Take Note of RedNote

Admit it: until a week or so ago, you’d never heard of the Chinese app RedNote.

RedNote logo. Yes, it's in Mandarin. Credit:  Xingin Information Technology

Its actual name is Xiaohongshu, which I’m told means “little red book” in Mandarin. That may or may not be an allusion to Chairman Mao’s little Red Book; it may simply be a play on “red” as a term for “popular” in Chinese. It has over 300 million users, but until recently almost all of them were in China, especially among young women.

Now is has been one of the leading downloads in the U.S. Why the surge? It’s all about TikTok, of course.

Not that long ago, TikTok was seen as a threat to U.S. national security. Since it was owned by a Chinese company (ByteDance), there were fears that the Chinese government had access to the data on the 170 million Americans on it, and could use TikTok’s algorithms to push out all kinds of propaganda to impressionable youth. Despite ByteDance’s protestations of its independence, and its ultimate agreeing to store data in the U.S., Congress banned it last April, giving it until January 19, 2025 to be sold to a U.S. company. The Supreme Court affirmed the ban last Friday.

So TikTok went dark yesterday…for part of the day.

TikTok on January 19. This didn't last long.

Many TikTok users weren’t going to stick around for the drama, and somehow landed on RedNote. There have been hundreds of millions of posts with the phrase “TikTok refugee” in the past week. Although such refugees are just a fraction of TikTok users, the growth rate has been incredible.

Never mind that RedNote is also owned by a Chinese company (Xingin Information Technology). Never mind that its servers, and thus all its data, are all in China. Never mind that its terms and conditions are in Mandarin, just in case you are the kind of person to want to read such things. And never mind that it is openly subject to Chinese government censorship and oversight.

Talk about jumping from the frying pan into the fire.

TikTok creator Manimatana Lee posted on TikTok: “How funny would it be if they ban TikTok and we all just move over to this Chinese app.” She told The New York Times: “I don’t really care if I’m using a Chinese app at all. It’s like a place for me to escape reality. And if it’s making me feel good, I’m here for it.”

Oh, and I’d be remiss if I didn’t note that another leading App store download this past week is Lemon8, which is not only another Chinese app but is also owned by ByteDance.

Ivy Yang, a China tech analyst and founder of consulting firm Wavelet Strategy, commented to CNN about the migration: “Users are finding creative ways to transcend language barriers, navigate cultural differences, and co-exist in fascinating ways. This community building happening in real time could have lasting impact, and I’m cautiously optimistic.”

RedNote preview in the Apple App Store. Credit: Apple

The Chinese government is barely disguising its glee. In a briefing last week, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Guo Jiakun said: “As a matter of principle, China has always supported and encouraged strengthening people-to-people exchanges and the promotion of people-to-people bonds with all countries.” Similarly, a commentary in People’s Daily opined: “Moving to RedNote can be seen as an act of defiance against the U.S. government’s narrative that Chinese apps are security threats. By embracing RedNote, users challenge the assumption that Chinese platforms are inherently dangerous.”

Users may not want to get too complacent. The law that banned TikTok wasn’t TikTok-specific. "This appears to be the kind of app that the statute would apply to and could face the same restrictions as TikTok if it's not divested," a U.S. official told CBS News. Daria Impiombato, China analyst at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, told The Washington Post: “We’ve probably spent too much energy worrying about the single app. Once you have the capacity to build those algorithms and those apps, it doesn’t take very long to create a TikTok or something different.” 

TikTok isn’t quite dead yet, of course. Last spring then former President Trump did a 180 degree shift in his opinion about TikTok, from demanding a ban in his first Administration to his 2024 campaign heavily using TikTok to reach young voters. Once he jumped onboard, all the other critics seemed to melt away; even President Biden said he wouldn’t enforce the ban. TikTok went dark for part of January 19, until President Trump indicated that he would give the platform additional time to comply with the law.

He may want ByteDance to sell TikTok to Elon Musk. Seriously.

It’s important to note that, although TikTok is a huge international success, there is a separate ByteDance app (Douyin) for Chinese citizens. Most of Chinese internet companies do almost all their business within China (which, granted, has a huge population). Li Yuan writes in The New York Times:

As the Chinese Communist Party tightens its grip on the country’s private sector, it’s increasingly difficult for the world to entrust their citizens’ personal data to Chinese companies, which ultimately answer to Beijing.

There are good reasons that the outside world, including the U.S. government, doesn’t trust these companies. In a country where the government owns much of everything and wields power randomly and often ruthlessly, the private sector has been on its toes. The internet companies are heavily censored and must self censor to survive. All the big ones, with no exception, have had their apps removed from app stores or been fined or disciplined by regulators in recent years.

RedNote and Lemon8 are noteworthy because the Chinese version is available outside of China as well. All that access to personal data, all that censorship, all that government control – apparently many Americans just don’t care. "Did the U.S. government forget our founding principles? We are a nation built on spite," user @thesleepydm posted on TikTok. "We're giving our information directly to the Chinese government now. The communists just have our information directly because of … what you did."

As Amanda Hess writes in The New York Times: “As if American-owned social media companies like Meta have never sought to mine and exploit sensitive data. As if American-owned platforms like X would never juice their algorithms to reward certain political ideas.”

I don’t think RedNote is going to supplant TikTok, but, then again, I don’t think TikTok is going away. A face-saving deal will be made, as long as President Trump finds TikTok useful. But, hey, since X and Meta are basically abandoning content moderation, I can see the appeal of a RedNote.