Americans are using the Chinese Red Note app to express their frustration with the TikTok ban

The Supreme Court and the U.S. government seem hell-bent on pushing TikTok out of existence in the United States in the next week—at least unless its Chinese-based parent company, ByteDance, accedes to a fire sale to a suitable buyer based closer to home. But the curious rise of a competitor app up the App Store rankings in recent days highlights what exactly TikTok’s userbase makes of the ballyhooed “national security threat” Supreme Court justices and government prosecutors were arguing over earlier this month in a last-ditch attempt to try and save the app from a ban.

Xiaohongshu is America’s hottest app, taking the top spot on social media App Store rankings. And the choice of it, rather than any of the American-made alternatives that could stand to benefit from a TikTok ban, seems like a deliberate middle finger to the establishment by TikTok’s fiercely independent young userbase. If you haven’t heard of it, you aren’t alone.

The 12-year-old app, which is also called Little Red Book in China, and has been dubbed Red Note by its recent western users, “is a cross between Instagram and Pinterest while featuring many of the social commerce features of the TikTok Store or Amazon,” says David Craig, associate professor at USC Annenberg, and a scholar on the Chinese social media and influencer space. And in the last two days it has rocketed up the rankings of social media apps as disenfranchised TikTok users have elected to pick it as the life raft onto which they’re escaping ahead of a likely negative decision on TikTok’s future by the Supreme Court, expected any day now.

“We’re watching social media history in the making,” says Catalina Goanta, associate professor in platform governance at the University of Utrecht, who has been tracking the mass migration from TikTok (which is run out of global headquarters in Singapore) to Red Note in recent days. “This is the second platform migration in the past year—the first one being the Twitter exodus—and TikTokers who are now on Red Note call themselves ‘TikTok refugees.’” Goanta says the self-description of users as refugees seems apt: Fewer than one in three Americans support a ban on TikTok, according to surveys by the Pew Research Center, and those who have made the move over to Red Note have been posting about their unhappiness at the imminent ban of the app from the country. “Maybe in the future, ‘digital refugee rights’ will be based on platform interoperability features and obligations,” says Goanta.

She’s also struck by the frankness with which both sides of Red Note—the Americans finding a new home on a majority Chinese-language app, and the Chinese citizens suddenly finding an influx of brash American teens and young people barging in—are interacting. “People are becoming more critical of the U.S. government and surveillance apparatus, and are in no way convinced that TikTok will be banned due to national security reasons,” Goanta says. One example of that is the way in which Red Note’s Chinese users are co-opting TikTok users’ tongue-in-cheek references to Chinese spies, designed to puncture the pomposity American TikTokers felt politicians had held the shortform video app with as a tool of the Chinese state.

Indeed, the way in which U.S. users have felt pushed to another Chinese app may well be seen by the politicians seeking most stridently to ban it as a plan that has backfired, reckons Craig. “Westerners using the app will start to encounter Chinese people and be exposed to their ideas and culture, which is likely to further frighten Western politicians engaging in what I refer to as ‘platform nationalism’,” he says. Usually, that term is used to put forward a Cold War mindset of countries pushing their own national champion apps. “In this instance, it is Silicon Valley and other stakeholders trying to get the U.S. government to protect their global, political and economic interests, which is ironically the sort of collusion that they accuse ByteDance and China of doing,” he says.

Craig has concerns that the drive to push TikTok out of existence in the U.S. being pushed by China hawks and the Biden administration—and the extreme response by users seeking out an even more Chinese app—may bode nervously for the future. “These are also smart, clever, and bewildered young people aware that they may lose a vital means of communication and, for creators, vital means of revenue, careers, and livelihoods,” he says. “They are also weary of the explanations offered by the U.S. government that lack transparency.” He calls them “a gaslit generation tired of being misled and misinformed by various structures in our society,” and worries what that might mean for the future.

The embrace of Red Note by TikTok users also has Goanta intrigued—and laughing at the message it sends to those compelling TikTok out of existence. “We must appreciate the irony that the U.S. banned a Singaporean platform with servers in the U.S., fearing Chinese surveillance, and this pushed U.S. citizens to populate an actual Chinese platform called Red Note,” she says. “Lenin must be laughing in his grave.”

https://www.fastcompany.com/91260363/americans-are-using-the-chinese-red-note-app-to-express-their-frustration-with-the-tiktok-ban?partner=rss&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=rss+fastcompany&utm_content=rss