TikTok Got a Reprieve, but Americans and Chinese Are Still on RedNote
TikTok got an apparent reprieve from being forced to shut down, but Americans on Monday were still using and downloading Xiaohongshu, the Chinese social media app that surged in popularity last week in anticipation of TikTok’s closure.
TikTok, owned by the Chinese internet company ByteDance, went dark in the United States ahead of a federal law requiring it to be sold or banned on Sunday. TikTok soon came back online after President-elect Donald J. Trump said he would issue an executive order to put off a ban once he took office on Monday.
Many questions remain about TikTok’s fate in the United States. For now, Xiaohongshu, which many people are calling RedNote, is leaning into its sudden celebrity in the United States.
Over the weekend, Xiaohongshu added a feature to let users translate posts and comments between Mandarin and English. On Monday it was at the top of Apple’s ranking of most downloaded apps, a spot it has held for much of the past week.
According to data on RedNote, 32.6 million notes have been posted with the hashtag “tiktok refugee” as of Monday, gaining 2.3 billion views.
Americans on the platform said they planned to keep posting on RedNote, even though TikTok had come back online.
“TikTok is back. Will I still continue using this app? Absolutely,” a user in the United States posted. “I am going nowhere.”
The initial users of Xiaohongshu outside of China had to overcome significant language barriers. In interviews and on the app, early joiners said they used tools like ChatGPT and Google Translate to figure out how to register accounts and interact with other users, most of whom were in China.
“I think it’s really cool that we’re seeing a completely different country and seeing their cultural differences from ours and it’s all merging,” said Sky Bynum, 18, who creates beauty videos from her home in New Jersey. “That’s something that you can’t do on TikTok or Instagram or Facebook or YouTube.”
Chinese users were also helping their new social media friends navigate China’s strict censorship. Don’t post any photos involving nudity or guns, they advised.
Americans have posted videos taking Chinese viewers along for a shopping trip to Walmart and talking about how much it costs to take their four children to dinner. The conversations have brought up topics that are often considered sensitive online in China, including whether people can be open about their sexuality and the long hours that many work. On a video about how people in China’s tech industry work long hours, commenters in the United States shared their job schedules working on oil rigs, in hospitals and at Taco Bell.
Although Xiaohongshu is extremely popular in China, especially among young women in big cities, the company has kept a low profile. It has not updated its English-language company news page in almost two years.
Xiaohongshu has posted nearly a dozen job openings every day for the past week on its recruitment website. Among the positions listed were one for an engineer to work on the platform’s “content security emergency response capability construction.” It is also looking for someone to be in charge of content security risk assessment and analysis, and interns with “excellent written and spoken English skills.”
Xiaohongshu, a privately held company, is operated by Xingyin Information Technology, which is based in Shanghai and owned by the billionaire entrepreneurs Charlwin Mao and Miranda Qu. As of last July, Xiaohongshu had raised nearly $1 billion since it was founded over a decade ago, according to Crunchbase, from investors including Alibaba, HongShan and Tencent, the Chinese internet giant behind the country’s most ubiquitous app, WeChat.
The app lets users share short videos as well as still, text-based posts, which sometimes attract long, Reddit-like comment threads. Like TikTok, Xiaohongshu is powered by a proprietary algorithm, which recommends content targeted to keep people scrolling.
