This is the third story I’ve seen today that was basically “Tiktok users flee service to other chinese service app you’ve never heard of”
So basically the usa banned tiktok, and now there’s 3 other tiktoks, all connecting the same amount of data for china, just through 3 different services instead of 1.
Honestly, I don’t even believe these articles. At some point it just starts to sound like they are making things up.
I mean, this is real easy to fact check. Open whichever playstore you prefer and sort by most downloaded. Red note and 8 will be up there.
Sounds about right, From my understanding, they singled out TikTok instead of addressing the actual problem they claim to care about.
[Edit, another comment says its any app with 1million users. So now there’s just going to be a hundred TikTok clones all under the same umbrella just different names.]
Due to the network effect, having a hundred apps instead of one is a big negative.
If they addressed the general problem it would also affect US social media platforms and they want to continue doing that when American companies do it.
your edit sounds like the fediverse model
I suppose. I was thinking more of 1 Chinese company just spinning up a hundred copy/paste apps.
To be fair, the law is broad enough that it could target these other services as well pretty easily.
The law is broad enough they could target Discord.
That seems like a bit of a stretch since it’s US based company. I guess some of its investors could be based in China though.
Russia is on the list too. But that’s the point. They can declare that an owner is compromised, no matter what citizenship they hold.
XiaoHongShu is much older than tiktok, it started shortly after facebook, though resembles more a mix of Twitter and Instagram.
XiaoHongShu was founded in 2013, Facebook was founded in 2004…
Your sense of time is a bit warped…
Meet the new app, same as the old app.
And those people will turn around and cry about privacy issues. The cycle repeats…
No one on TikTok cares about privacy
he does ☞ https://www.tiktok.com/@mor10web
Not clicking that link, but the mere fact of having an account there means you don’t care about your privacy IMO.
i don’t have an account “there”
i see that you like making assumptions, now, please tell me what we can assume about you after your comment above knowing that it’s false
check these if you care, while you think ☞ https://mor10.com https://www.youtube.com/@mor10web https://github.com/mor10
I don’t think he meant YOU specifically.
the mere fact of having an account there means they don’t care about their privacy IMO.
would have been clearer then?
and in that case, we can say that for mor10, as an educator, reach is probably more important than strict privacy
I meant the user on TikTok, I used “you” in a general sense. I apologize that wasn’t clear.
And after a quick review of the links you posted (<5 min), it looks like he’s more a software design and ethics enthusiast than a privacy advocate. The fact that he has no privacy-friendly platforms on their website and the only ones listed are perhaps the worst for personal privacy (LinkedIn and TikTok) makes me more confident that my assessment is correct.
It’s certainly not conclusive though, since other privacy advocates also tend to have accounts at those places (e.g. Naomi Brockwell has IG and Twitter (hasn’t updated to X lol) in addition to TikTok, LinkedIn, and YT, but she also has Odyssey, which is a step in the right direction. She’s looking for maximum reach, and her content is almost exclusively about privacy. I would prefer that she also have PeerTube, Matrix, etc, but she’s targeting a specific demographic here.
So yeah, idk, but it definitely seems that privacy isn’t nearly as important to him as software ethics, and those are very different (though related) things.
Most of them are joking about reuniting with their Chinese spy
Right? The tech-user bubble is funny, sometimes. The average TikTok user couldn’t care less about privacy, they care about having an app that delivers the experience they want. The reason many aren’t going to Instagram reels and Youtube shorts is because their algorithms and content are awful.
Similar vibes as “Why are Twitter users going to Bluesky and not Mastodon? Are they stupid?”
Meanwhile the mainstream will probably just focus on Instagram and its reels feature as pretty much all bigger creators crosspost everything there as well.
Not with a ten meter cattle prod for me, anyone willing to indulge Zuck’s midlife Nazi crisis deserves him.
Not with a ten meter cattle prod for me
I’m waiting for by Loops verification mail but I’d say the average Lemmy user has not that much in common with the average TikTok/IG user.
the average Lemmy user has not that much in common with the average TikTok/IG user
The fact that they managed to clone the most idiotic and brainwashing platform on the internet proves that they are pretty average.
Meanwhile the mainstream would probably just download whatever VPNs they can.
You can still connect to it, the app store has to take it down and it can’t be hosted in the u.s. assuming your ISP allows it, you can still access the TikTok servers outside of the u.s. but that’s going to cause a lot of traffic and ISPs will throttle it or block it completely.
