decades of US propaganda undone in just a few days of Americans interacting with Chinese netizens on Xiaohongshu

The funniest part of the 'social credit score' bullshit is we absolutely have it here in the United States. It's called your credit fucking score. So many aspects of life are gatekept by access to money which, in the current economy, means access to debt, which is controlled by: your credit score. And it can absolutely negatively impact your life. And not just prejudices from private citizens.
You try driving a beat up clunker of a car through nice neighborhoods and see how long until a cop shows up to ask what you're doing there. That's a state actor. You try sending your kids to a good school when you can't get a loan to live in a house in a good school district. That's municipal government. You try renting an apartment without a fucking pay stub. God. Damn. We live in a society governed by money. Having access to money is a social metric aka a "sCoRe" you fucking barbells.
- I'm also 99% sure credit is tied to your family just from anecdotal evidence. Both me and my friend signed up for credit cards the same day at the age of 18.
  He could only get a "secured" credit card with a $150 limit, while I had an insane limit for a kid making minimum wage.
  Of course his parents filed for bankruptcy years before that, but it does make me wonder.
  
  It absolutely does tie in to your family. And where you live. And a host of other factors outside your control. And not just passively like that. A shitty parent can fuck up your life by doing fraud in your name or vice versa. And now you're stained by it and it can haunt you like a ghost for years.
  
  My mom took out my first credit card as a joint family account, so I not only had her positive credit, I could make purchases and she could immediately repay them. For example, sometimes I'd buy our groceries or pay the electric bill. That way, I was building up credit without actually doing anything.
  
  In Europe there is tons of private credit info systems, white lists etc. which overlaps or don't and works pretty randomly for example if someone do some scam on your name you could get permanently blacklisted or not, depend if you get reported and you might get to clear your name or not.
- Didn't you know? Usonians are in front of mirrors at all times, spew incoherent garbage nonsense about social credit scores, china genocideded muslims and 500 gorillion homeless then pretend they don't recognize themselves in the process.

I also wonder about the opposite of this like since rednote is mostly kind of a space for more pro western liberalized Chinese young people, how many of them are gonna get scared straight talking to Americans lol
- Exactly, while Americans are discovering that much of what their government said about China was false, the Chinese are realizing that conditions in the US are as bad, or worse, than their own government said.
  
  Just saw this on Twitter lol
  
  Mass shootings in the US get way less coverage in China because it gets to a point where people start dismissing it as propaganda. Big ones make the news for a while, but most of them get touched on briefly and the news moves on.
  Like, surely, after your 3rd mass shooting in a decade, the government would step in and do something about it, right?
  
  Reminds me of a saying from the SSRs after '91: "Everything they told us about communism was a lie, and everything they told us about capitalism was true."
  Except, you know, Chinese people seem to really like their communist party
- was thinking this. the radicalization can go both ways
  
  Also I don't know how much these types of posts say anything about anything because these people have no object permanence and tend to believe whatever's in front of them or the last thing said to them. They have probably looked at Chinese netizens debunking of their priors with the same scrutiny as their original wrong opinions. XHS gets banned and all of these people will revert to treatlerites within 1 hour of returning to instagram or w/e.
- So many are so surprised about how expensive it is to live in the US, and how the median citizen really doesn't earn enough to live well. College tuition and student loans are another one.

It'd be really, really funny if the TikTok ban is the domino that begins the collapse of the US empire in earnest.
- Reposting this one
  
  Ban tick tock? Guess they're out of time
- that would be the funniest catalyst for the collapse
- I mean with how absolutely astoundingly incompetent the Biden administration was I could see their actions being another "stepping on a rake" moment.
  
  China is truly evil. Why did they put so many rakes around Biden? Don't they know he's senile?
- Unironically it’s a huge move that will piss off a lot of people. Half of Americans use TikTok. Half. If you’re in a room with 30 people, 15 of them have TikTok on their phone, and 14 are pissed about this ban.
  You know what has less monthly users than TikTok does? The New York Times and the Washington Post. Put their monthly readerships together and it’s about equal to TikTok, except you know they have like a 90% overlap. Also waaaaay more than TV news has viewers, honestly adding all TV news viewers together still might not beat TikTok.
  TikTok is absolutely massive and is arguably the dominant force in American culture. Banning it for reasons that literally everyone except my father can see are bullshit is a good way to piss off a lot of people for no gain.
  
  Well Meta and Google are convinced there's a payoff.
  It's kinda wild how completely I missed TikTok taking off and now I feel like I'm watching this big zeitgeist moment from the sidelines.
  
  what's funny is that TikTok is controlled by the CIA and Israel. They're only doing this for silly propaganda reasons.
  https://www.mintpressnews.com/nato-tiktok-pipeline-why-tiktok-employing-national-security-agents/280336/
  https://www.mintpressnews.com/288710-tiktok-isnt-anti-israel-its-hired-unit-8200-agents-to-run-its-affairs/288710/

Let's go!
But yea this is just a drop in the bucket. Every person I talk to in America has this warped view of China. The propaganda here is quite effective, cause even people who call themselves apolitical or barely know anything can recite anti-china talking points
- That's why direct interactions between people are so important. As soon as Americans start talking to the Chinese, they quickly realize that they've been fed bullshit their whole lives. And while it's still a small number of people talking, I think it will grow because of networking effects. People will tell their friends, and they will get curious, and so on. I really think this is an incredibly important moment.
- You can even track how effective it is over time. Negative views on china in the us and canada jumped 30% in like 15 years.
  
