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Leading up to the January 19 [2025] deadline for TikTok to be acquired by a non-Chinese owner or face being banned in the United States, a vocal handful of TikTok users began migrating to Xiaohongshu (XHS), a similar video-sharing app designed for users in China. One ‘TikTok refugee’ posted on XHS, “we decided to piss off our government and download an actual Chinese app.” Another American TikTok user who recently migrated to XHS told Rest of the World: “I don’t think China cares what I am doing, I think it is just a way [for the US government] to control us.”
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Apathetic questions like “What are they going to do with my data?” reveal a lack of awareness among the American public on how the Chinese government has, in fact, found notable success in using international American tech companies such as Apple, LinkedIn, and Zoom to censor political opposition and target dissidents across the world.
The issues the Chinese government deems sensitive—whether it be feminism within the country or the mass detention of Uyghurs—might have no visible or direct impact on most American social media users. However, for those who are victimized by such issues or who speak out about them, China’s shadow over international social media and tech is a painfully felt arm of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)’s transnationally oppressive efforts to curb political opposition.
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The heavily publicized move to XHS, although unlikely to be significant or sustained, is a dramatic signal of how US lawmakers and the American public are increasingly alienated from effectively responding to the influence of the CCP over multinational tech companies, which is being used to push party narratives. Incredibly, a vocal portion of what appears to be liberal American social media users and influencers enthusiastically supported a platform that has overt and fast-acting censorship algorithms that further the CCP’s human rights abuses and persecution of dissidence. An underrecognized but glaring contradiction emerges when those who support progressive causes centered around social justice and human rights flock to an app that caters to blanket bans on “sensitive” content such as the Uyghur incarceration, Tibetan human rights, the Tiananmen Square Massacre, or any one of 546 derogatory nicknames for Xi Jinping.
Many of the biggest names to move to XHS have been outspoken about Israel’s human rights abuses in Gaza, LGBTQ+ advocacy, and American racial violence. The effort to ban TikTok and public reactions to it reveal how the issue of Chinese human rights has largely become sidelined within US liberal advocacy, while being co-opted by American conservative, China-hawk rhetoric that is often ineffective at curbing oppression.
This public ignorance and insufficiency in addressing the human rights implications of digital policy pose broader dangers in preventing an effective awareness or regulatory response to the broader arms of influence the CCP casts over multinational tech companies, whether it be the suspicious ban of the Chinese subreddit r/real_China_irl, the ban of Apple’s Airdrop feature during the Whitepaper movement, or Zoom shutdowns of Tiananmen commemorations.
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The public’s indifference to the use of American tech companies to target or undermine those who speak out against the Chinese government, but explosive reaction to the ban of their favorite social media app, empowers the CCP’s oppression.
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