Home Tech Faced with imminent TikTok ban, users flee to the Chinese app ‘Red Note’

Faced with imminent TikTok ban, users flee to the Chinese app ‘Red Note’

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Faced with imminent TikTok ban, users flee to the Chinese app 'Red Note'

“Hi everyone, my name is Ryan. I’m a TikTok refugee. The US government is banning TikTok, so we’re looking for an alternative… We’re really sorry to interrupt you here. I hope we don’t have to stay here for too long.” said a Xiaohongshu user who used the name Ryan Martin in a video. aware yesterday apparently targeting the app’s Chinese user base. He translated the statement into Chinese and used a robotic voice generator to read it in the video, which has since received more than 24,000 likes. “It’s okay, you’re not interrupting. When you are active, we sleep,” reads one of the main comments in Chinese.

There are also dozens of live audio chat rooms on the platform where American and Chinese users explained to each other, probably for the first time in many cases, how their respective societies work and clarified common misunderstandings. The most popular chat has been listened to by almost 30,000 users.

While Xiaohongshu is not specifically mentioned in the Protecting Americans from Apps Controlled by Foreign Adversaries Act that the Supreme Court is currently considering and could result in a US ban on TikTok, the law does stipulate that any “app controlled by foreign adversaries ” may face a similar fate. in the future. In other words, there’s no guarantee that Xiaohongshu won’t follow in TikTok’s footsteps by also being blocked by the US government.

The TikTok ban might have catapulted Xiaohongshu into the spotlight in the United States, but the app has long been successful in China. Founded in 2013, the Shanghai-based company has operated one of, if not he trendiest platform in China in recent years and supposedly generated more than $1 billion in annual profits in 2024. Simply put, it is the most popular app in China that non-Chinese have never heard of before.

It also has a considerable following among Chinese speakers outside the country, from overseas Chinese students to Taiwanese and diaspora communities in Malaysia. Restaurants, tourist places and travel companies. around the world They have started to pay attention to the app due to the number of Chinese tourists who rely heavily on it for local information and recommendations shared by other Chinese.

The app is markedly different from TikTok in some important ways. While Xiaohongshu allows users to post short vertical videos like TikTok, most of the platform’s content is slideshows of photos along with text, which is why people often see it more as a competitor to Instagram than to Instagram. TikTok. The app’s AI-powered grid-shaped font (known as a “masonry grid” in professional tech circles) has been so successful in driving engagement that major social media companies like Tencent and ByteDance have copied the design on their own products. Lemon8, the other popular social media app developed by ByteDance besides TikTok, is widely seen as an attempt to emulate Xiaohongshu and its success.

In fact, the app doesn’t even have a good English translation of its own name: Xiaohongshu is just the phonetic translation of its Chinese name. 小红书. While the literal translation “little red book” may remind English-speaking users of former Chinese leader Mao Zedong’s collection of speeches and propaganda slogans of the same name, it has a different connotation in China, where users interpret it as a reliable source of information. -Recommendations generated for mundane things, such as which restaurant to go to or which cosmetic product to buy.

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