The grass is rarely greener

Left-wingers have long searched for utopia overseas, and now right-wingers are joining them. With pretty much the same results.

Last year I finally got around to reading Paul Hollander’s Political Pilgrims, his study of American and European left-wingers who really thought they’d found Heaven on earth in the Soviet Union. Or in Mao’s China. Or in Cuba. Or in Venezuela under Ortega 1.0. Or in pretty much any country which identified itself in opposition to the American-led capitalist world order.

Spoiler alert: after hyping up these exciting new experiments in governance and going to see them for themselves, very few of them went all the way and defected. And the few who did soon realized they’d made a big mistake (vividly illustrated in Tim Tzouliadis’ The Forsaken, about the Americans who moved to Stalin’s USSR to help build socialism and mostly ended up in the Gulag).

Lefties never gave up looking for the Next Big Thing, though, and with Venezuela gradually turning out to be Not Real Socialismᵀᴹ many are turning back to China, at least online:

Chinese social media platform Xiaohongshu, also known as RedNote, has been hiring for a surprising position in recent days: English-language content moderators.

That’s because a growing number of US users are creating new accounts there, driven in large part by a looming ban on TikTok, which is due to take effect Sunday.

The sudden influx of overseas users, many of whom call themselves “TikTok refugees,” is posing a new challenge for the app, which must now strike a balance between satisfying China’s stringent content moderation rules while also providing a positive experience for its non-Chinese-speaking newbies.

[…]

Just days into using RedNote, some have started to express frustration over the censorship rules, which go far beyond what they’re used to. It’s not just violent content, hate speech or pornography that is off-limits. China’s internet is famous for censoring an ever-growing list of terms deemed sensitive, either politically or otherwise.

The Supreme Court just ruled unanimously in favor of the proposed law banning TikTok, just in time for the issue to be rendered moo by President Biden announcing he won’t enforce the ban and incoming President YouKnowWho promising to reverse it.

So, this great American migration to RedNote could be short-lived. But it was kind of worth it just to see Taylor Lorenz shilling for an app which turned out to be so homophobic it makes 4chan look like Tumblr.

One American user, who identified themselves as “non-binary” on RedNote, was censored after publishing a post on Tuesday asking if the platform welcomed gay people. The post was removed within hours, the user told CNN.

The next day, they uploaded a new post saying they will quit the platform over the decision but was soon on the receiving end of homophobic comments, with some users accusing them of cultural imposition.

In a separate post, a male user expressed frustration after RedNote censored a photo of his upper body. “Why can’t I post photos of my fitness and abs?” he asked, adding he had “never had such a problem on TikTok and Instagram.”

A Chinese user suggested that he try covering his nipples, as Chinese social media platforms generally impose restrictions on displaying them when it is perceived as sexually suggestive.

A few RedNote users also noted that posts about the Japanese anime My Hero Academia, which faced censorship in China since 2018 due to controversial references to Japan’s wartime history, have since been removed from the platform.

Lorenz has led online cancellation mobs for much less. I’m just saying.

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But it’s no longer just left-wingers looking for an overseas utopia. In contrast to the purportedly progressive USSR, Vladimir Putin’s Russia has gone all-in on social conservatism, and some Westerners have taken the bait and moved there to escape teh gheys and immigints taking over America.