  What happened in 2015/2016 (ish?) to have that dip?
- I thought MMOs and online gaming would do this when I was little, nah gamers can't be helped.
  
  Just about every game I've ever played has regional servers meaning that US players never get to interact with people from other countries, often not even English speaking Europe. There's only a few exceptions to that like EVE Online and their large Russian communities, but even then the groups tend to self-segregate.
  Things might be different if everyone was just always forced to play together.
  
  What few Russian words I know are solely from staying up late and only finding Russians to play Left 4 Dead with lmao

Reminds me of this quote:
"Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime." -Mark Twain
- Exactly, and the beauty of social media is that it's a lot cheaper than travel making it possible for millions of people to get exposure to other cultures for free.
  
  I know many people who are infatuated with travel and rush around the globe visiting places two weeks at a time. If you really want to understand a place stay there a minimum of six months, otherwise you will just be getting the Readers Digest version. I have seen hoards of travelers descend on a location at one time and all that they do is change the character of the place by their presence. This is especially true for cruise ships. Also all of this excessive travel has a huge carbon footprint.
- Nonsense. Talk to anyone who has visited France or Paris specifically.
  
  Funnily enough people I know were treated better than they expected in Paris, and worse than they expected in Barcelona. Came out of Europe thinking all the racists were in Spain.
  
  May also not apply in Italy
  
  Didn’t Twain specifically go to Palestine and say “damn based empty desert”? Or have I been dershed once again
- Nice, thx for that. Made a meme of it here: https://lemmy.ml/post/24890041

under an edit about china fighting fascist japan

- PRC+USSR propaganda posters with hunky dudes? Move over. It's time for cats.

Honestly really wholesome to see, which means the US will step in any second to stop this.
- Trump gonna throw out an EO banning it on like day 2
  
  Step away from the lathe. https://edition.cnn.com/2025/01/15/tech/trump-tiktok-ban/index.html

It's amazing seeing normies with profiles full of cat photos comment about how they are realizing how misinformed they are on China.

I just signed up last night and the amount of content like this rules

And they thought they could never suffer their "radio free europe" event

I personally thought China had Sanda instead of BJJ/judo. They are rank 4 in judo at the Olympics.
I saw videos of people doing BJJ and judo and it's every bit like it is in the anglosphere
I am not immune to propaganda
- with 1.5b+ people surely they have everything. there are an excess of black belts these days. they're all over the world starting gyms
  
  there are an excess of black belts these days
  Less than 1 in 1000 BJJ students get their black belt so jot that down
  I'm likely to get my black belt in a few months
  
  But more constructively, I saw an interesting conversation regarding the fidelity and information communicated by belts. It was the idea that you have a badge system for people who have been in the sport for a long time without competition results. So you still celebrate long time contribution to the art but you don't make a claim about their martial competency. Maybe you could have gilded belts for universally recognized competition results. So you have 5+ stripes for competency in different sections of the art, gilded lining for comp results, and the normal ranking. It would be more complicated and flashy, so there's pros and cons.

Reminds me of that Declassified CIA Report from 1983, which confirmed that the average Soviet Citizen ate around the same, albeit slightly less, calories as the average US Citizen, thus giving insight on how the Soviet Union wasn't full of starving individuals.
- sadly Americans never had a chance to talk to Soviet citizens back then

Do you have the full versions of the videos in the picture? I found the first one https://www.tiktok.com/@shuswap_doug/video/7459845225922530566
- ah that's the one I managed to find as well
- iirc they're in here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSkAbDbvVOY
  
  I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
  yewtu.be
  inv.nadeko.net
  yt.artemislena.eu
  piped.video

Okay, vulnerability time.
The social credit system isn't real?
Now, is it a flat out fabrication, hasn't been implemented yet, or not real in the sense that it doesn't exist in the why we've been told it does? I would also really appreciate a source, one that a westoid like me would trust to be unbiased would be great, but I won't give you a hard time for not supplying one.
- it's not real, and even western media reported on this before
  https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/09/15/china-social-credit-system-authoritarian/
  https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/11/16/chinas-orwellian-social-credit-score-isnt-real/
- You might also find it interesting how Chinese users react to being asked about it:
  https://xcancel.com/KHAMCHANH/status/1879651724308398141
  But yeah, it's always been utter nonsense, and was debunked years ago. But these sort of fabrications and twisted stories work well, because people will easily believe whatever they hear and read about a country they're supposed to see as an enemy.
- There are some big companies that have loyalty rewards programs and some assign numbers to it, but it's generally like it is here in the west. It's not a government thing.
  The government thing is basically just intense accounting. They keep very close track of financial stuff and though it's mostly aimed at businesses, they also note when individuals take out loans or credit cards and that can impact a person's life if they default. People and companies can also be blacklisted for stuff like fraud. But again, that's pretty much the same in the west too.
  It's true that there is less anonymity in China though because people have to use their real names for everything. Like on social media, even if a user has a screen name, their legal name is still tied to their account through their phone number or internet connection or associated bank account (you can do online shopping through basically every Chinese app) or all of the above. Westerners nominally have more privacy in that regard but let's be real, if a western government wanted to know who's behind an "anonymous" internet post, they would know.
- Fabrication https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/09/15/china-social-credit-system-authoritarian/
- Looks like it exists but is fragmented and mainly for companies. Though the stories about foreign police and VPNs in companies seem real.
- Thanks to everyone who responded! I've found it helpful!

The people on that app are funny and sweet, it's cute. Time to start learning Mandarin!

Actually I have some very smart communists here to say that this is meaningless and irrelevant