11 Comments
Jan 15Edited

As a little note here. Atrocity Fabrication And It’s Consequences by A.B Abrams does a great job of both revealing the history of western atrocity propaganda and even debunking recent examples (Xinjiang, Libya, the DPRK, Syria, etc).

Meanwhile Why The World Needs China by Kyle Ferrana goes into the “Chinese debt trap” talking point and not only throughly debunks it, but even reveals China’s exciting alternative method of global development. One not predicted on resource extraction and labor exploitation.

Here’s an Internet Archive PDF link to the former.

https://ia800302.us.archive.org/1/items/abrams-atrocity-fabrications/Abrams_AtrocityFab.pdf

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Good recs!

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The must interesting aspect will be what Europe, South America, Africa and India do. If, in particular, European audiences stay on TikTok then the day of the ban will be remembered as the day America voluntarily surrendered the cultural hegemony in which they have invested so heavily over the last century.

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Exactly, banning TikTok is only taking the US out of the conversation and voluntarily silencing themselves.

TikTok has several things going for it and actually one of its features is that it shows you content from around your location. This is slightly different from e.g. Instagram or Twitter's feed which show you content in your language. While both US and EU users use the same app and servers, they see completely different content from each other unless they specifically look for it. But in my experience using it in Europe, I never really found or needed to look for US content specifically. So in our case, I think people will keep using TikTok as usual. I've seen some Europeans on Rednote but very few comparatively.

In Europe we desperately need our own solutions instead of always importing US tech. In my opinion having TikTok break that hegemony will not bring about European social media but it will at least keep eating away at Meta and co.

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8dEdited

My personal opinion regarding social media is that content creators would do better hosting their content on their own servers and only sharing links on platforms. All platforms will be subverted eventually so rather than trying to find the right or best one, we’d be better off making ourselves as resilient to algorithmic fuckery as we can.

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I actually started preparing a guide last year on how to do just that, I just never got around to finishing it. But social media also has lots of opportunities as well; In my opinion, we need to be strategic about how we use it.

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Billionaires want to mimic the economy of authoritarian China which is why they promote Trump so intensively. While he delivers for them on billionaire planning, tax cuts and deregulation he also comes with liabilities like xenophobia and misogyny exposed by the H1B and invitro maga takedowns and the state loses on abortion.

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can we stop stop with all these web video portals - whether they are banned or chinese or youtube. they ALL SUCK.

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I appreciate your perspective, one I don't otherwise see. Maybe you can address the question of LGBT phobia in China?

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Depends if I can find the information and an angle to write from. As a primer there's a lot of information on this page: https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/LGBT_rights_and_issues_in_AES_countries#People's_Republic_of_China

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