Chinese tech companies and their censorship apparatus look to be early beneficiaries of the Supreme Court’s decision to keep a law forcing the sale or shutdown of TikTok in the coming days.
As the new Trump administration tries to determine its policy on the future of TikTok’s U.S. operations, Xiahongshu, which means “Little Red Book” in English, is the top downloaded app for phones and tablets in Apple’s App Store. American users migrating to the app colloquially refer to the app as “RedNote.”
Founded in Shanghai in 2013, Xiaohongshu counts China’s Alibaba Group, Tencent and ZhenFund among its investors, according to its website.
“Xiaohongshu’s headquarters is located in Shanghai with an R&D Center in Wuhan and an office in Beijing,” the company’s website said. “As of 2020, Xiaohongshu has over 1,000 employees.”
But the same national security concerns over Tiktok’s Chinese roots have surfaced with Xiaohongshu: The company’s massive trove of data is stored in China, where the Chinese Communist Party’s policy of military-civil fusion mandates that private tech companies cooperate with government intelligence and security agencies.
Xiaohongshu completed a project with Alibaba last year to move 500 petabytes of data under Alibaba’s watch to a “data lake,” according to the Alibaba-owned South China Morning Post.
“The data lake contains all the raw and critical data that Xiaohongshu has accumulated since it started operating 11 years ago,” the South China Morning Post said in November. “For context, one petabyte of data can hold around 11,000 4K high-definition movies, which would require more than 2 1/2 years of non-stop binge watching to get through — assuming an average size of 90 gigabytes and length of two hours per film.”
Alibaba looks to have made a winning bet. Its stock jumped more than 2% on the New York Stock Exchange during intraday trading on Friday, spiking after the Supreme Court’s unanimous decision upholding the TikTok divestiture or shutdown law.
Others securing new business because of Xiaohongshu’s sudden growth are China’s swelling ranks of digital censors.
Job listings for digital content monitors went out in earnest last week, according to tech publication Wired. The publication spotted listings for positions “moderating the videos by accounts of foreign friends on Xiaohongshu” and said one listing that requested, “Xiaohongshu overnight urgent recruitment — TikTok refugee moderation, short-term [contracts] accepted.”
The urgency of the job posting reflected the surge in Western users arriving on the platform but it may also reveal the Chinese government’s interest in silencing American voices.
Chinese regulators raised concerns about English-language content appearing on Xiaohongshu with the company’s government relations team last week, according to the tech publication The Information.
The platform appears to already be flexing its censorship muscles.
Adam Kovacevich, founder of the liberal Chamber of Progress, created an account and posted an image recalling the 1989 massacre of pro-democracy protesters at Tiananmen Square and a caption identifying the account as a “Uighur supporter.” The image and caption were deleted within two days. The U.S. and other government accuse Beijing of a systematic campaign of oppression against the minority Uighurs, a Muslim population largely located in China’s western region.
“I posted two posts on Tiananmen and Tibet freedom. I also changed my bio (which Rednote had deleted) to ’Justice for Uighur people,’” Mr. Kovacevich said on X. “As a result my account was banned and my posts were deleted.”
• Ryan Lovelace can be reached at rlovelace@washingtontimes.com.