As TikTok anxiously awaits a Supreme Court decision that could determine whether it will be banned in the United States, users are preemptively fleeing the app and migrating to another Chinese social media platform called Xiaohongshu, which literally means “little red book” in Mandarin. As of Monday, Xiaohongshu was the number one most-downloaded app in Apple’s US App Store, despite the fact that it doesn’t even have an official English name. The second app on the list is Lemon8, another social media app owned by TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, that is also experiencing a traffic surge from exiled TikTok users.
Over the weekend, thousands of people began swarming to Xiaohongshu, which is known in China as a platform for travel and lifestyle content and has over 300 million users. The newcomers, who refer to the app as “Red Note” or “the Chinese version of Instagram” and call themselves “TikTok refugees,” are relying on translation tools to navigate Xiaohongshu’s mostly Chinese ecosystem. Some say they are hoping to rebuild communities they had on TikTok, while others say they joined the app out of spite and to undermine the US government’s decision to ban TikTok over concerns that the Chinese government could use the app to surveil Americans.
“I would rather stare at a language I can’t understand than to ever use a social media [platform] that Mark Zuckerberg owns,” said one user in a video posted to Xiaohongshu on Sunday. There are a countless number of similar clips in which TikTok refugees introduce themselves and explain why they decided to come to Xiaohongshu, many raking up thousands of likes and comments each. A spokesperson for Xiaohongshu could not immediately be reached for comment.
The Supreme Court heard oral arguments on Friday from TikTok and the US government, which respectively made their cases for and against a law passed last year that would force TikTok to sell its US operations or be banned by January 19. Experts said the justices appeared to think the law was constitutional and would likely allow it to stay, leaving many users feeling that the app’s days are numbered. While TikTok is unlikely to immediately disappear from the phones of people who have already downloaded it, it could be deleted from US app stores, causing many to panic and look for the next place to go.
Some users are predictably going to Instagram or YouTube, but others say they would like to stick to a platform developed by a Chinese company to protest the decisions by US lawmakers that led to this situation. “Telling me to download Rednote out of spite over the TikTok ban was the only push I needed actually,” one person wrote on Bluesky. Internet culture journalist Taylor Lorenz also shared a link to her Xiaohongshu account on Bluesky, calling the platform “the hottest new social app in America.”
At least so far, pettiness and revenge appear to be enough to motivate people to learn how to navigate Xiaohongshu, an app that is overwhelmingly used by Chinese-speaking people and was not designed with English-speaking users in mind. “I have no idea what I’m doing here. I can’t even read the rules,” one TikTok refugee who goes by “Elle belle” said in a post on the app.
Original Author: Zeyi Yang | Source: Wired
