With the TikTok ban looming in less than a week, creators are scrambling to find a replacement. Many have simply migrated over to TikTok’s direct American competitors, like Instagram Reels or YouTube Shorts. But another unlikely challenger has emerged: the Chinese-owned Xiaohongshu, a social media app often referred to as Red Note in English.
While Red Note had previously catered almost exclusively to Chinese audiences, Americans are flooding onto the platform this week, making it the number one on the App Store for two days straight. Lemon8, a separate Chinese social media app owned by TikTok’s owner ByteDance, sits at number two. On those apps, Chinese influencers and fashionistas appear in between American newcomers showing off their woodworking or floating down the Mississippi River.
It is unlikely Americans will settle on Red Note or Lemon8 long term: They face the same regulatory pressures that TikTok does. But these apps’ ascendance does reveal an acute desire from Americans to find their next social media destination; their general wariness about TikTok’s top American competitors; and their discontent with a ban that many see as paternalistic.
“It was a bit of a spite thing—and I also wanted to be one of the first people over there,” says Christina Shuler, an entrepreneur who runs the small business Glam Farmhouse and joined Red Note this week. “Hopefully I can be part of the crowd that maybe can change how our government views this whole situation.”
TikTok’s Ban
TikTok’s likely shuttering stems from a bill passed by Congress last year, which forced the app’s parent company ByteDance to either sell it by Jan. 19, or face a ban in the U.S. TikTok took the law to court, arguing a violation of freedom of speech. But last week, Supreme Court Justices expressed skepticism about the company’s legal arguments. Because ByteDance has said it will not sell TikTok, the ban will likely go into effect Sunday. (The Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday that Chinese officials have discussed the possibility of allowing Elon Musk to invest in or run the company’s U.S. operations.)
Read More: TikTok’s Fate Arrives at the Supreme Court
So many users are looking to establish themselves on other platforms. American companies have been preparing for this influx: Snap, for instance, announced a new Monetization Program last month, which places ads within eligible creators’ videos.
But this week, Red Note and Lemon8 seem to be the main beneficiaries. Red Note was founded in 2013 as an online shopping guide before pivoting towards social media and e-commerce. Over 300 million people use the app, which is filled with Mandarin speakers delivering travelogues, beauty tutorials, animal videos and language lessons. Red Note also has a live online marketplace, a format extremely common in Asia, but much less prevalent in the U.S. While some new users noted that the name Red Note seems to allude to Mao Zedong’s Little Red Book, the company has stressed that the names are unconnected.
Before this week, the few American users of Red Note had included musicians looking to tap into the Chinese market, like John Legend and Mariah Carey. This week, a wave of TikTokkers announced on that app that they would be migrating over to Red Note, and encouraged their followers to join them.
Marcus Robinson, a 29-year-old fashion designer, created a Red Note account to share his thrifting adventures and promote his clothing company, P-13. He previously had accrued 21,000 followers on TikTok, and estimates that 40% of his brand’s sales came from that app. “I thought I was going to keep building and make a living ultimately,” he says.
Robinson heard about Red Note on TikTok, set up an account, and started posting. After just 36 hours on the app, he already has nearly 10,000 followers and 22,000 likes. He engages with his Mandarin-language followers thanks to translations and captions provided by CapCut, an AI-powered video editing app owned by ByteDance. “I honestly feel like my brand will grow a lot quicker than it did on TikTok,” he says. “They’re all asking for clothes, asking me to model clothes. Everything’s flying right now.”
Shuler, the 32-year-old woodworker based in South Carolina, had been earning money from TikTok thanks to brand partnerships, the Creator Rewards program, and product commissions. Her first post on Red Note, in which she announced herself as a TikTok refugee and gave a tutorial on how to install a sliding barn door, received 10,000 likes. “Right now, everyone’s so positive and people are caring,” she says. Other videos containing the hashtag “TikTokrefugee” have been viewed 100 million times.
Shuler says that her posts on Red Note are already performing better than those on the Meta platforms Instagram and Facebook. “Unless you pay Meta to promote your posts, they’re not really going to show it to people—so I’ve seen a significant drop in engagement on both of those platforms,” she says. “And Facebook is just a bunch of angry people on there. So it was refreshing to get on Red Note and know that my content was appreciated.”
Shuler says she’s even been learning a few Mandarin phrases thanks to the app. Neither she nor Robinson are particularly concerned about the data privacy worries associated with Chinese apps. “If you’ve already bought anything from Temu or Shien, I feel like whatever data that they want, they probably already have,” she says.
It is quite possible that Red Note’s honeymoon will be short-lived. Some users have expressed concern that Red Note will be quicker to censor content that is political, sexual or LBGTQ-related. And Red Note also faces a potential ban: While Congress’s Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act singles out TikTok and other ByteDance apps, it also regulates other “foreign adversary controlled applications.”
“Nobody thinks rednote is a viable long-term replacement,” wrote one Redditor on Monday. “This is just a form of protest; a big middle finger to the US government and their billionaire masters.”
