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.
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
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.
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.
I would double check its not some identity theft deal going on with banking, since that’s been a thing going on for a bit.
Depending on various things you could try to escape the harassment, best of course is immigrating, second best is moving remote since the authorities there generally don’t have time nor inclination to harass the blacklisted and such with the caveat if you super stand out as a minority they’ll pester you for that, but not necessarily for your whistleblowing nor saying/being the wrong things around butthurt lib-chuds with connections. You can etch out a small and miserable existence rather than none at all, its a choose your own flavor of hell. Mine’s not that severe, for certain can’t touch anything academic or at a college, a former coworker confirmed since they told me at work astonished about it. For another ‘symptom’ in CA I’d get chained pulled over like every other second for total bullshit, best record was I had a little snow on the roof of my car and got pulled over 5 times in a row otw home.
The people I did a little loud complaining with were like ‘hurr hurr the lists only last 6-12 years’, nah they’re much longer than that, I’m suspecting permanent.
Supposedly some lists get trigger-happy and ridden with false positives, so you end up with like the whitest toddler in Murikkka on the terror watch list unable to fly while his parents are ok, and a bunch of harmless libs noted as super villain tier radicals. I’m not sure to the extent, but I do know its something no one is ever going to fix.
it’s not identitify theft; i’ve already checked with the credit bureaus and the thought of living in a small town like the one i grew up in fills me with dread due to the certainty that i would go crazy again.
i was already planning on emigrating, so i think i’ll just place more effort & resources on that.
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
thank you, i very much do. only my close friends know i’m a communist.