So the Chinese government is spying on me, I'm literally never going to China, plus they have backdoor access to like every cheap security camera on the planet.
It's a better position than giving all my info to one of the u.s. companies where it has a real effect on me, especially now.
China is half a world away and isn't directly involved in my day to day. The harms that China can do to me are significantly less than those American businesses.
It's not about trust, it's about accurate threat modeling.
This is the correct take. Anyone who paid the least amount of attention to Snowden's revelations know that the USA harvests absolutely everything online. Americans have more to fear from their info being misused by their own government and the corporations that own it than by the Chinese. The push to ban TikTok is just an attempt to cut out the spying competition. And jingoistic Sinophobia.
I love how in the article they are presenting this as "people looking for a tiktok alternative". Instagram and YT shorts are right there, the people joining this app are either doing it in protest or following the trend that those people started. Most of the people joining probably aren't going to it because of it's prior reputation as a stelar app or because they think it will protect their data.
Although those platforms also provide short form content, their algorithms are pretty terrible. Also, Instagram's reels are absolutely flooded with ads, sponsored videos, and undisclosed branded content.
Instagram is basically an advertising platform at this point and youtube shorts doesn't have the same feel to it.
TikTok like Vine before it was built from the ground up with this kind of functionality and content in mind, Instagram and youtube were not and it shows.
It is very early days, but loops looks promising as a genuine alternative.
Trust in Meta cratering to new lows, TikTok being banned.
I totally get wanting to be on a bandwagon, I think this is the perfect time to get onto PixelFed but to go to (Little) RedNote instead? Could they make China's effective ownership of the platform any more obvious?
I love how in the article they are presenting this as a "people looking for a tiktok alternative". Instagram and YT shorts are right there, the people joining this app are either doing it in protest or following the trend that those people started. Most of the people joining probably aren't going to it because of it's prior reputation as a stelar app or because they think it will protect their data.
"In the "TikTokCringe" subreddit, a video from a RedNote user with red eyes, presumably swollen from tears, suggested that Americans had possibly ruined the app for Chinese Americans who rely on RedNote to stay current on Chinese news and culture."
Do you think the people going to a Chinese app cared? They don't trust American companies sooo much they left to let there data get harvested by another state