American users fearing a potential TikTok shutdown because of the popular video-sharing app’s ties to Beijing are rushing to China’s social media app Xiaohongshu as an alternative.
The frenzy to find a substitute before the threatened ban next week has made Xiaohongshu, which means “Little Red Book” in English, the top downloaded app in Apple’s App Store.
Lemon8, which like TikTok is owned by China-based ByteDance, appeared second in Apple’s list of top free downloaded apps on Tuesday, trailing only Xiaohongshu, colloquially referred to by TikTok users as RedNote. ByteDance faces a deadline later this month to sell or shut down its popular American subsidiary under a bipartisan law signed by President Biden last spring.
The #tiktokrefugee topic notched more than 160,000 posts on Xiaohongshu, indicating internet audiences are adaptable and prepared to work around government-imposed restrictions and digital blockades.
“Aaand now all the “TikTok refugees” are flocking to RedNote — another [Chinese] brain rot social media platform,” Rep. Daniel Crenshaw, Texas Republican, said on X. “By the way: ’RedNote’ refers to Mao’s ’Little Red Book,’ which was literal propaganda distributed during the Chinese Cultural Revolution.”
The TikTok refugees are not going quietly to their new digital dens. Droves of TikTok fans moving to Rednote are giving it stellar ratings on Apple’s App Store, along with reviews trashing Meta’s rival platforms.
“Not bending my knee to Zuck,” said one reviewer on Monday, a reference to Meta head Mark Zuckerberg. “I’ll gladly give China my data. All Meta platforms deleted.”
Tech writer Taylor Lorenz encouraged X users to ditch the American app for RedNote, and said “Long Live China,” according to a translation of her Chinese-language post.
“Follow me on Rednote, the hottest new social app in America!!” Ms. Lorenz said on X.
Xiaohongshu is not exactly new. The platform had roughly 300 million monthly active users in July, according to the South China Morning Post, and has competed with Chinese tech firms since its founding in 2013, according to CNBC.
Whether Xiaohongshu’s popularity endures in the U.S. remains to be determined, as is the fate of TikTok in America. The Supreme Court is expected to rule soon on the constitutionality of the law forcing TikTok’s divestiture from China’s ByteDance by Jan. 19 or face a ban on national security grounds.
While those same policymakers may have expected Google’s YouTube and Meta’s Instagram to be among top beneficiaries of TikTok in peril, Hudson Institute senior fellow Michael Sobolik thinks China’s other platforms that will benefit more.
“The narrative up until now has been IG reels or YouTube Shorts benefiting from TikTok’s potential demise,” Mr. Sobolik said on X alongside an image showing Google Search interest for RedNote rising. “It seems an alternative [Chinese Communist Party]-controlled app stands poised to benefit most of all.”
Mr. Sobolik said Xiaohongshu could one day meet the same fate as TikTok in the U.S. market, likely falling under the scope of the same bill that forced TikTok’s sale.
• This story is based in part on wire service reports.
• Ryan Lovelace can be reached at rlovelace@washingtontimes.com.