River Page is now joining me to talk about that article. River Welcome to the show.
First of all, Hi Mandy, Thanks thanks for having me.
So, first of all, tell people why there are TikTok refugees going to Red Note if they have not heard the story.
So there's a last year Congress passed a bill that requires by Dance, which is the Chinese parent company of TikTok, to sell TikTok to an American buyer before this coming Sunday.
They just the Spreme Court just heard arguments.
They're supposed to be release their findings Friday because basically by dancers saying no, we don't want to sell, but it looks like the spring Court is going to make them sell. So far they've signaled that like they're not going to sell to any American, although they could be changing now because the Chinese seem reportedly are on board
with the Alumnusk buying it. Mister Beast, I just found out the YouTuber is trying to buy, so like things could change, but for right now, and especially earlier this week, it seemed like Red Book I'm sorry TikTok was going to be banned by Sunday, and so people started flocking to Red Note aka Red Book as in, you know, our our favorite quotations from the Chairman Melson dog when I was a little Red Book, also.
Called in Chinese Xiaohongshu. And so.
They're going there basically out of spite for American regulators for taking away an app that they love, because the Chinese are spying of them. But you know, if you grow up in my generation of twenty nine, you know you don't really have any expectation of privacy online. So people don't really take you know, the government's protection of their data as like something earnest. They think it's a sort of cynical ploy to pical narratives, that sort of thing.
We had a spirited discussion about this on the show earlier, and for me, it has more to do with the fact that Chinese is a geopolitical foe, right, I mean, that's the thing that gets me. That's the tough nut to swallow. But in your article, which I think is hilarious, that you point out that all of their privacy notices are in Chinese, so you may have given them your four K and your first born child.
What are you seeing.
Because you joined Red Note to see what was going on, and you're seeing Chinese people and American people interact on red note correct.
Yeah, yeah, it's actually kind of lovely. The Chinese they want to see our cats. For some reason, they've implemented something called the cat tax, where if you're an American you post something, they immediately.
Get in the comments and they're like, show me your cat.
What about a dog?
I'm a dog owner.
I'm not a cat person. Do I get bounced off red note because I have a dog?
No?
Apparently there's something in the red note tax where if you don't have a cat, you can use a dog. I even saw a horse, so that they're pretty flexible. They're more flexible than the irs, I might add. But yeah, it's actually I mean, it's cute. I haven't seen anything like overtly political. It just the Chinese people seem sort of like the funnel. They're like, why are all these Americans here all of a sudden, But they're like asking for help with their English homework.
Which is hilarious.
You know, they're pretty cool. I mean, I you know.
Well, you know what's funny. In your article you talk about people, you know, asking questions about what it's like to live in America and my favorite hello from your new Chinese spy. These kind of comments. But they're asking questions about Americans in life here and culture, and I'm guessing I'm hoping at least that some Americans are asking questions about them. I mean, is that going is it going both ways or is the interest in one direction only?
Well, Americans love talking about themselves. A lot of the questions are like what do you think about America? Or like what do you think about you know, so even like Florida and you know, then the Chinese people will be like do you live with crocodiles? And it's like, no, alligators, but its close enough, you know, that's sort of thing. But yeah, I mean they're asking questions like do you have to sell your house to uh, you know, pay
your medical bills? And people are like, no, we just to ignore the bill collectors, you know, like it's it's still kind of hug and cheap. But yeah, I mean, they're they're people do seem to be like interested in each other. The Chinese weirdly, I mean, because they have like the Great Firewall where if you want to interact with Chinese people are rather Chinese people are banned from like the apps that people all over the world use,
like Instagram, Facebook, it's so forth. So we haven't really had this cultural exchange before where it's like, you know, you go on any other social media site and you're seeing Japanese people, Europeans, that sort of thing. We've never really interacted our Americans have never really acted with interactive with Chinese people on this big of a scale.
So it's interesting to see.
And that's kind of what caught my attention because I firmly believe that the Chinese Communist government will not let this continue because of the Great Firewall they have been able to sow carefully craft what a majority of Chinese people have access to. There are Chinese people who have VPNs and they have ways of getting the outside web, But for a vast majority of Chinese people that are just going about their daily lives, they're not exposed to
any of this stuff. And this has got to be a nightmare for the Chinese Communist government that now they have their citizens freely interacting with the Great Satan, right with the enemy of their geopolitical foe. I just don't I don't know if they pull the app out of China or if they pull the app out of the United States. I don't know how long they let that continue.
That was my first thought about this whole thing, because to your point, it's kind of cool, right, it's neat that people are just communicating.
I think that's great. Yeah, yeah, I mean that's a good point.