You can still side load the app, not sure how iOS users are going to do that and that’s going to be the majority of people.
So you may or may not still be able to use the current app without a VPN until TikTok updates it or the OEMs push an update that bricks it.
I wonder if Tiktok would respond by making their mobile webapp better in this case.
By the way, if the traffic is throttled and not outright blocked - that would mean things like GoodbyeDPI would be likely possible instead of VPNs!
Connecting to it isn’t hard, But they won’t be able to pay people, so the US content will just get starved out.
We have a similar situation on Youtube - the site itself doesn’t pay the creators anymore. But everyone who had Youtube as a profession is still there. Some depend on a Patreon-like service, some on their own sponsorships.
Youtube has backed down a lot, but they’re still paying their golden geese.
Spiffing britt has let a new recent video payouts out of the bag, a good multi-million hit view video still nets him around 20k.
I meant because of sanctions they don’t receive anything from Youtube itself. Yet they go on.
Ahh, well, we’ll see I suppose.
I’m not actually seeing anything preventing creators from being paid, they’re just going to lose the majority of their u.s. audience on the platform.
They won’t freeze the assets until the company is officially barred from working here. They won’t just fuck around and blindly try to figure out what they’re doing, once they command Apple and Google to remove it from the App store, they’ll start freezing assets and stopping financial transactions. It’s just the nature of the beast.
Way to much credit for the average user.
I am saying this because I saw this happen. Whenever I accidentally peek into a random’s phone on a bus, chances are the homescreen has a VPN app. The blocked social media did have a bit of a decline, but remain very popular, especially Youtube, which was likely the biggest drive for people to bypass the blocks. The lack of credit is more about them often choosing shady VPN services.
In all likelihood, Red Note will be banned banned, probably before the Red Note devs add a built-in translate function.
The instagram reels and YouTube shorts algorithms are utter shit. I’ve tried, but holy shit there’s some crap in there.
“I would rather stare at a language I can’t understand than to ever use a social media [platform] that Mark Zuckerberg owns,” said one user in a video posted to Xiaohongshu on Sunday.
but uh, why tf did they use tiktok in the first place
The problem with the American government trying to propagandize us against China is that there is currently nothing that they can say about China that is not effectively the same or WORSE in the United States.
But China spies on their citizens…
Yeah, that’s the NSA.
They can’t Google Tiananmen Square. They don’t want people knowing their history…
We’re trying to ban history books right now because we don’t like that white people look bad during the slave trade.
But China doesn’t have freedom of press…
All of our press sources have been bought up by billionaires who also contribute enough campaign contributions to effectively own all of our politicians so that they can control which laws are passed as well as control the narrative surrounding those laws.
China doesn’t have freedom of speech…
The United States is officially banning a platform on January 19th that is used by millions of Americans to communicate and share ideas!!!
But China has massive amounts of human rights violations…
Forced birth is a war crime that is happening in America RIGHT NOW. Child marriage is legal in the United States right now. Our prison system is legalized slavery. There is a reason that we have one of the highest incarceration rates in the world. It’s because it’s legalized slavery. The 13th amendment to our constitution says “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” Convenient for a nation that imprisons black people at more than FIVE TIMES the rate of white people.
China is condoning/committing a genocide…
That’s fucking laughable. Smile and say that to America’s indigenous peoples. Say that to Palestine. Say that to Congo. Say that to Sudan. Fuck it… Say that to ANY COUNTRY in the global south.
But the working conditions for the Chinese people are terrible…
We haven’t raised the minimum wage in 15 FUCKING YEARS! The minimum wage is still $7.25 per hour, meaning you could work a full time job and still only make $15,080 per year. BEFORE TAXES!!! With basically no guaranteed benefits. And on top of that, the government is actively banning an app that is a secondary source of income for people.
There is really not much we can say about China right now, in a negative light, that we cannot find some equivalent here in the United States. And on top of that, at least China has universal healthcare. At least China has public transportation. At least in China, they’re not having their kids shot to death on a daily basis. At least in Chin/ they have managed their homeless population. Do you know how we manage our homeless population? We throw the In prison. We take our veterans and turn them into slaves. In China they give them temporary housing and a job.
