A Queer Dream of New and Unassimilable Things
As the rest of the world watches the exodus of American users from TikTok to RedNote, it reveals a telling paradox: Western claims to digital freedom depend on portraying contexts like Africa and Asia as uniquely hostile repressive Others, while masking their own suppression of queer expression—a power dynamic that the Global South has long been co-opted to maintain.
The recent exodus of American users to the Chinese social media platform, RedNote, amid the now Trump-halted TikTok Supreme Court ban has sparked multiple discourses around citizen apathy about data privacy, battling data empires, and more recently, RedNote’s alleged suppression of LGBTQ+ content. The news, which quickly triggered several posts across social media platforms, ‘first-hand’ reports, and opinions from both liberal and anti-woke users online originated from a news media platform that described itself as the ‘world’s leading source on LGBTQ+ information.’ Yet there was something more profound that this digital migration revealed: how anti-gay laws and digital restrictions outside the West serve as essential props for maintaining Western claims to moral authority over LGBTQ+ rights while masking the actual containment of LGBTQ+ communities in the West.
As a doctoral scholar of African feminist digital cultures and technology studies, observing this from both my American and Nigerian locations, I am struck by how this digital migration of users currently referred to as ‘TikTok refugees’ mirrors broader patterns of queer displacement. This movement reveals complexities of power, assimilation and survival that extend far beyond simple narratives of censorship versus freedom, as the very framing of Chinese digital spaces as uniquely hostile to queer expression exposes a fundamental contradiction within the US’s liberal democratic and self-appointed role as global protector of LGBTQ+ rights. This contradiction becomes especially apparent with recent developments, as a narrative of Western digital exceptionalism conveniently obscures how similar restrictions operate within American platforms, especially with this news coming just days away from Meta’s platform governing decisions: shutting down its system for moderating fake news, implementing dehumanizing moderation policies against trans people, abandoning its diversity, equity and inclusion programme, permitting homophobic and transphobic speech across its platforms, and getting a MAGA makeover less than four years after the platform banned Trump for inciting the January 6 riots. This exemplifies exactly how Western platforms can engage in speech suppression precisely because the existence of supposedly more restrictive spaces elsewhere maintains their image as relatively exceptional havens of freedom...
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