Connect with us

Substacks

I Joined TikTok Refugees on RedNote. Here’s What It’s Like. River Page

Published

on

On Sunday, if the Biden administration gets its way, the third of American adults who use TikTok could abruptly be deprived of the social media app. And over the past several days, self-described “TikTok refugees” have been flocking to another Chinese app called RedNote, also known as Xiaohongshu, which roughly translates to “little red book” (as in, Mao’s). It’s not clear who started the trend, but it’s undeniable: RedNote surged to the top of both Apple and Android’s app stores. Taylor Lorenz, the uber-progressive internet commentator, described it as “the hottest new social app in America!!”

Unlike TikTok, RedNote, which started in Shanghai in 2013 and has over 300 million active monthly users, is an unmistakably Chinese app. When you first open it to sign up, you’re greeted by a wall of Mandarin. The terms and conditions are also in Mandarin: For all I know, I could have just signed over my 401(k) to Xi Jinping himself. And while TikTok is banned in its native China, RedNote is available to the 1.4 billion people living there, and who make up the majority of its userbase. When you log on, you are greeted with a feed nearly identical to TikTok’s, an endless scroll of photos and short-form videos—and they are overwhelmingly in Chinese. And unlike some social media sites such as X, there is no button to auto-translate text.

President Biden signed a bill last spring that would ban TikTok if its Beijing-based parent company doesn’t sell the app to a U.S. buyer. Ever since then, Zoomers have been sardonically bidding farewell to the Chinese spies assigned to monitor their online activities. “It’s been real, my Chinese friend,” one posted. Another imagined “trying to reconnect with my Chinese spy on the dark web” after a TikTok ban, “cuz I never felt more seen and understood than I did with him.” The joke has carried over to RedNote, with some Americans posting that they’re looking for their “new Chinese spy.”

The Chinese users on RedNote seem bemused by these TikTok refugees, asking questions like: “Why are you here? Is it because your TikTok has been banned?”

But overall they are welcoming to the Americans, posting videos with titles like “Hello from your New Chinese spy.”

They have only one demand.


Read more

 

Continue Reading
Click to comment

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Substacks

Nellie Bowles: The Triumph of the Plastic Straw Nellie Bowles

Published

on

By

The biggest environmentalist craze of my generation started in 2011 with Vermont 9-year-old Milo Cress cooking up an arbitrary number for how many plastic straws Americans used daily. This 9-year-old figured it was so many. He says he called up straw manufacturers and calculated 500 million a day. Boom, big number, good number. The mainstream media was off to the races. That 500 million a day number was cited in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post. Suddenly the most important thing we could do for the environment—for our children!—was ban plastic straws.

States and cities passed laws against them. California banned them from restaurants outright in 2018. New York, in 2021, changed the law so the only straws on display were paper (you were allowed to ask for plastic). Official fact sheets from Ron DeSantis’s state of Florida instruct Floridians to “Skip the Straw,” citing the 500 million figure. Did anyone question the basis of this?


Read more

 

Continue Reading

Substacks

It Pays to Be a Friend of Donald Trump Joe Nocera

Published

on

By

Two dodgy Democrats had a great day on Monday—thanks to our new Republican president, Donald J. Trump.

The first, former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich, was granted a full pardon. Back in 2009, after he’d been charged with corruption, Blagojevich got himself booked on Trump’s show, Celebrity Apprentice. (You can see his appearance in these YouTube clips. He was fired, of course.) I don’t know if Blagojevich had a premonition that Trump might someday be in a position to help him, but it sure has turned out that way. Transforming himself from a high-profile Democratic governor to a big-time Trump supporter was the single best move he could have made.


Read more

 

Continue Reading

Substacks

Stop Making Cents? Charles Lane

Published

on

By

On Sunday, President Donald Trump announced that he has ordered his administration to cease production of the penny. The argument for the move seems straightforward enough. It costs more than a penny to make a penny (3.7 cents, according to the U.S. Mint). Given inflation and the move to digital payments, ditching the coin is just common cents, right?

Not necessarily. Life’s about more than just making the numbers add up, and amid all the government waste, doesn’t the humble penny deserve a carve out for sentimental reasons?

Today, we debate the penny’s fate. Good riddance or gone too soon? Deputy Editor Charles Lane supports Trump’s move. Consulting Editor Jonathan Rosen opposes it. Have at it, gentleman.

Charles Lane: President Trump’s decision to end production of the penny has my total support. This mite of a coin betrayed me, quite directly and personally, over the course of 13 years.

“Save your pennies, Chuck,” a supervisor at work told me in 2002, responding to some angst I expressed about future college tuition costs. This was her way of not getting the hint that I needed a raise.

Attitudinally positive as always, I took her advice. I told my 5-year-old son that we would henceforth be keeping every one-cent coin we received as change, found on the street, or won playing dreidel until the moment he left for college.

What a father-son project! So rich in lessons about thrift, consistency, and long-term thinking! And so we collected and collected, filling first one large glass jug and then another, until July 2015, when it was time for the big reveal: We had accumulated 10,142 pennies, about 2.19 per day.

They were worth $101.42, not even enough to cover a month’s fraternity dues.

Wrapping the little suckers in paper rolls to enable deposit at a bank took me several days. Valued at the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour, the time wasted offset any wealth embodied in our hoard—with change left over.

So I did not need the DOGE to tell me the government lost over $179 million in fiscal year 2023 minting more than 4.5 billion one-cent pieces at a cost of three-plus cents each. I already knew that a penny is much more trouble than it’s worth.


Read more

 

Continue Reading

Shadow Banned

Copyright © 2023 mesh news project // awake, not woke // news, not narrative // deep inside the filter bubble