I’m not going to sit here and condone the awful shit that China is doing and I do not have any desire to live/suffer there, but if you wanted American citizens to actually believe that we are better than China, then maybe we should actually fucking BE BETTER THAN CHINA.
I’m going to miss TikTok. Some of the smartest, kindest, most generous people I’ve met in my whole life, I met on TikTok.
Honestly, you’re probably better off without tiktok. Short form video is bad for humans, and it’s much worse if it’s not educational
I’m genuinely sorry for the potential friends you’ve lost, but tiktok was not a good thing… An American controlled version wouldn’t be better, I hope you double down on the fediverse
The Greeks complained about the youth using paper instead of writing chalk on stone.
The British complained about the youth reading books.
Things change man
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Tik tok is banned what a great observation /s
Short form media is still around and not banned via Instagram snapchat and YouTube shorts.
Do you need it spelled out more? More examples? More details?
Can you find a way to be smarmy?
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O I’m self righteous AND indignant? Man thanks for your virtue signal pointing out MY self righteousness. That’s a SUPER useful skill I’m glad only one person like you exists on the internet. /s
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You actually tricked yourself into believing this isn’t all about shutting down competition to American companies or stopping people’s (especially young people’s) power to disseminate even remotely left leaning views that could gain traction and threaten the oligarchs.
I mean even the politicians who back this bill state as much, so I’m not sure why you think this is about national defense. American citizens are just under as much threat as before, but now they have one less way to express themselves. Ain’t that great. /s
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It can be a corporate move to out competition AND also improve security. These are not mutually exclusive.
to protect the people from outside influence and to protect national defense.
Thats just not true, otherwise we wouldn’t be welcoming a South African who illegally immigrated to the US and has some serious international conflicts-of-interests with US interests control a major social media platform.
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strawman gonna strawman.
Hardly a strawman! We have a major social media company in the US, that is controlled by a foreigner, for their own, and for foreign interests, and impacting our elections with measureable results.
So, obviously, this move wasn’t done to prevent such a thing from happening, just to prevent certain countries from doing it.
you act like it’s the current administration that let’s Elon do whatever he does, but it’s the incoming administration (Trump) that is allowing that.
Our current admin has done nothing to stop it, and therefore allowing it.
Why are all the US Gov accounts STILL on Twitter?
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are you even taking this seriously? did you not even comprehend what I said or are you just blindly responding hoping for a “gotcha”?
That aint a “gotya”, that’s proof it has nothing to do with preventing foreign interests from influencing anything. Because we have a foreign interest influencing it already: Musk.
not obvious, and just because you say it with more conviction doesn’t make it true.
So, we have other large social media networks, that are rife with foreign influence, that already influence the US’s internal politics… But yet, banning tiktok was to prevent it from happening?
Its either true, or its not. And in this case, its not true. The sole reason was to keep China specifically, and it only arose because people in the US were learning about shit that US supports. Which the US doesn’t want.
by that logic, then you’re just as guilty for allowing them to do nothing. so what gives you the right to complaint about it if you haven’t done anything to stop them?
Except, they’re not trying to stop foreign influence. They are trying to stop one country, and they only took notice because of news that is damning to the US.
there are so many reasons why but you’re just too emotional and inexperienced to see them, but I’ll point out a couple just so you can see how absurd you’re being.
And… with all your excuses… How come nothing is being done still? Its not new that Elon is a fascist. And it’s not new that Elon is in bed with several foreign interests that are hostile to the US… In fact, its at least 6 years old news at this point.
But tiktok. home of the Pro-Palestinian content is what is being gone after now. Not the Fascists running Twitter, or Facebook… Wonder why that is? Could it be their political donations?
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I don’t want to rain on everyone’s parade but I think the law bans all apps with over 1 million users that are based in China, Russia, Iran, or North Korea (“foreign adversary controlled applications”) where you can make a profile and share content. WeChat would definitely count. So, Red Note is probably/possibly going away soon too. I guess VKontakte is Russian and still in the app stores.
The media is focused on creators and TikTok, obviously. But a WeChat ban would probably suck for people with grandparents in China since that’s the “everything app” there. (I don’t know what China bans but even if there’s other messaging apps allowed in China, teaching your elderly Chinese grandma to use a different app on a ~12h time zone difference is probably not a fun activity.)
Russia is no longer an adversary with the incoming administration, Putin owns Trump and their interests are now are own.
