Reminds me of that Declassified CIA Report from 1983, which confirmed that the average Soviet Citizen ate around the same, albeit slightly less, calories as the average US Citizen, thus giving insight on how the Soviet Union wasn't full of starving individuals.
sadly Americans never had a chance to talk to Soviet citizens back then
The people on that app are funny and sweet, it's cute. Time to start learning Mandarin!
The funniest part of the 'social credit score' bullshit is we absolutely have it here in the United States. It's called your credit fucking score. So many aspects of life are gatekept by access to money which, in the current economy, means access to debt, which is controlled by: your credit score. And it can absolutely negatively impact your life. And not just prejudices from private citizens.
You try driving a beat up clunker of a car through nice neighborhoods and see how long until a cop shows up to ask what you're doing there. That's a state actor. You try sending your kids to a good school when you can't get a loan to live in a house in a good school district. That's municipal government. You try renting an apartment without a fucking pay stub. God. Damn. We live in a society governed by money. Having access to money is a social metric aka a "sCoRe" you fucking barbells.
I'm also 99% sure credit is tied to your family just from anecdotal evidence. Both me and my friend signed up for credit cards the same day at the age of 18.
He could only get a "secured" credit card with a $150 limit, while I had an insane limit for a kid making minimum wage.
Of course his parents filed for bankruptcy years before that, but it does make me wonder.
In Europe there is tons of private credit info systems, white lists etc. which overlaps or don't and works pretty randomly for example if someone do some scam on your name you could get permanently blacklisted or not, depend if you get reported and you might get to clear your name or not.
It absolutely does tie in to your family. And where you live. And a host of other factors outside your control. And not just passively like that. A shitty parent can fuck up your life by doing fraud in your name or vice versa. And now you're stained by it and it can haunt you like a ghost for years.
My mom took out my first credit card as a joint family account, so I not only had her positive credit, I could make purchases and she could immediately repay them. For example, sometimes I'd buy our groceries or pay the electric bill. That way, I was building up credit without actually doing anything.
Didn't you know? Usonians are in front of mirrors at all times, spew incoherent garbage nonsense about social credit scores, china genocideded muslims and 500 gorillion homeless then pretend they don't recognize themselves in the process.
Okay, vulnerability time.
The social credit system isn't real?
Now, is it a flat out fabrication, hasn't been implemented yet, or not real in the sense that it doesn't exist in the why we've been told it does? I would also really appreciate a source, one that a westoid like me would trust to be unbiased would be great, but I won't give you a hard time for not supplying one.
Looks like it exists but is fragmented and mainly for companies. Though the stories about foreign police and VPNs in companies seem real.
You might also find it interesting how Chinese users react to being asked about it:
https://xcancel.com/KHAMCHANH/status/1879651724308398141
But yeah, it's always been utter nonsense, and was debunked years ago. But these sort of fabrications and twisted stories work well, because people will easily believe whatever they hear and read about a country they're supposed to see as an enemy.
Fabrication https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/09/15/china-social-credit-system-authoritarian/
it's not real, and even western media reported on this before
- https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/09/15/china-social-credit-system-authoritarian/
- https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/11/16/chinas-orwellian-social-credit-score-isnt-real/
There are some big companies that have loyalty rewards programs and some assign numbers to it, but it's generally like it is here in the west. It's not a government thing.
The government thing is basically just intense accounting. They keep very close track of financial stuff and though it's mostly aimed at businesses, they also note when individuals take out loans or credit cards and that can impact a person's life if they default. People and companies can also be blacklisted for stuff like fraud. But again, that's pretty much the same in the west too.
It's true that there is less anonymity in China though because people have to use their real names for everything. Like on social media, even if a user has a screen name, their legal name is still tied to their account through their phone number or internet connection or associated bank account (you can do online shopping through basically every Chinese app) or all of the above. Westerners nominally have more privacy in that regard but let's be real, if a western government wanted to know who's behind an "anonymous" internet post, they would know.
Actually I have some very smart communists here to say that this is meaningless and irrelevant
Reminds me of this quote:
"Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime." -Mark Twain
Nice, thx for that. Made a meme of it here: https://lemmy.ml/post/24890041
Exactly, and the beauty of social media is that it's a lot cheaper than travel making it possible for millions of people to get exposure to other cultures for free.
I know many people who are infatuated with travel and rush around the globe visiting places two weeks at a time. If you really want to understand a place stay there a minimum of six months, otherwise you will just be getting the Readers Digest version. I have seen hoards of travelers descend on a location at one time and all that they do is change the character of the place by their presence. This is especially true for cruise ships. Also all of this excessive travel has a huge carbon footprint.
I think it comes down to "exposure" to different people and cultures. If you only go places that cater exclusively to tourists, or you never leave the resort or whatever, then you aren't really getting that exposure. At the same time, you can have some profound realizations in very little time-- I mean basic shit like "oh wow these people are just want to live their lives like everybody else!"
Nonsense. Talk to anyone who has visited France or Paris specifically.
Funnily enough people I know were treated better than they expected in Paris, and worse than they expected in Barcelona. Came out of Europe thinking all the racists were in Spain.
Didn’t Twain specifically go to Palestine and say “damn based empty desert”? Or have I been dershed once again
It'd be really, really funny if the TikTok ban is the domino that begins the collapse of the US empire in earnest.
Unironically it’s a huge move that will piss off a lot of people. Half of Americans use TikTok. Half. If you’re in a room with 30 people, 15 of them have TikTok on their phone, and 14 are pissed about this ban.
