The great firewall is finally broken | Hacker News Reader

The great firewall is finally broken

medium.com

24 pointsdluan17 comments

This article seems to be talking about the great firewall of China as if it was some cultural barrier to Western consumers preventing them from accessing Chinese sites, instead of a technological barrier barring Chinese citizens from engaging with the internet at large. Am I missing something?

yeah, the author is either being paid to spout propaganda or doesn't know how the internet doesn't flow into and out of china freely, never has, never will

I think the argument is that American consumers have never before signed up in droves for a Chinese-owned site hosted in China and mostly used by domestic Chinese users, and that the content posted by the Americans is likely to change the culture on that platform, unless XHS decides to reject a shot at "owning" the short-video space.

Huh. Had not thought about that. It's important.

China has a chance to take over social media outside China, but the censorship is getting in the way. It will be interesting to see how this plays out.

This parallels another big issue in China - external usage of the yuan. China still has capital outflow controls and exchange limitations. So few outside China want to hold yuan if they don't have a use for it inside China. Yet China's leadership wants to make it the world currency, replacing the dollar. That requires more convertibility, and exposes China's internal economy to external market forces. That's been an internal debate for a decade.

exactly, taking this chance requires allowing free market rules to apply.

china is the only country on earth managing 1.5 billion people efficiently (not perfect, not fair, but more efficient than anything seen in history)

and they won't take chances to allow free market to reign. even with iron fist, it's been hard to keep the lid on unrest, laying-flat philosophy, unemployment on young people and real estate bubbles. and remember they print their currency twice as fast than the US, either applying inflation to their whole population or representing new value created in the country, I don't know.

> Taking this chance requires allowing free market rules to apply.

On the yuan side, yes. On the TikTok side, it requires allowing free speech rules to apply. That scares China's current leadership.

it's sarcasm.

you cannot say the great firewall is broken and at the same time say people who are joining Xiaohongshu must abide to their current state overseen moderation rules

no, the great firewall is still there and there are users moving but I highly doubt this is gonna change the hegemony of meta inside the US

What does the great firewall have to do with Meta hegemony in the US?

he is talking about the great firewall but the rules remain the same, nothing changed

he says people is leaving meta in anger, some are, I don't see a significant massive migration

honestly I think he is talking from his user experience and trying to extrapole it way beyond its real extent

> he is talking about the great firewall but the rules remain the same, nothing changed

You're misunderstanding the point of the great firewall, which is to create an isolation effect on the Chinese net. Obviously a bunch of American e-refugees foils that. This absolutely is a massive change to the status quo.

> he says people is leaving meta in anger, some are, I don't see a significant massive migration

He's saying zoomers are moving from TikTok to REDNote rather than Instagram/Facebook. Not that they're going from Instagram/Facebook to REDNote.

> honestly I think he is talking from his user experience and trying to extrapole it way beyond its real extent

Speaking as a zoomer, no he's right. I can think of maybe 2 friends who haven't gotten on REDNote in the last couple of days. The numbers[1] don't lie. Whether or not this sticks? Remains to be seen. But it's inarguable that it's happening.

[1] - https://www.newsweek.com/rednote-app-tiktok-ban-xiaohongshu-...

> You're misunderstanding the point of the great firewall, which is to create an isolation effect on the Chinese net. Obviously a bunch of American e-refugees foils that. This absolutely is a massive change to the status quo.

I think you're misunderstanding. The point of the great firewall is to keep Chinese users from bypassing the Chinese censorship apparatus. A bunch of American e-refugees does not foil that, if all they can say are things acceptable to the Chinese government.

In fact, a bunch of American e-refugees can probably be parlayed into a propaganda win for the Chinese government strengthening the Great Firewall ("our stuff is so good that the Americans are seeking it out. Why look abroad when we have the best stuff? Stay inside the firewall.").

Why is everyone running to a Chinese TikTok clone? Is the west really not able to make something similar?

facebook has their own don't they?

Doubtful we could build it, get everyone signed up, rebuild audiences, and monetize it for the company and users and not be Meta or Musk before the 19th.

It's lower friction just to switch to something you already know.

I still think this smells like a free-speech issue and it does not smell good. However, Congress seems to be OK with it and the Supreme Court, so … oh, well.

We've yet to hear anything coherent from Trump or anything substantive from Musk on the issue, which is odd because supposedly he's all about the Freedom of Speech as an absolute right.

The whole thing has nothing to do with the great firewall.

It's about users switching to a different chinese app for their next rendition of the twerk tic set your balls on fire challenge...

Chinese censoring and survielance will continue unabated.

I don't think that word "internet" means what you think it means...

> 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.

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