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Comment by sirisaysgpt | Hacker News Reader

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I was on RedNote just now. I saw some gay content that had been there yesterday as well, and has not been removed.

BTW, the RedNote userbase in China is 70% female, similar to Pinterest in the US. That may be why there's an affinity with a portion of the Tiktok userbase. The RedNote users are not into politics (at least were not). They cats, cooking, fashion, interior decorating, travel, sports.

One American user, who identified themselves as “non-binary” on RedNote, was censored after publishing a post on Tuesday asking if the platform welcomed gay people. The post was removed within hours, the user told CNN [0]

The next day, they uploaded a new post saying they will quit the platform over the decision but was soon on the receiving end of homophobic comments, with some users accusing them of cultural imposition.

A Chinese user suggested that he try covering his nipples, as Chinese social media platforms generally impose restrictions on displaying them when it is perceived as sexually suggestive.

A few RedNote users also noted that posts about the Japanese anime My Hero Academia, which faced censorship in China since 2018 due to controversial references to Japan’s wartime history, have since been removed from the platform.

[0] https://www.cnn.com/2025/01/16/tech/tiktok-refugees-rednote-...

Thanks for the ref. Not sure why that particular user got banned. A search just now on RedNote using the hashtag "gay" returns 8.7k posts. The results show plenty of men in skimpy clothing with uncovered nipples.

Perhaps RedNote is having trouble scaling their moderation?

Maybe that "one american" was being annoying and/or breaking other rules?

Why are you spreading misinformation? There's plenty of Chinese gay influencers on RedNote and there have been for years [0], saying LGBTQ talk there is banned is nonsensical. The ban waves are probably due to the app struggling to scale moderation to handle all the new people, including the ones disrespectful of Chinese societal norms.

[0] https://www.xiaohongshu.com/search_result?keyword=gay (requires log-in)

I’ve seen social media posts by Chinese users on how not to get censored / banned on RedNote, and one common tip is to not share any LGBTQ content. Clearly there’s a fear about it, and gullible young people who flocked to little red book are only understanding reality when they get suddenly banned for something harmless.

for what I Know, gay content is ok, gay flags are not ok

> The RedNote users are not into politics

I wonder why? Post about Taiwan or 89 or Winnie the Pooh and find out :)

why it's about Russia? are Russians a part of this too?

>why it's about Russia? are Russians a part of this too? reply

Yes, Russian bot farms work hard on TikTok. Algorithms and bot farms have no right for "free speech".

I've never understood this conspiracy theory. If Russia does have bot farms, and they're effective, surely the US has much, much larger bot farms - their budgment for this sort of thing completely dwarfs Russia.

Or is the US just too much of a moral actor to do this?

This underlying idea that the US state is “just the same” as Russia, China, etc. (and that as such they will function in the same way) is imho one the biggest factors on the decline of the quality of western democracy today. I’m not American, have only been there once a couple of days, and have no special sympathy for the country, but the fact that so many people do not understand that the US democracy is fundamentally different than the Russian or Chinese regimes is such a sad, depressing thing.

They're "just the same" in the sense that they would surely both use similar tools in the information war. Just like they're "just the same" in having submarines, fighter jets, etc etc.

The content of the information war or different, but it's still a war, and the idea that the US would just cede all advantages to Russia because they're above using bots strikes me as faintly ridiculous.

In regards to things our secret government agencies do, we are the same though (and secret police/courts/governmental organizations are very much anti-democratic in principle, so it says a lot that we have them in our "fundamentally different" US democracy)? Covertly manipulating opinions in foreign countries is very much spy agency territory IMO. Seems like they should be running bot farms as well if they are effective.

So the claim is USA has bot farms but they are much, much better then the Ruzzian ones since we never seen them, and no USA hired criminal publicly got medals and rewards for running them.

But is a very typical Ruzzian stuff happening in response to my original comments

1 denial, "are the Ruzzians bots in the room with us" , trying to imply I am mad and there is no such thing as Ruzzian bot farms funded by Kremlin

2 Ruzzia has bot farm but what about USA

If bot farms are effective, we probably have them. I doubt that bot farms are good enough to prefer over the "feed a story to friendly media" approach which has been working very well so far.

>If bot farms are effective, we probably have them.

If UFOs are effective then USA has them too

> Or is the US just too much of a moral actor to do this?

US government has massively more oversight because of still somewhat functioning legislative and judicial systems. Also free press is still a thing (compared to Russia anyway..).

Ao any large scale program like this would inevitably be leaked and scrutinized (of course if they keep it somewhat low scale it will probably pass under the radar).

So effectively.. yes? It is?

That does not make any sense.

"If germany had concentration camps and they were effective then surely US has much larger concentration camps"

Why do you assume that US must be worse than the worst in everything? US is not perfect but russia, iran, north korea etc are on another level.

Russia was just flowing USA's lead, Centcom was contracting out influence operations through sock puppet accounts since 2011, no different than Radio Free Asia really, influence hearts and minds, now with just a little automation.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/mar/17/us-spy-op...

And what’s the point you’re trying to make? If Russia was trying to drop bombs on DC and the US was trying to drop bombs on Moscow, would you think it strange for the US to try to prevent the bombs from being dropped on DC?

Say it is true, then both are wrong and evil. But from my POV Ruzzia has more interests in destabilizing my country and region then do a invasion they would call liberation and grab some strategic lands.

No, US is the one that gives them platform.

It's not a conspiracy theory. We know where the farms were located and several former bot farm workers spoke about them.

The US government can barely make a comment telling people that they're not horses.

Are they in the room with us right now?

Does they also faked opinions about Isreal and Gaza?

It's horrible, how should we identify them?

>Are they in the room with us right now?

This is well known but ou can contionue to pdo your job pretending it is not. Independent group also could prove this, it is easy, thousands of accounts that were created at the same time, then slept for years are activated at the same time and spread same content.

Ruzzia was very proud by the cyber troll army, did they start denying it now? And now do you belive their Mistier of Invasion ? I mean they are still reporting that they are always downing 100% of the drones but the debries sometimes hit the target, sometimes cigarrates or lighting cause fires... so please let's ignore everything those criminals say.

Do you pretend bot farms do not exist?

>It's horrible, how should we identify them?

Social Media can identify them if they want.

As a regular users in general you can spot a bot account if it is new or hybernated for years and just started posting. But the issue is with bots that vote, give lies this ones are used to boost content so the algorithm pushes that agenda in fron of real users. but having many bot accounts increase their evaluation so they are not putting effort into silencing them.

The message being displayed to users is very pro Trump right in the message.

And I assume you mean woke* content not DEI.

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