AS a TikTok ban looms in the United States, young Americans are flocking to the Chinese social media platform Xiaohongshu as “TikTok refugees” in search of a similar experience.
The app has risen to the top spot on the iOS and Google Play stores in the US in recent days as users prepare for TikTok to be banned on national security grounds from Sunday unless Chinese parent company ByteDance divests its ownership.
Chinese lifestyle app Lemon8, which is also owned by ByteDance, has ranked as the second most downloaded app.
Xiaohongshu, which has been described as China’s answer to Instagram, allows users to post photos, videos and text and is known for its female-heavy user base.
While boasting about 300 million monthly active users, Xiaohongshu’s reach is smaller than that of other popular apps in China, such as Sina Weibo and WeChat, which claim 1.2 billion-plus users.
A surge in new users, some of them describing themselves as “TikTok refugees,” is now flooding the app’s “Discover” page with videos seeking tips on how to use “RedNote,” the app’s new nickname in the US.
“Hello. I don’t know what’s happening any more. Americans are coming here. So sorry if y’all hate us. I promise we’ll do our best,” a female user calling herself “Star404” said in a short-form video posted on Tuesday.
“Don’t even worry, we’re going to do so great. This is so much better than TikTok. Just not Meta. Instagram reels, I can kind of dig. Facebook and YouTube shorts, no shot. Never happening,” she said.
The irony of many users moving from one Chinese-owned app to another has not been lost on observers like Ryan Broderick, the author of Garbage Day, a newsletter that covers the internet.
“It’s definitely funny that American teenagers are protesting the looming TikTok ban by using a much more culturally Chinese app,” Broderick told Al Jazeera.
“At the moment, RedNote doesn’t seem to be siloing Chinese content or requiring users to have a Chinese phone number, so it’s turned into a sort of fun cultural chaos on the app, an experience that never really even happened on TikTok,” he said.