One thing I will say is that I've been seeing posts about how like if you try to look up tiedum and square or something on red Book, like nothing comes up. So this is still a China based app, so it is still subject to the Chinese censorship laws. So maybe, you know, maybe the government will ban it. Maybe they won't ban it because they still roll it in a way, like they far more than they control TikTok, right, you know, they have a lot more direct control over Red Book.
So that's still an open question to me.
I mean, I think like the American government might not care for it too much either, because you know, the Chinese government is authoritarian, but you do see Chinese people just living like fairly normal, comfortable lives, and like it doesn't if you're an American government trying to create kinda as a sort of like North Korea style, you know, state that oppresses people and like every aspect of their lives, like that doesn't quite come across just because, as is
the case with like even you know, the Soviet Union, if you're a political dissident, obviously life is health you. But if you're just like a normal person, you know, it doesn't really show. The oppression doesn't necessarily show up in your everyday life because you've just grown up knowing how to comply the things you can and can't say.
It becomes like second.
Nature, right, So you just see people Chinese people playing with cats and like living in decent apartments and cooking food, and you're.
Like, yeah, it doesn't look like that that over there.
And so I think like the sort of hostility could come for both governments where as people understand each other more, it could be you know, the average Chinese and the average American being like, why are we fighting with these people they see and just like us?
Right yep, Now, I think that's a great point. And I just wonder who's going to blink first. But hopefully this will, this kind of back and forth will continue because it's it's bound to be productive, right, And it's my understanding that TikTok itself is banned in China.
Correct, that's correct.
Yeah, I mean that's ironic right there. But I want to tell you that, Yeah, I'm just you know, we're just saying. I want to talk about another article you did because it caught my eye because I totally agreed with the headline, and the headline is porn is inevitable. And it's about this story before the Supreme Court right now that some states are requiring age verification on porn sites. And you know, as a mom whose daughter is going to have to date boys that learned about sex from pornography,
I'm concerned about this. But the inevitability of porn I absolutely agree with. Like it's been around since the beginning of photographs. I bet you there was pornographic cave drawings at some point. We just haven't seen them.
So there are like it credates the written word.
Yeah, yeah, And so what happens here in this case and and you know, what do you think happens next if these sorts of things go into effect?
So if the if these laws are allowed to stand, I don't think it'll make that much of a difference because there are only like a few big porn sites that are actually complying with the laws or just pulling out of the states altogether, like pornhob is pulled out of most of the states that have passed these laws
in Florida, Texas, so forth. But there are still all of these like sketchy sides, most of them based in like Europe or Asia, that are easily accessible just through like a basic Google search.
So.
You know, and even beyond that, if you live in Florida, for example, and want to get on porn howe even though it's been pulled out, you can just like get a VPN. And so my argument was that, like, you know, if parents want to protect their kids from that, let me restate that. Sorry, what the gut, what these states are doing is giving parents a false sense of confidence
that they're fandling the problem when they simply aren't. You can still watch porn in Florida without flashing your ID that you know, up in front of a webcam or another one is like you have to show your face and they use AI to calculate your age bents on your face. You can still access porn in all of these states without doing that. It's probably just going to be on the website, it's going to give you a virus or something. Plus it's on Twitter slash epects something
like thirteen percent of all the material on that is porn. Yeah, and you know you don't have to provide They ask you what your ages whenever you sign up, but you can just lie.
There's you know, they don't verify it anyway.
So I mean it's still a similar thing with Reddit, and so it's still going to be out there. And I think what you know, parents should have been misled to thinking that the problem has been solved. If you don't, if you want to protect your kids from watching porn, you should, you know, stop giving them unfiltered Internet access from the time that they're like eight years old.
You know, there are like softwares.
You can you can put firewalls on your computer, like a you can filters all sorts of different things.
So you know, I think that.
Families have to protect themselves because the government really can't. And the only way it could would be basically to and VPNs implement like mass surveillance of everybody's Internet activity, and it would just be a Weellian It's probably unconstitutional.
I like the way you put it where you said, it's giving parents a false sense of security. Because I think you're exactly right. I think that with these laws, which sound fantastic, solve it's basically playing whack a mole, right, like you hit this one over here and another one
pops up over here. I think the better way to handle this is to have ongoing conversations, uncomfortable conversations with our kids from the time they're like twelve years old, about what pornography is and what it isn't, which is real sex. Okay, my sister gave the best analogy ever, and she said to her son, pornography is to sex like the WWE is to wrestling. Right, It's not anything like Greco Roman wrestling.
It's just it's not.
So you got to have a more personal responsibility as a parent. Even though these conversations are wildly, wildly unpopular. River Page is my guest. He's with the Free Press. You're writing this fantastic. I enjoy reading your work and hopefully we can talk again in the future about another article on something that I find interesting.
River absolutely, thank you so much. Mandy, all Right, have a great day. That's River Page.