“Long live China, ngga. Long live Xi Jinping, ngga!”
This is how one influencer responded to the looming TikTok ban in a viral video with more than 8 million views. While perhaps unique in its eloquence, this reaction was sadly par for the course for how many members of Generation Z and TikTok users are handling their favored platform’s possible deletion.
The U.S. government is seeking to ban the app partly due to concerns that its parent company, ByteDance, is subject to the control and influence of the Chinese Communist Party. However, the young people in the United States who use TikTok simply don’t care. Not only that, but they are so upset about the ban that they are purposefully giving their data directly to the CCP in protest.
That’s not conjecture. It’s their openly stated rationale behind a mass switch to an alternative app called RedNote. As Wired reported, “[TikTok] users are preemptively fleeing the app and migrating to another Chinese social media platform called Xiaohongshu, which literally means ‘little red book’ in Mandarin.”
It’s not just a few influencers doing this. It’s a somewhat broad phenomenon.
“As of Monday, Xiaohongshu was the number one most-downloaded app in Apple’s US App Store, despite the fact that it doesn’t even have an official English name,” noted the outlet.
On one level, this is kind of hilarious. Angry TikTok users, overwhelmingly Gen Zers, decided to flock to a platform that is literally controlled by China and purposefully hand over their data. You have to give them points for creativity in their trolling.
However, on another level, this is profoundly stupid. The same law that, if upheld by the Supreme Court, would allow the federal government to ban TikTok would absolutely allow it to ban RedNote, too, making this protest stunt almost certainly short-lived.
There’s also a profound historical ignorance on display here from these youthful protesters.
RedNote is named after former CCP Chairman Mao Zedong’s infamous “little red book” of quotations. Mao was the authoritarian leader of China from 1958 to 1962 who oversaw the so-called “Great Leap Foward” communist revolution, which ultimately resulted in the deaths of approximately 45 million people who were, as Ilya Somin of FEE.org noted, “starved, shot, tortured, and worked to death.” Chinese culture today bizarrely still reveres Mao, and his “little red book” is one of the most widely published books of all time.
Think about this for a second. To pull off a protest stunt, Gen Zers flocked to an app named in honor of one of the biggest mass murderers in history. Would they have done the same thing with an app named after Hitler’s Mein Kampf?
Probably not, because there is still at least some awareness of the horrors of the Holocaust among younger Americans. However, they are profoundly uneducated about the evils of China’s past (and present) governments, so much so that many are now openly praising Chinese President Xi Jinping. That’s a form of brain rot. No matter how flawed one thinks our government is, China’s is objectively much worse in every way when it comes to respecting human freedom.
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Still, young people and other TikTok users have understandable reasons for frustration over the TikTok ban. Even if one ultimately thinks the ban is justified, and I don’t, there’s still no denying the fact that millions of people will lose a platform they love and thousands of entrepreneurs will have their businesses destroyed.
However, the fact that so many members of younger generations can’t handle adversity, even significant adversity, without cracking up and openly supporting communism, does not bode well for the future of our country. That’s ultimately not a laughing matter at all.
Brad Polumbo is an independent journalist and host of the Brad vs Everyone podcast.