Their interests are his interests, not ours.
No sarcasm, I’m happy that you agree. But we have no power to stop whatever the fuck he’s going to do, so we’re just talking semantics.
It’s any app they can point to as being controlled. It does not matter where it is based. As an example they could allege that one of the owners of Discord has Russian contacts and is therefore controlled by a foreign adversary. (He was born in Kharkiv, Ukraine; where contact between Russians and Ukrainians wasn’t uncommon before the current war.)
Congress can request a briefing but if they want to prevent a fire sale they have to pass an entirely new bill amending the law.
And this article is so transparently an ad for Red Note it’s ridiculous.
“NOOOO the foreign man who’s been fucking me is gone, I MUST find a new foreign man to fuck me or I will die!” -Idiot humans
foreign man
Why „foreign man”? Why not „Capitalist”? Or „Megacorporation”?
Foreign people are not the only ones who are fucking you over.
Why „foreign man”? Why not „Capitalist”? Or „Megacorporation”?
In this specific case, the man fucking them over is banned because it’s foreign. The position of domestic man fucking them over is not vacant so they only need to find a replacement for the position of foreign man fucking them over.
The foreign capitalist/imperialist app ran by a despot who approved this app for me to useeeeeee.
OK then, foreign communist megacorporation & government
Communist mega corporation and government? What strain is that
The China kind.
“We may disclose any of the Information We Collect to respond to subpoenas, court orders, legal process, law enforcement requests, legal claims, or government inquiries, and to protect and defend the rights, interests, safety, and security of the Platform, our affiliates, users, or the public. We may also share any of the Information We Collect to enforce any terms applicable to the Platform, to exercise or defend any legal claims, and comply with any applicable law.”
Wow, a very normal, and widespread TOS part. Which almost EVERY SINGLE COMPANY has. And whatever yammer yer were doing with “communist mega corporation” is also very strange. I hope for the better of yer.
No.
Many companies in the western world will not freely give your information to law enforcement and will even actively fight it. We saw that with apple, we saw that with signal and specifically in germany, we had some other smaller profile cases that have fought law enforcement.
In China, companies are forced to give the government free access to all of its information without any subpoena or anything needed. Which is why many western companies can’t do business in china themselves without having a Chinese partner company that handles it for them (Blizzard needed NetEase, for example)
Apple?? You used apple as an example? Apple that finally settled the lawsuit where siri recorded conversations and they sent them off to third parties? Comical.
Taiwanese communist? What world do you live in?
Why try to hype this as a trend?
because “red note” paid them to?
I look forward to the people who don’t realize that Red Note will just get banned too.
I don’t think they care. For most, this is just a middle finger to the government
The problem is that that sometimes if you give the government the finger… you might not get it back.
You just need to be careful of which part of gov you give the finger to, and where you are when you give it.
Snowden did it the right way, he gave the middle finger on foreign soil and made it to an enemy of the state’s soil before the gov caught up.
Middle finger to the US or Chinese government?
It goes both ways, users are giving the middle finger to the US gov, the US gov is giving the middle finger to the Chinese gov. Lots of middle fingers flying around.
I’m not really one for Tik Tok, but I went on REDNote to see what it was about and it was incredibly wholesome seeing American and Chinese people getting to interact as normal human beings and understand each other without it being filtered through our governments. Even if they don’t shut down Tik Tok, they’re gonna have to shut that shit down. Can’t have future soldiers seeing their “enemies” as humans.
I wonder if they’re actually chinese troll farms
Insane to me that people can be this xenophobic. Wholesome Chinese people? No internet troll farm.
China paying entire offices of people to be friendly, entertaining, and educational to foreigners online would be cool actually.
Who like all of them? Why?
For those unfamiliar:
The 50 Cent Party, also known as the 50 Cent Army or wumao, are Internet commentators who are paid by the authorities of the People’s Republic of China to spread the propaganda of the governing Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The program was created during the early phases of the Internet’s rollout to the wider public in China.
I’m kind of surprised by the response in the comments. Generally I think Lemmy is anti Tik Tok and I don’t understand why. You don’t have to like the shit but why do people have to be so negative about what other people do with their free time?
I think people here are just trying to be edgy and hate tik tok because it’s popular.
