Physical Address
304 North Cardinal St.
Dorchester Center, MA 02124
TikTok received amnesty for forcing the shutdown, but Americans on Monday were still using and downloading Xiaohongshu, the Chinese social media app that grew in popularity last week in anticipation of the Shutdown by TikTok.
TikTok, owned by Chinese internet company ByteDance, went dark in the US ahead of a federal law requiring it to be sold or banned on Sunday. TikTok quickly returned online after President-elect Donald J. Trump said he would issue an executive order to delay the ban once he takes office on Monday.
There are many questions about the fate of TikTok in the United States. Today, Xiaohongshu, who many people call RedNote, is suddenly becoming a celebrity in the United States.
Over the weekend, Xiaohongshu added a feature that allows users to translate text and comments between Mandarin and English. As of Monday, it was at the top of Apple’s list of most downloaded apps, a position it has held for the past week.
According to RedNote data, 32.6 million notes were posted with the hashtag “tiktok refugee” on Monday, with 2.3 billion views.
The Americans on the platform said that they planned to continue broadcasting on RedNote, even when TikTok came back online.
“TikTok is back. Will I continue to use this app? Indeed,” said one user in the United States. “I’m not going anywhere.”
The first users of Xiaohongshu outside of China had to overcome significant language barriers. In interviews and in the app, participants said in the past they used tools like ChatGPT and Google Translate to figure out how to sign up for an account and interact with other users, mostly in China.
“I think it’s really cool to see a completely different country and see how different their culture is from ours and it all comes together,” said Sky Bynum, 18, who creates beauty videos from at home in New Jersey. “That’s something you can’t do on TikTok or Instagram or Facebook or YouTube.”
Chinese users have also helped their new friends on social media to bypass China’s strict censorship. Don’t post nudity or guns, they say.
Americans broadcast videos of Chinese viewers shopping at Walmart and talking about the cost of taking their four children out to dinner. The conversation touched on topics that are often considered sensitive in China, including whether people can be open about their sexuality and the long hours many people work. In a video about how China’s tech industry works long hours, commentators in the US shared their work schedules in oil fields, hospitals and at Taco Bell.
Although Xiaohongshu is very popular in China, especially among young women in the big cities, the company has kept a low profile. The company has not updated its English language news page in two years.
Xiaohongshu posted nearly a dozen job openings a day for the past week on the recruiting site. Among the positions listed is one for an engineer working in the area of ”emergency capacity building in content security”. It is also looking for people to handle content security risk assessment and analysis, and trainees with “good written and spoken English skills.”
Xiaohongshu, a private company, is run by Shanghai-based Xingyin Information Technology and owned by billionaire entrepreneurs Charlwin Mao and Miranda Qu. As of last July, Xiaohongshu had raised nearly $1 billion since its founding a decade ago, according to Crunchbase, from investors including Alibaba, HongShan and Tencent, the Chinese internet giant behind the country’s most popular app, WeChat.
The app allows users to share short videos as well as text-based content, which sometimes attracts long comment threads like Reddit. Like TikTok, Xiaohongshu is powered by a proprietary algorithm, which recommends targeted content to keep people moving.
