The “Other Country's App”
With a few weeks left until the impending ban, I began seeing the videos on my FYP. “Where are we going? Where should we meet? How will we find each other? What’s the next best app?”
Comment sections were peppered with suggestions. BlueSky. Clapper. Instagram. YouTube. And then, the other country’s app. I watched its name appear with increasing frequency, and then the joke – it’s actually a FULLY owned Chinese app. We loved this. The protest of it. The hilarity and the irony. And so, I took off early – a week before the ban – with the first wave of TikTokers – to scope things out.
After downloading the app and fumbling through the account registration that was written entirely in Mandarin, I arrived on scene.
It looked like the Chinese Instagram on there. Everything was painstakingly curated to the maximum levels of esthetic, visual pleasure. The ordinary was being pushed towards unreasonable, unrealistic perfection. I was instantly bored.
I quickly located a few of the best translation tools, and got to work. I had gained over a hundred followers almost immediately, and many of those accounts were in my DM’s. I largely ignored them. I hadn't come here just for protests and funsies. I was dead set on extracting as much knowledge as I could during my virtual trip to China. And so, I hunted the comment sections of old posts. I zeroed in on users who were posting and commenting intellectually, deeply, thoughtfully, and seemed to have a balanced and sensible perspective. The smart people. I was looking for the smart people. The nerds. The free thinkers – if such a thing could even exist, be recognized, spoken, or visible whatsoever in a citizen who is being closely monitored, restricted and controlled.
I located these people, regardless of opposing opinions, beliefs, theories, lifestyles etc. I wanted to make sure that I was able to speak with a wide array of people, so that I could experience the most accurate view of their government and way of life. I made it a priority to converse with the young, the old, the “rich”, the poor, male and female, parents, and everyone in between. I attacked it like I attack everything else. An experiment. A social experiment that I hoped would open up my perspective, increase my awareness, and grow me.
I did not anticipate the level of awareness that I received.
I spent the next six days, around the clock, in conversations. Images and screenshots flew back and forth. New, fast “friends” were made in days, and several made the jump to other platforms with me.
The most enlightening conversations I had were with people who were clearly using fake accounts, VPN’s, and circumventing the systems in order to speak more freely. This is how I learned that the consistent and universal message that was being spread on the beautifully curated feed of the app was intentional propaganda. And my fellow TikTokers were falling for it.
While they were being spoon fed lies about a utopian society in which every citizen emphatically agreed that they had solved all of the problems that the US struggles with, I was hearing messages that were more closely aligned with reality.
I was banned from WeChat after just one day, after having sent words related to sexuality to a Chinese citizen. In order to reinstate your account, your must find someone in good standing who will vouch for you. If no one will (because why would they want to be electronically tied forever to a sexual deviant), then you are locked in place. Unable to use public transportation, enter public spaces, communicate with others, or do anything other than make payments to your masters.
Before I had put all of the pieces together, it was time to move back to TikTok and watch “The Finale” go down. And boy, did it go down. In the flurry of scrolls through the FYP, everyone desperately trying to get one last hit of this particular brand of dopamine, a video hit my feed. It was this woman, directing us towards a subreddit where we could congregate after TikTok went dark. I joined it immediately.
The “founder”of the sub is this woman – I do not know her TikTok username, nor have I ever seen her before.
The subreddit ballooned to 75k members nearly overnight. Very quickly, we were routed to several additional venues:
A Telegram group by the name of “Voices United”, which appeared to be pretty militia/revolution-focused.
A Signal group that branched out into a Discord server and then
Separate Discord servers for each US state.
Once everyone was settled, I returned to the other country’s app to watch the next influx of Americans arrive on scene. These ones were rowdier than the original wave that had migrated. They began posting en masse about the corruption and deception of the US government, and strangely, although political discussions are against the rules, this apparently did not apply to US users. The frenzy and the insanity of it all was a sight to behold. Young, enraged Americans arriving on an app with hundreds of millions of Chinese netizens, all of them willing and ready to patiently listen to their woes, empathasize with them, and then sell them the same brainwashed lies that the CCP had sold them since the day they were born.
But for me, I was having a different experience entirely. One that spiraled into the most terrifying scenario of my entire life.
Unable to delete my account or my profile photo, I deleted as much as I could and uninstalled the app. I ran multiple scans on my phone for potential data leaks and to try to ensure security and privacy moving forward.
And then, I hopped to our subreddit to share my experience and my findings, and hopefully, to direct people away from something that actually IS a threat to our democracy. To tell them that unfortunately, we had been bamboozled. Our government had been right on this one. China should have NO access to us – digitally or otherwise. None whatsoever.
What occurred after I posted to Reddit was the most terrifying part of the entire experience. And what I learned during my time there, and my fight to be heard and exercise the free speech that we were all fighting for, chilled me to my bones.
And it is why I will never even dip a toe into mainstream social media again, and for as long as I live.