With TikTok’s ban looming in the US, content creators are flocking to Chinese social media app RedNote to start over and, in some cases, show off their contempt for the US government.
The surge is also fueled by reports that ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company, could sell TikTok to X owner Elon Musk.
Despite its primary Chinese interface, RedNote has skyrocketed in popularity.
It is now the top app on the Apple App Store and second on Google Play, after Lemon8, another ByteDance product. Currently, more than 60,000 RedNote posts carry the hashtag #TikTokRefugee.
TikTok will go dark on Sunday, marking the first time the US government has banned a mainstream social media app. Instead of allowing users who have downloaded the app to continue using it, TikTok will redirect users to a website with information about the ban.
Questions remain about whether RedNote can amass TikTok’s 1.5 billion monthly active users and whether the US government will put the TikTok alternative in its crosshairs.
According to Randy Nelson, head of Insights and Media Relations at analytics firm AppFigures, RedNote’s newfound popularity is a sign of the power of TikTok and the app’s ability to make another app go viral.
“We see it happening with an otherwise obscure app in the West that ultimately isn’t really a direct alternative to TikTok, with a largely Chinese user base, and there are indications that TikTok ‘refugees’ are facing this disconnect from the alternative that they have. expected,” Nelson said Declutter.
“These consumers go from one app that faces a ban due to its country of origin to another app operated from that same country that, if its profile rises to the level of a TikTok, could suffer exactly the same fate. ”
Launched in 2013 by Shanghai-based Xingyin Information Technology and known as Xiaohongshu – Little Red Book in English – a reference to the book of quotes by the founder of the People’s Republic of China, Mao Zedong.
RedNote focuses on lifestyle content and product features, contrasting with TikTok’s emphasis on entertainment.
According to data from AppFigures, the app has been downloaded more than 3.4 million times in the US across both the App Store and Google Play since January 1, 2017.
The data includes approximately 1.1 million downloads in 2024 alone, representing more than a third of total downloads in the US.
RedNote continued this upward trend in 2025 with 260,000 downloads, up from 30,000 in January 2024, an increase of 867%, AppFigures data shows. As of January 2025, RedNote has more than 300 million active monthly users, mainly in China, Taiwan and Malaysia.
The increasing number of users in the US has prompted creators to add translated English or Chinese subtitles to videos.
Getting started with RedNote
The first thing new users will notice is that RedNote’s interface is a mix of Chinese and English. Although many app screens are in Chinese, making navigation challenging for non-Chinese speakers, signing in is easy.
On iPhones, users can register with a phone number or their Apple ID. RedNote also has one desktop version in addition to iOS and Android. Once registered, users can set English as the default language, although some features may still display text in both languages.
Reactions to RedNote’s sudden rise in popularity in the US have been mixed.
“If you install 小红书 (RedNote) for fear of a TikTok ban, you will immediately turn into an NPC,” the decentralized social media platform’s account says. Ghosts wrote on X (formerly Twitter).
The American Migration to Xiaohongshu (RedNote) may be the craziest accidental cultural exchange ever.
Hundreds of thousands of users ended up in an app that was not localized or in their language.
In a day, it will be considered rude not to subtitle videos in the other language. pic.twitter.com/eG08cH1ID9
Lmao to thousands of people downloading Rednote (the version of tiktok actually owned by China) to thwart the US government, allowing them to have sweet interactions with the millions of Chinese citizens on the app and inadvertently undoing decades of US propaganda. pic.twitter.com/2OVe06tTpz
The rapid rise of RedNote in the US may seem spontaneous, but according to experts like USC Professor of Communications Karen Norththe trend is not as grassroots as social media would have us believe.
“I don’t think RedNote will just appear out of the blue,” North said Declutter in an interview. “I believe RedNote is being promoted. TikTok is essentially an astroturfization of this campaign – it simply makes no sense as a protest against the US government’s attack on TikTok because it is Chinese.”
North is a clinical professor and founder of USC Annenberg’s Digital Social Media program. During the Clinton administration, she worked for the White House Office of Science and Technology.
“The idea that there was bipartisan support for an unpopular action right before the election should be a signal that elected officials know something serious, and we need to stop and think or be open to the reason,” North said.
On April 23 last year, Congress past the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversaries Controlled Applications Act, which requires TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, to sell its US operations by January 19, 2025.
US President Joe Biden signed the legislation into law, including a provision for a three-month extension if the sale is not completed by the deadline.
The PAFACA targets not only TikTok, but also foreign-owned apps that U.S. policymakers say pose national security risks, especially those from Chinese companies.
Privacy and social media
North noted that people in the US are increasingly indifferent to personal privacy, often saying it doesn’t exist. However, she emphasized that privacy laws vary significantly from country to country; “It’s their country, their laws,” she said, highlighting the contrast between privacy regulations in the United States and those abroad.
Despite this growing public apathy, governments around the world have banned Chinese social media apps. By 2023, several countries, including the US, EU, Canada and Taiwan, will forbidden the use of TikTok on government devices. Taiwan had already banned RedNotee in 2022 due to national security concerns.
“In the EU, privacy laws are stricter. In China, individual users have no privacy. Data can be collected and stored individually, which is how their government works. But for most of us, it’s generally not okay,” North said.
“When people say that privacy no longer exists, they are thinking in American terms. We need to think country by country when downloading apps that fall under the laws of other places,” she said.
Edited by Sebastian Sinclair and Josh Quittner
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