TikTok apparently received a reprieve from its forced shutdown, but Americans on Monday were still using and downloading Xiaohongshu, the Chinese social media app that soared in popularity last week in anticipation of TikTok's shutdown.
TikTok, owned by Chinese internet company ByteDance, came under fire in the United States ahead of a federal law requiring it to be sold or banned on Sunday. TikTok quickly returned online after newly elected President Donald J. Trump said he would issue an executive order to delay a ban once he took office on Monday.
Many questions remain about the fate of TikTok in the United States. For now, Xiaohongshu, which many people call RedNote, is leaning on its sudden celebrity in the United States.
Over the weekend, Xiaohongshu added a feature that allows users to translate messages and comments between Mandarin and English. On Monday, it topped Apple's rankings of most downloaded apps, a spot it has held for much of the past week.
According to data from RedNote, as of Monday, 32.6 million notes have been posted with the hashtag “tiktok refugee,” racking up 2.3 billion views.
Americans on the platform said they planned to continue posting to RedNote even though TikTok was back online.
“TikTok is back. Will I still continue using this app? Absolutely,” wrote one user in the United States. “I'm not going anywhere.”
Xiaohongshu's first users outside China had to overcome significant language barriers. In interviews and on the app, early joiners said they used tools like ChatGPT and Google Translate to figure out how to register accounts and communicate with other users, most of whom were in China.
“I think it's really cool that we get to see a completely different country and the cultural differences from ours, and it all blends together,” says Sky Bynum, 18, who makes beauty videos from her home in New Jersey. “That's something you can't do on TikTok or Instagram or Facebook or YouTube.”
Chinese users also helped their new social media friends navigate China's strict censorship. Don't post photos with nudity or weapons, they advised.
Americans have posted videos taking Chinese viewers on a shopping spree at Walmart and telling them how much it costs to take their four children out to dinner. The conversations have raised topics that are often considered sensitive online in China, including whether people can be open about their sexuality and the long hours many work. On a video about how people in China's tech industry work long hours, commentators in the United States shared their schedules working on oil rigs, in hospitals and at Taco Bell.
Although Xiaohongshu is extremely popular in China, especially among young women in major cities, the company has kept a low profile. It hasn't updated its English-language company news page in almost two years.
Xiaohongshu has posted nearly a dozen job openings on its recruiting website every day for the past week. Among the positions listed was a position for an engineer working on the platform's “content security emergency response capability construction.” It is also looking for someone responsible for content security risk assessment and analysis, and for interns with “excellent written and spoken English skills.”
Xiaohongshu, a privately held company, is operated by Xingyin Information Technology, based in Shanghai and owned by billionaire entrepreneurs Charlwin Mao and Miranda Qu. As of July last year, Xiaohongshu had raised nearly $1 billion from investors including Alibaba, HongShan and Tencent, the Chinese internet giant behind the country's most ubiquitous app WeChat, according to Crunchbase.
The app allows users to share short videos as well as still, text-based posts, which sometimes attract long, Reddit-like comment threads. Like TikTok, Xiaohongshu is powered by a proprietary algorithm, which recommends content designed to keep people scrolling.