I’m in the camp that thinks in 25 years there will be some regretful studies about how attention span demolishing apps like TikTok and yt shorts fucked civilizations progress for the next 150 years. I’d agree with you if I only cared about my lifespan and what happens inside of it. Some people want to see progress across the centuries even if we don’t get to live it. TikTok is a sign of regression, whether there is good content or not.
That is a terrible mentality that is essentially “your generation bad, my generation better”.
People have been saying the same thing about any new technology. They said it about phones, they said it about tv, they’ll say it about literally anything. To boil down a generations problems to an app is ridiculous.
Sure but after phones and TV we raised gays, disabled, and the mentally ill out of the mud, transformed nations, inspired by inclusive initiatives humanity went through 50 years of progress.
After 20 years of social media we’ve full regressed to 1938. I think if you look around, there is some pretty obvious proof, society’s critical thinking has been intentionally dismantled by these social media algorithms and the bad actors that manipulate facts around them.
Congratulations you’ve been successfully brainwashed by Fox News. I’m not even going to address everything wrong with your comment. May God have mercy on your soul.
Literally never watched a second of fox news in my life but ok. I was just sarcastically grasping at straws cause that’s what you did. There are measurable impacts on society caused by social media but if you wanna ignore that go ahead.
I’ll tell you this for nothing, not many kids know how to knap flint any more, and there’s the truth!
Tiktok is Chinese spyware, that’s been caught again and again to send user data to servers in China. How can anyone in their right mind not be outspoken and negative about this shit?
Users leaving tiktok in favor of xhs are totally insane.
I understand it perfectly, if american companies harvest their data, their govt is only a step from having it, and companies over here have immediate use of that data.
If the chinese companies have it, the chinese govt has it, and then what? Is china gonna prosecute us internationally with the info? At minimum they are making the US companies and govt crawl to china for the data they so desperately want.
Like, the US gets more use of data on US citizens than China would. Maybe if the concern was improving the security of american apps and data I would see the point, but seeing how many american companies continue to get away with it, it is blatant “America Good, others Bad”
But why give your data to anyone? I totally understand the argument that you don’t want your own government to have it, but willingly surrendering it to another nation is sketchy at best. With Lemmy, Mastodon and Pixelfed there are sufficient tracking-free alternatives with solid enough apps for most use cases.
Fair, but alot of people are going to wind up on a corporate social media anyways, and if they aren’t willing to jump over to more private options this is a mitigation of the damage and simultaneously is an act of defiance, so while not the best choice, I still regard it as better than, say, anything Meta owns. So I feel this shouldnt be beaten down on so hard, but rather used as a chance to say “Yeah, that is a step, but here are some better options”. Talking down about their choice on a platform they already aren’t on as if it is somehow worse than what is being pushed on them is just screaming into the void.
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China treats data as bad as the US, I want neither of them to have access.
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This is so funny because it’s suppose to sound scary but no one actually gives a fuck.
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It really puzzles me that many people in this thread that don’t know to what degrees an authoritarian country censors their dada, never lived in one, and can’t read their language, somehow think giving your personal information to that one is better. Being able to discuss such things is already a privilege. If your bag has to be searched twice a day just to be able to commute, I thought you will at least feel uncomfortable.
Agree. I lived in China until last August and left after about 7 years, my wife is Chinese, I speak Chinese. Yet I was alienated on a near constant basis (comes with not looking Chinese, I guess).
Luckily I avoided most of the bag searches by driving my own car (and admittedly, at least where I was at the searches on subway stations were half assed at best), but it sure is a nuisance to be under constant surveillance.
Lemmy is Anti-Tiktok, but Lemmy is even more Anti-America
fucking idiots
Why? Cuz Chinese bad? Stolen data bad? I think you don’t understand that there is no safe data. It doesn’t matter who is taking it but your data is owned by someone. If not the Chinese it’s the US government. If not them then you’re phone provider. If you purchase ANYTHING, that store is collecting your data.
Not Chinese bad, Chinese government bad. because the Chinese government has so much control, Chinese companies can’t be trusted. yes, stolen data is bad. I know that data is being stolen anyway, but tiktok has historically been very bad about it. however, i was reffering to them moving from one shitty Chinese platform to another even more shitty and even more Chinese (as in controlled more by the Chinese government) one, when there are platforms that are from places that do not have an authoritarian government able to control any company if they so choose. of course something like instagram (reels) or youtube shorts isn’t much better in terms of data theft, but who has the data does matter no matter how hard you’re coping.
