation I've seen is basically a unified "fuck you, I won't do what you tell me, so instead I'm going to give my data to China even harder". It's a generation of kids who grew up (mostly correctly) assuming all of their data was already all controlled by corporations in league with the government. Worrying about data privacy is too quaint to even consider.
There's of course a chance of algorithmic meddling, nudging people to a different Chinese app, but I think spite is a far simpler answer.
> I've seen is basically a unified "fuck you ..."
My wife is exploring RedNote for this very reason. "You're telling me I have an easy way to make the US government upset and the more I use RedNote, the more upset they are?" was her line of thinking. She explained that it makes her feel like she has a morsel of control over a group that previously didn't give a damn.
Her father would also be upset if she starts learning Chinese because of his political tendencies. It's basically a two-for-one deal of learning about another culture and learning a foreign language.
I live in the US. I mean, if I give my data to China, what are they going to do, arrest me? Oh wait no, that's if I give my data to Google or Meta.
> if I give my data to China, what are they going to do, arrest me?
Flip the question around to your familiar villain. You’re a U.S. intelligence chief, and have a trove of embarrassing—possibly worse—information about ordinary Chinese citizens. How can you use this to make them useful to you?
This is a very first level consideration of things like this. In general it would not be particularly useful because exactly the first thing that's going to happen is that any victim of said efforts is going to go to their domestic law enforcement which would not only curtail these efforts (or even completely backfire in the case of double agent stuff), but could also blow up into a giant international controversy.
And for what? What are you going to gain from trying to blackmail an "ordinary citizen"? The risk:reward ratios are simply horribly broken in this sort of case. By contrast when your own government is doing this to you, you have nobody to turn to, and they can completely destroy your life in ways far worse than the threat of somehow revealing your taste in videos.
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The options available to that intelligence chief in your scenario are probably bad for China, but are they any worse for those citizens than what China's own government could do to those citizens?
I kinda get why the US is banning tiktok, I don't get why you'd expect most of tiktok's users to care about those reasons.
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