i've never seen so many americans excited about china and the chinese language. good stuff, folks

  • xiaohongshu [none/use name]
    ·
    edit-2
    2 days ago

    All major social media platforms in China were ordered by law to reveal IP location (just the cities) of their users since April 2022 because a lot of anti-Russia comments were made by Taiwanese trolls when the war in Ukraine started.

    Most Chinese people are Russia simps and the social media fights got really ugly flamed by trolls, so they decided to just reveal the IP location of the users instead.

    • coolusername@lemmy.ml
      ·
      edit-2
      1 day ago

      i'm in taiwan and it says 中國臺灣
      doesn't make a difference to me

      it's just an ip lookup

      • xiaohongshu [none/use name]
        ·
        1 day ago

        It tells people you’re posting from Taiwan, which will earn you extra mockery when people see that

      • xiaohongshu [none/use name]
        ·
        1 day ago

        I don’t think many people use VPN at all. You only need it to bypass the firewall to browse certain foreign websites. Only a small fraction of people does that.

        But it is true that it would not be very effective against determined trolls posting from, say, Taiwan, because they can simply use VPN servers located inside China. Without showing the IP location, people will just endlessly accuse one another for being Taiwanese trolls without any proof. Surprisingly the flame wars did tone down substantially after this was introduced.