You know what has less monthly users than TikTok does? The New York Times and the Washington Post. Put their monthly readerships together and it’s about equal to TikTok, except you know they have like a 90% overlap. Also waaaaay more than TV news has viewers, honestly adding all TV news viewers together still might not beat TikTok.
TikTok is absolutely massive and is arguably the dominant force in American culture. Banning it for reasons that literally everyone except my father can see are bullshit is a good way to piss off a lot of people for no gain.
what's funny is that TikTok is controlled by the CIA and Israel. They're only doing this for silly propaganda reasons.
https://www.mintpressnews.com/nato-tiktok-pipeline-why-tiktok-employing-national-security-agents/280336/
https://www.mintpressnews.com/288710-tiktok-isnt-anti-israel-its-hired-unit-8200-agents-to-run-its-affairs/288710/Well Meta and Google are convinced there's a payoff.
It's kinda wild how completely I missed TikTok taking off and now I feel like I'm watching this big zeitgeist moment from the sidelines.
I mean with how absolutely astoundingly incompetent the Biden administration was I could see their actions being another "stepping on a rake" moment.
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China is truly evil. Why did they put so many rakes around Biden? Don't they know he's senile?
I also wonder about the opposite of this like since rednote is mostly kind of a space for more pro western liberalized Chinese young people, how many of them are gonna get scared straight talking to Americans lol
Exactly, while Americans are discovering that much of what their government said about China was false, the Chinese are realizing that conditions in the US are as bad, or worse, than their own government said.
Mass shootings in the US get way less coverage in China because it gets to a point where people start dismissing it as propaganda. Big ones make the news for a while, but most of them get touched on briefly and the news moves on.
Like, surely, after your 3rd mass shooting in a decade, the government would step in and do something about it, right?
"We've had 15 mass shootings in 2025 so far"
"You mean in the 2020's, right?"
"Nope"
Time taken for 15 most recent mass shootings in Australia: 20 years
Time taken for 15 most recent mass shootings in USA: 14 days
Like, surely, after your 3rd mass shooting in a decade, the government would step in and do something about it, right
One would think!
I'm like 50:50 as to whether news out of China specifically just short-circuits a populaces brain that cannot even imagine anymore that the people like a government. I mean you look at like global north numbers and it peaks at, what, 30% or so? Removed from everything else I get the feeling the idea that you could like a government has died
Reminds me of a saying from the SSRs after '91: "Everything they told us about communism was a lie, and everything they told us about capitalism was true."
Except, you know, Chinese people seem to really like their communist party
Also I don't know how much these types of posts say anything about anything because these people have no object permanence and tend to believe whatever's in front of them or the last thing said to them. They have probably looked at Chinese netizens debunking of their priors with the same scrutiny as their original wrong opinions. XHS gets banned and all of these people will revert to treatlerites within 1 hour of returning to instagram or w/e.
Yea i dont expect it will trigger any introspection in people like “oh maybe I should be more critical of what the state dept says about x.” They’ll believe the very next lie they’re told even lol. But hopefully with respect to China itself it’ll erode the anti-Chinese/anti-communist sentiment among a decent portion of young(ish) people
Even if the only result is this leaves the door cracked open for non-US Hegemonic PoV as part of this "believing the last thing you heard," that's still a vast improvement over being fully ensorceled by the propaganda machine.
So many are so surprised about how expensive it is to live in the US, and how the median citizen really doesn't earn enough to live well. College tuition and student loans are another one.
It's amazing seeing normies with profiles full of cat photos comment about how they are realizing how misinformed they are on China.
Let's go!
But yea this is just a drop in the bucket. Every person I talk to in America has this warped view of China. The propaganda here is quite effective, cause even people who call themselves apolitical or barely know anything can recite anti-china talking points
That's why direct interactions between people are so important. As soon as Americans start talking to the Chinese, they quickly realize that they've been fed bullshit their whole lives. And while it's still a small number of people talking, I think it will grow because of networking effects. People will tell their friends, and they will get curious, and so on. I really think this is an incredibly important moment.
You can even track how effective it is over time. Negative views on china in the us and canada jumped 30% in like 15 years.
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·1 day agoWhat happened in 2015/2016 (ish?) to have that dip?
I imagine reactionary libs shifting their position in response to Trump's anti-China rhetoric.
The libs also laughed at Mitt Romney for saying Russia was a huge threat, now all those libs think Russia is going to conquer all of Europe.
Americans realized China was serious about socialism and they weren't going to fall into the same trap as the Soviets. IIRC it was around that time the CPC initiated a lot of purges and anti-corruption policies.
I thought MMOs and online gaming would do this when I was little, nah gamers can't be helped.
Just about every game I've ever played has regional servers meaning that US players never get to interact with people from other countries, often not even English speaking Europe. There's only a few exceptions to that like EVE Online and their large Russian communities, but even then the groups tend to self-segregate.
Things might be different if everyone was just always forced to play together.
In games I played I went off what hours I'm available. As a child I had bad insomnia and ended up playing with east Asian guilds a lot, as a very young adult for a bit the only time I could play was during Euro hours.
What few Russian words I know are solely from staying up late and only finding Russians to play Left 4 Dead with lmao
One of my fav experiences was in college playing with an international crew, we didn't understand each other much but we knew we had to beat the other team.
PRC+USSR propaganda posters with hunky dudes? Move over. It's time for cats.
Honestly really wholesome to see, which means the US will step in any second to stop this.
Step away from the lathe. https://edition.cnn.com/2025/01/15/tech/trump-tiktok-ban/index.html
And they thought they could never suffer their "radio free europe" event
Do you have the full versions of the videos in the picture? I found the first one https://www.tiktok.com/@shuswap_doug/video/7459845225922530566
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