I don’t get it, are they going to steal my bank login? Like what’s so bad about knowing I liked a fried meme?
It’s more than just what you do in the app though. Check out some of the data any random website can find out about you here: privacy.net/analyzer/
Expand that into an app, given lots of permissions, that is tied to your phone number and email account. Given enough time and logging, it knows where you live and work, when you commute and sleep, every WiFi or mobile network you connect to and where they are located. This metadata is linked to your account and in-app activity. They have this data for you, your friends, colleagues, that weird guy you see on the bus every day… Right now, the app just uses all this to influence “your algorithm” (side note: this is also why people think some apps are actively ‘listening’ to conversations). But imagine a case where the govt owner of the app wants to start pushing a specific narrative, gradually swaying opinions or sowing the seeds of discourse, reinforcing it with the artificial echo chamber that is your new algorithm. /TedTalkThey are stealing data that can be (and is, often) used to track you across the entire internet. many social media platforms (again, especially tiktok) use this data to straight up manipulate people into spending more time on their platform and having views that align with the interests of the company. this is especially bad if the interests of the company are really the interests of an authoritarian government that is blatantly hostile to other countries unprovoked.
Your statement applies whether we’re talking about American or Chinese companies. One of these countries has affordable groceries, the other has school shootings.
But yeah yeah “what about Tianeman Square, and Taiwan?” OK sure, fine. What about police brutality and the ENTIRE MIDDLE EAST?
You are just parroting shit you read on the internet and I feel bad for you. You literally have no idea how fucked we all are in terms of our data being stolen. I guess you want to be the one who determine who fucks you. Well TikTok users are doing the same
You are essentially virtue signaling that you are so much more security minded than everyone because you “safeguard your data”. I’m sorry to burst your bubble but our oligarch owns our data and is selling it to the highest bidder. The fact that you own a phone/computer means your data has already been bought and sold.
What if that’s what they were talking about? That’s it’s idiotic to ban it given everything you just said.
People keep making this argument comparing TikTok to American social media companies when talking about data.
What is hard to understand? Americans are fine with other Americans or American companies having their data. Americans are not fine with China having their data.
It is pretty simple.
I’d rather the Chinese government have my data than the US government. The US government has a lot more power over me.
This sentiment will be the downfall of America. Maybe that’s what you want. Not me.
It isn’t just about data, but influence.
Okay so China bad, America good?
That’s one way to look at it, not my intent but if that’s how you took it, enjoy.
More like, foreign control of my mental state is bad.
It really just sounds like unintentional racism to me. A vague dislike and distrust of foreigners. Nobody able to prove the Chinese intentions are any worse than the American gov’s intentions.
I agree mas data collection is wrong, but if we’re gonna be upset, it’s gotta cover the whole topic, not just china
From the frying pan into the fire. Well done.
They don’t view it as a fire or frying pan, obviously
Those users:
I will always upvote Kung Pow!
Good ole wimp lo.
We trained him wrong. As a joke.
“Hold on. Stand still as I do a back flip over your shoulders so I can kick you in the face bro.”
“Ok bro”I do recommend the movie, if you haven’t seen it!
Oh, yep, I love Kung Pow! It was one of the more memorable ones growing up. It’s tupid fun watching it every time.
Wow. They really went with Xiao hong shu?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotations_from_Chairman_Mao_Tse-tung
I knew Xiao Hong shu translated to little red book, but I didn’t put two and two together until now. That’s freaking hilarious
I thought it was hilarious for the same reason, but I don’t think anyone in Chinese refers to that book as 小红书. It’s the 红宝书. I’ve never been to China and perhaps google/Baidu/Pleco isn’t going to perhaps pick up that kind of usage, but I think it is more of a cross cultural accident.
It’s an obvious cultural reference.
https://collection.sina.cn/yejie/2015-01-21/detail-ichmifpx5063889.d.html
The article is about a bookstore in Manhattan, called “Little Red Books” though. Your link is an abbreviated translation of this article, which you might notice from the link at the bottom. I don’t know if that serves as the kind of linguistic evidence that’s called for here.
You are correct - I had forgotten (been quite a while). I still think it’s funny but thanks for pointing this out.
But 宝 (Bǎo) means “precious” or “treasured” and 红宝书 probably only gets translated as little red book because it sounds better in English.