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Douyin as someone else mentioned is the Chinese equivalent to TikTok and it has completely separate content. The international TikTok content (not US specific)

Douyin as someone else mentioned is the Chinese equivalent to TikTok and it has completely separate content. The international TikTok content (not US specific) is not available in China.

jMyles 2y ago
> The international TikTok content (not US specific) is not available in China. These comments are very confusing to me. Why is half this thread pretending that the Great Firewall is effective? Do y'all not have friends in China? Contacts who visit? Do they suddenly drop off the face of the earth? Of course not, they install a VPN and carry on, and communicate with you via all the normal media. The Great Firewall is really just a means of forcing people not to acknowledge what they know, and to only publicly speak about the censored version of history and politics. But it's no more effective than any other internet censorship (which is to say, it is trivially bypassed).
- TeaBrain 2y ago
  I never said the content would be impossible to access given the use of a VPN. The comment I responded to implied that they thought TikTok would be available simply by using a Chinese domain name. Granted, Douyin does have a Chinese domain name, but it does not have the content on TikTok.
- insane_dreamer 2y ago
  > Why is half this thread pretending that the Great Firewall is effective? It's extremely effective. Just because a very small fraction of the population 1) know how to use a VPN, 2) are willing to pay for it, and 3) bother to use it, doesn't mean the GFW is ineffective. The CCP doesn't need 99.99% efficiency rate, 95% is plenty to control their population. Source: myself, many years living in China.
  - jMyles 2y ago
    I've never lived in China. But you're saying that 95% of people refrain from reading resources that are not served by The Great Firewall? That seems like a huge, huge stretch. I've never met a Chinese person whom, when the topic came up, hadn't read about, for example, tiananmen square, in a method contrary to the wishes of the CCP.
    - dgfitz 2y ago
      Have you met more than 5% of the residents of China? If not your point is moot. I’m guessing not.
      - insane_dreamer 2y ago
        Yeah, I did! Joking aside, that's not how statistics work. But I am reasonably confident that a random sampling of 1000 Chinese people drawn proportionally from where they live (meaning mostly in smaller cities, not Beijing, Shanghai, do not speak English, are not well off or highly educated, etc.), that only 50 of them would be using a VPN regularly. But I could be off by a factor of 2 or 3 and the point about control of the population still stands.
    - TeaBrain 2y ago
      I would not be surprised if the use of VPNs in China is not as prevalent as is often assumed. I knew a Chinese guy in his thirties who came to the US for a graduate program and he was excited to tell me of the websites he now had access to that he wasn't able to access on the Chinese web.
      - insane_dreamer 2y ago
        What people don't understand is that it's hard to discover VPNs in the first place. They're not going to be in the Chinese iOS app store (which is separate from the rest of the world), or local Android app stores (Google Play isn't even there). Websites advertising VPN services are likely to be inaccessible (though not all are). I used a VPN for years in China, as did some Chinese I knew, but even among highly educated and well-off Chinese in a 1st tier city it was less prevalent than you would think, not to mention your average Chinese person living in a 2nd tier or smaller city (the vast majority of the pop).

Douyin as someone else mentioned is the Chinese equivalent to TikTok and it has completely separate content. The international TikTok content (not US specific) is not available in China.

jMyles 2y ago

> The international TikTok content (not US specific) is not available in China. These comments are very confusing to me. Why is half this thread pretending that the Great Firewall is effective? Do y'all not have friends in China? Contacts who visit? Do they suddenly drop off the face of the earth? Of course not, they install a VPN and carry on, and communicate with you via all the normal media. The Great Firewall is really just a means of forcing people not to acknowledge what they know, and to only publicly speak about the censored version of history and politics. But it's no more effective than any other internet censorship (which is to say, it is trivially bypassed).

TeaBrain 2y ago
I never said the content would be impossible to access given the use of a VPN. The comment I responded to implied that they thought TikTok would be available simply by using a Chinese domain name. Granted, Douyin does have a Chinese domain name, but it does not have the content on TikTok.
insane_dreamer 2y ago
> Why is half this thread pretending that the Great Firewall is effective? It's extremely effective. Just because a very small fraction of the population 1) know how to use a VPN, 2) are willing to pay for it, and 3) bother to use it, doesn't mean the GFW is ineffective. The CCP doesn't need 99.99% efficiency rate, 95% is plenty to control their population. Source: myself, many years living in China.
- jMyles 2y ago
  I've never lived in China. But you're saying that 95% of people refrain from reading resources that are not served by The Great Firewall? That seems like a huge, huge stretch. I've never met a Chinese person whom, when the topic came up, hadn't read about, for example, tiananmen square, in a method contrary to the wishes of the CCP.
  - dgfitz 2y ago
    Have you met more than 5% of the residents of China? If not your point is moot. I’m guessing not.
    - insane_dreamer 2y ago
      Yeah, I did! Joking aside, that's not how statistics work. But I am reasonably confident that a random sampling of 1000 Chinese people drawn proportionally from where they live (meaning mostly in smaller cities, not Beijing, Shanghai, do not speak English, are not well off or highly educated, etc.), that only 50 of them would be using a VPN regularly. But I could be off by a factor of 2 or 3 and the point about control of the population still stands.
  - TeaBrain 2y ago
    I would not be surprised if the use of VPNs in China is not as prevalent as is often assumed. I knew a Chinese guy in his thirties who came to the US for a graduate program and he was excited to tell me of the websites he now had access to that he wasn't able to access on the Chinese web.
    - insane_dreamer 2y ago
      What people don't understand is that it's hard to discover VPNs in the first place. They're not going to be in the Chinese iOS app store (which is separate from the rest of the world), or local Android app stores (Google Play isn't even there). Websites advertising VPN services are likely to be inaccessible (though not all are). I used a VPN for years in China, as did some Chinese I knew, but even among highly educated and well-off Chinese in a 1st tier city it was less prevalent than you would think, not to mention your average Chinese person living in a 2nd tier or smaller city (the vast majority of the pop).