Technology

The number of people in the comments celebrating censorship by our own government while also claiming China is authoritarian is insane.

Why try to hype this as a trend?

I don’t want to rain on everyone’s parade but I think the law bans all apps with over 1 million users that are based in China, Russia, Iran, or North Korea (“foreign adversary controlled applications”) where you can make a profile and share content. WeChat would definitely count. So, Red Note is probably/possibly going away soon too. I guess VKontakte is Russian and still in the app stores.

The media is focused on creators and TikTok, obviously. But a WeChat ban would probably suck for people with grandparents in China since that’s the “everything app” there. (I don’t know what China bans but even if there’s other messaging apps allowed in China, teaching your elderly Chinese grandma to use a different app on a ~12h time zone difference is probably not a fun activity.)

From the frying pan into the fire. Well done.

Wow. They really went with Xiao hong shu?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotations_from_Chairman_Mao_Tse-tung

Those users:

Meanwhile the mainstream will probably just focus on Instagram and its reels feature as pretty much all bigger creators crosspost everything there as well.