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The Chinese social media app, popular in the United States a week after being flooded by TikTok users, has added language translation features.
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Bracing for Life after TikTok, Americans Join the Chinese Internet
Hundreds of thousands of self-described TikTok refugees are flocking to Xiaohongshu, a Chinese social media app also known as RedNote. Americans users say they feel welcome, but politically sensitive topics are off limits.
Hello again, from a TikTok refugee. Nihao. Hello. I think I came to Red Note with a sense of rebellion, that if there’s going to be some of our opportunity taken away, then we may as well just go all the way with it. This idea that we’ll just flock back to whatever we’ve had in the past. Because we have no better options. No, we have options. This is the free market showing you what they want. This just happens to be the one where it seems to be the most people were going to. What happened in the past 24, 48 hours was something I would say phenomenal. And it’s never happened before. I made a video after I saw what’s happened on Xiaohongshu, TikTok refugees just flooding in. Our first reaction was — do you have a cat? So “cat tax” means show my pet. OK, well, I have a dog. I can do that. People are talking to each other. Some of them are actually sharing their farm life in America. And that’s really fascinating. People are curious about my artistic style, which is different than traditional Chinese. I posted a video explaining the concept of sweet tea, which everyone was baffled by how much sugar. A lot of people are interested in what it looks like to be a woodworker in the United States. I think there’s a lot of common ground that we share. I can see why that would be potentially limiting. For my case, It doesn’t feel like that. I think I can talk about woodworking and that should be able to be there. I remember even 20 years ago when we don’t have a wall on our internet, people in every country could just actually talk to each other. I just wish that this sweetness and friendliness and this conversation between these two groups of people can just last longer.
Jan. 20, 2025, 6:45 a.m. ET
TikTok got an apparent reprieve from being forced to shut down, but Americans on Monday were still using and downloading Xiaohongshu, the Chinese social media app that surged in popularity last week in anticipation of TikTok’s closure.
TikTok, owned by the Chinese internet company ByteDance, went dark in the United States ahead of a federal law requiring it to be sold or banned on Sunday. TikTok soon came back online after President-elect Donald J. Trump said he would issue an executive order to put off a ban once he took office on Monday.
Many questions remain about TikTok’s fate in the United States. For now, Xiaohongshu, which many people are calling RedNote, is leaning into its sudden celebrity in the United States.
Over the weekend, Xiaohongshu added a feature to let users translate posts and comments between Mandarin and English. On Monday it was at the top of Apple’s ranking of most downloaded apps, a spot it has held for much of the past week.
According to data on RedNote, 32.6 million notes have been posted with the hashtag “tiktok refugee” as of Monday, gaining 2.3 billion views.
Americans on the platform said they planned to keep posting on RedNote, even though TikTok had come back online.
