Leading up to the January 19 deadline for TikTok to be acquired by a non-Chinese owner or face being banned in the United States, a vocal handful of TikTok users began migrating to Xiaohongshu (XHS), a similar video-sharing app designed for users in China. One ‘TikTok refugee’ posted on XHS, “we decided to piss off our government and download an actual Chinese app.” Another American TikTok user who recently migrated to XHS told Rest of the World: “I don’t think China cares what I am doing, I think it is just a way [for the US government] to control us.”
Such sentiments gaining traction is unsurprising; US lawmakers’ ban on TikTok relied on vague, unconvincing notions of the dangers of data collection by a foreign adversary: China. A viral video circulated of indignant Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR) fruitlessly attempting to pressure TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew, who is Singaporean, into admitting that he is Chinese. Because government officials like Cotton largely failed to articulate the specific dangers of the app, Americans felt little reason for the unprecedented government intervention of banning it.
American social media users’ reaction to the TikTok ban demonstrates a widespread ignorance and discursive marginalization of Chinese human rights issues, in part fueled by Congress’ insufficient and ineffective intervention. Apathetic questions like “What are they going to do with my data?” reveal a lack of awareness among the American public on how the Chinese government has, in fact, found notable success in using international American tech companies such as Apple, LinkedIn, and Zoom to censor political opposition and target dissidents across the world.
The issues the Chinese government deems sensitive—whether it be feminism within the country or the mass detention of Uyghurs—might have no visible or direct impact on most American social media users. However, for those who are victimized by such issues or who speak out about them, China’s shadow over international social media and tech is a painfully felt arm of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)’s transnationally oppressive efforts to curb political opposition.
The heavily publicized move to XHS, although unlikely to be significant or sustained, is a dramatic signal of how US lawmakers and the American public are increasingly alienated from effectively responding to the influence of the CCP over multinational tech companies, which is being used to push party narratives. Incredibly, a vocal portion of what appears to be liberal American social media users and influencers enthusiastically supported a platform that has overt and fast-acting censorship algorithms that further the CCP’s human rights abuses and persecution of dissidence. An underrecognized but glaring contradiction emerges when those who support progressive causes centered around social justice and human rights flock to an app that caters to blanket bans on “sensitive” content such as the Uyghur incarceration, Tibetan human rights, the Tiananmen Square Massacre, or any one of 546 derogatory nicknames for Xi Jinping.
Many of the biggest names to move to XHS have been outspoken about Israel’s human rights abuses in Gaza, LGBTQ+ advocacy, and American racial violence. The effort to ban TikTok and public reactions to it reveal how the issue of Chinese human rights has largely become sidelined within US liberal advocacy, while being co-opted by American conservative, China-hawk rhetoric that is often ineffective at curbing oppression.
This public ignorance and insufficiency in addressing the human rights implications of digital policy pose broader dangers in preventing an effective awareness or regulatory response to the broader arms of influence the CCP casts over multinational tech companies, whether it be the suspicious ban of the Chinese subreddit r/real_China_irl, the ban of Apple’s Airdrop feature during the Whitepaper movement, or Zoom shutdowns of Tiananmen commemorations. Americans are left toothless to address China’s successes in transnational oppression by using American tech companies to push party narratives and threaten dissidents. The public’s indifference to the use of American tech companies to target or undermine those who speak out against the Chinese government, but explosive reaction to the ban of their favorite social media app, empowers the CCP’s oppression.
With China representing a massive and lucrative user market for global social media and tech, corporations are enticed to comply with Party pressure and become complicit in censorship and surveillance. A recent example of the more active, invasive forms of US-based technology companies’ complicity in stifling and disrupting political opposition comes from Apple’s intervention in China’s nationwide 2022 White Paper protests, which advocated against the party’s harsh “Zero-Covid” policies. The protests were sparked by incidents like Peng Lifa’s one-man pro-democracy protest on a road overpass and a deadly apartment fire in Urumqi, believed to have been made more deadly by extreme Zero-COVID measures. They represented the largest, most widespread act of expressing dissatisfaction with CCP rule since 1989, and Chinese censors quickly scrambled to manage the movement’s online presence.
After protesters began using AirDrop to disseminate protest leaflets anonymously to public crowds, Apple ended up on the front lines of China’s efforts to mitigate the damage as it rolled out a nationwide update that limited AirDrop to being on for 10 minutes at a time, making it impossible for protestors to use AirDrop as a means to bypass internet censors and tracking. One Chinese graduate student, Wang Han, staged a hunger strike outside of Apple’s California headquarters, demanding the restriction on AirDrop be lifted, which elicited no comment from the company. While it is unclear to the public what communication was held between Apple and the Chinese government, AirDrop’s known popularity in other protest movements against party rule, combined with the time limit’s China-only rollout, makes its intent particularly clear.
More explicit evidence exists of US companies working directly at the behest of the Chinese government to undermine the work of international dissidents. Zoom admitted during the thick of the Covid-19 pandemic in June 2020 that it had shut down meeting rooms and accounts relating to Tiananmen protest commemorations. Zoom went beyond complying with local Chinese law as it shut down American and Hong Kong accounts belonging to activists. Incidents like these, among countless others, demonstrate the need for regulations ensuring that American tech companies protect the security of Chinese dissidents outside of the country and are not complicit in international oppression. Proposed policies such as the Global Online Freedom Act of 2006 offer a way for Congress to create standards for US tech and social media corporations in their policies with foreign countries and avoid becoming instrumental to globalized authoritarianism. The relentless, singularly focused push of US lawmakers to ban TikTok has served to galvanize an entire population of American social media users to distrust and mock lawmakers who have done too little to regulate their own companies’ relationship with the Chinese government. Congress’ unconvincing fear-mongering around a single app has reinforced American ignorance about their complicity in the digital side of Chinese human rights abuses.