Major tactics used by Chinese social media to isolate informtation
Let me make a summary of the major information controlling approaches so the many naive Americans do not fall into the illusions presented by Rednotes.
字节跳动-ByDance (the owner of TikTok): It separates the users with two separate apps. The app inside China is called DouYin, for users registered with China phone numbers. The international version is the famous TikTok, for the users registered with the phone numbers outside of China. They are essentially the same app internally (the same technology stack). But the Chinese users can international users cannot talk to each other. The data are completely separated.
腾讯-Tencent (the owner of Wechat): It also separate the users with two separate apps. The app inside China is called 微信-WeXin, for users registered with China phone numbers. The international version is Wechat, for the users registered with the phone numbers outside of China. The Chinese users can partially see the international users in weird ways. They can join the same wechat group. But if an international user is marked as potentially dangerous, wechat still let him talk in the chat group, but silently blocks the messages to the domestic Chinese users. So, the international user without noticing any difference can continue to see other people talking and thought himself/herself is talking. But from the domestic user side, the oversea person is totally invisible. The situation is even more weird when two oversea users are chatting (one invisible and one not). What the domestic users see is that one person is talking to a ghost somehow.
小红书-Rednote has been an exception so far. It does not separate the users. It originated as an app for oversea Chinese to sell goods on internet. So it lets the domestic and oversea users talk without any separation measures. It could do that also because it had been much less known, so there had been less political concerns by the Chinese government. This is no longer true. Chinese government must be very worried now that Rednote Chinese users can talk so much with the Americans, and come to realize that they can be so independent and disobedient to their government. So, some form of separation measures will likely to come soon.
