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 gained popularity last week in anticipation of TikTok's shutdown.
TikTok, owned by Chinese internet company ByteDance, stopped operating in the United States before a federal law required 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 postpone a ban once he takes office on Monday.
Many questions remain about the fate of TikTok in the United States. For now, Xiaohongshu, who many people call RedNote, is leaning into his sudden celebrity in the United States.
Over the weekend, Xiaohongshu added a feature that allows users to translate posts and comments between Mandarin and English. On Monday it was at the top of Apple's ranking of most downloaded applications, a place it has maintained for much of the past week.
According to data from RedNote, as of Monday, 32.6 million notes were published with the hashtag “tiktok refugee,” obtaining 2.3 billion views.
Americans on the platform said they planned to continue posting on RedNote, even though TikTok was back online.
“TikTok is back. Will I continue using this application? Absolutely,” posted a user in the United States. “I'm not going anywhere.”
Early users of Xiaohongshu outside of 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 interact with other users, most of whom were in China.
“I think it's really cool that we're looking at a completely different country and seeing their cultural differences from our own and it's all coming together,” said Sky Bynum, 18, who creates beauty videos from her home in New Jersey. “That's something you can't do on TikTok, instagram, facebook or YouTube.”
Chinese users were also helping their new social media friends navigate China's strict censorship. Don't post photos that involve nudity or weapons, they advised.
Americans have posted videos taking Chinese viewers shopping at Walmart and talking about how much it costs to take their four children to dinner. The conversations have brought up topics often considered sensitive online in China, including whether people can be open about their sexuality and the long hours many work. In a video about how people in China's tech industry work long hours, commentators in the United States shared their work schedules on oil rigs, hospitals and Taco Bell.
Although Xiaohongshu is extremely popular in China, especially among young women in big 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 every day for the past week on its recruitment website. Among the positions listed was one for an engineer who would work on the platform's “building content security emergency response capability.” It is also looking for someone to be in charge of content security risk assessment and analysis, and interns with “excellent spoken and written English skills.”
Xiaohongshu, a private company, is operated by Shanghai-based Xingyin Information technology, owned by billionaire entrepreneurs Charlwin Mao and Miranda Qu. As of last July, Xiaohongshu had raised nearly $1 billion since its founding more than a decade ago, according to Crunchbase, from investors including Alibaba, HongShan and Tencent, the Chinese internet giant behind the country's most ubiquitous app, WeChat.
The app allows users to share short videos as well as text-based still posts, which sometimes attract long, Reddit-like comment threads. Like TikTok, Xiaohongshu is powered by a proprietary algorithm that recommends content aimed at keeping people scrolling.
