the tiktok exodus is widely known! for those of you who don’t know, i am in high school. i can’t count with my hands how many people have talked about it, and that’s just in the two classes i had yesterday (exam week, yay). i’ve already gotten 2 people to download it. they both made accounts and use it now! it’s broken the niche internet thing into the real world, at the very least for young people.
on the app front, lots of americans are posting things like “we’ve been lied to, china isn’t that bad!” i’ve come across so many americans learning about chinese culture and responding positively to patriotic or socialist posts from chinese netizens. it’s insane, i’m really amazed at how, for at least a good chunk of americans, china is becoming less demonized.
i wish someone had told me this at your age because it’s costed me a few opportunities (and i knew it was true because i’m gay, but didn’t realize that it’s also true for being a leftists in this country): you have to be careful not to espouse these views publicly within the united states because it will trigger someone and sometimes that someone will have the ability to fuck things up for you; so keep your cards close to your vest and hope for a day when you don’t have to hide it.
Same, at absolute worst you can get the treatment some whistleblowers get, while not always killed directly they’re functionally banned from most legal employment and higher educational opportunities stateside, along with an odd inability to do things like open bank accounts, which is a slow assassination via poverty.
i suspect that this might be hitting me now; i’ve tried opening 4 bank accounts and they all get shut down after a couple of weeks.
As someone who runs a bunch of communities I have run into trouble with americans when I haven’t been rabidly anti-china. It’s caused mass exoduses from the community more than once.
The European users have never behaved that way in regards to China, only the Americans.
I even received a winnie the pooh death threat one time.
except for Polish anarkids
Yeah fair enough. My discords don’t really get many of those because there’s things like rainbow flags. They self-filter themselves out early.
In Poland anarkids are often pro-LGBT or even queer, so it doesn’t help much. And I’ve found plenty of them on the fediverse
Definitely have to be careful. What I try to focus on when I talk to people are just the facts, because those are neutral and indisputable. But if you ever talk to someone who knows they can’t argue against the facts, they’ll resort to straw man arguments where the conversation then turns to establishing definitions (e.g. What is socialism?)
I’ve also made the mistake of taking the bait and debating these people, which in my experience never leads anywhere
There’s a corollary to this which is that if you’re a cishet white man, or sometimes just white, or whatever other identity that is privileged enough to command a certain amount of respect within a given context, you can learn to use it in your favor to say what you know others who are less privileged are thinking. You gotta learn when it’s your time to talk so you don’t take up the air in a conversation that could see everyone contribute directly, but more often than not the case is some specific people are invited to speak their minds and most people are invited to either reinforce them or shove it. If you’re part of the former group, it’s good to try to push a different line when possible.
thank you, i very much do. only my close friends know i’m a communist.