As a ban looms on the popular social networking platform TikTok in the United States, users have begun signing up for ‘RedNote’, another Chinese application with largely similar features and functionality.
The number of new users on RedNote every week has grown by 200% over the last week alone.
Users who are ditching joining RedNote due to the looming ban on TikTok have been using the hashtag #TikTokRefugee to signal why they are migrating.
The app, originally known as Xiaohongshu, allows users to post photos, videos and text. Founded in 2013, the app is run by a company of over 2,000 people and its main investors are Chinese companies Boyu Capital and HongShan Capital Group. The app is valued at $17 billion.
RedNote’s approximately 300 million users are predominantly Chinese. Meanwhile, TikTok was designed by a Chinese company to appeal to a global audience and is not accessible in China at all. In format, RedNote has been compared to Instagram more than it has been to TikTok.
As users begin replacing one Chinese app with another, there are concerns that RedNote could also be targeted in the same way as TikTok by US authorities through its divest-or-ban rules.
ByteDance has been given a deadline of January 19 by US authorities to either sell TikTok or face a complete ban from usage in the country. The US says it is banning the app on ‘national security grounds’.
TikTok made the short video format popular in a social media landscape that was dominated at one point by the Meta-owned Facebook and Twitter, which is now owned by Elon Musk and has rebranded to X.
With 170 million users in the United States alone, TikTok became a major network and was particularly popular with younger audiences.
However, the US Congress passed a law in April last year requiring ByteDance to sell TikTok or face a ban in the country. The legislation was motivated by concerns that a foreign company’s social network was being used so widely in the country. While the US Supreme Court is yet to issue a ruling, the ban is likely to come into effect on January 19.
