CHINESE SOCIAL MEDIA app RedNote has quickly become the most downloaded app on Irish app stores in recent days, ahead of a potential US ban on TikTok.
TikTok’s Chinese owners ByteDance are facing the prospect of the popular app being shut down permanently in the US on Sunday, when a US government ban is due to take effect.
Supreme Court justices are due to rule on a law that set a 19 January deadline for TikTok to either sell its US operations or face a ban in the country.
TikTok has repeatedly said that it will not sell its US business and its lawyers have warned that a ban will violate free speech protections for the platform’s 170 million users in the US.
TikTok users have said that they are pushing back against the looming TikTok ban by “migrating” to RedNote, which some users are calling “China’s TikTok.”
The app is reportedly popular with young people in China, Taiwan and other Mandarin-speaking populations. Women reportedly make up a vast majority of users on the app (79%).
Known as Xiaohongshu in China, RedNote is a social media platform that includes images, short-form videos, community building tools, shopping and more.
RedNote’s Chinese name, Xiaohongshu, translates to Little Red Book, but the app says it is not a reference to Chinese communist leader Mao Zedong’s book of quotations with the same name.
The app, founded in 2013, is not a one-to-one TikTok clone, and it is not owned by ByteDance. It is owned by Shanghai-based Xingyin Information Technology.
It has about 300 million monthly users and looks like a combination of TikTok and Instagram.
While the app has unsurprisingly received a wave of downloads in the US as users search for a TikTok alternative, the app has also skyrocketed in popularity here.
As of today, RedNote is currently sitting at the number one spot on Apple’s Irish App Store, and is the third-most popular app on in Ireland on Google Play Store.
The app is not exactly a TikTok clone, and has been compared more closely to Instagram.
While it offers short-form videos and images to users via an algorithm like TikTok, text posts and shopping features are also prominent.
If the goal were as simple for US TikTok users as finding another social media platform with short-form videos, then using already popular Western apps like Meta-owned Instagram and Facebook might have been a viable alternative.
But US TikTok users, many of whom make a living on the app, have en-masse protested the US Supreme Court decision to ban the app in recent days by encouraging followers to join them in downloading RedNote, with some videos even featuring people jokingly saying goodbye to their “Chinese spy”.
Many of the video creators are intending to send a message to the US government, which they believe is overstepping in its move to ban the app.
The videos are part of a deeper resentment some users feel toward the U.S. government for moving to ban TikTok in the name of security and safety, even though some lawmakers use it themselves, as well as toward the continued politicization of other social media companies, like X and Meta.
Meanwhile, RedNote has welcomed its new users with open arms. There are 63,000 posts on the topic “TikTok refugee”, where new users are taught how to navigate the app and how to use basic Chinese phrases.
“To our Chinese hosts, thanks for having us – sorry in advance for the chaos,” a new US user wrote.
But like TikTok, there have also been reports of censorship on RedNote when it comes to criticism of the Chinese government.
In Taiwan, public officials are restricted from using RedNote due to alleged security risks of Chinese software.
Security concerns have not affected the TikTok migration however, as many popular Irish content creators such as Garron Noone have already made the move to RedNote.
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