As the US ban on TikTok approaches, its American users are migrating by the hundreds of thousands to a Chinese application they’d probably never heard of just a few days before. Xiaohongshu means “little red book” in Chinese. The name is not a reference to Mao Zedong’s collection of quotations but to a personal diary. It is sometimes translated into English as RedNote.
Users – mostly women – share videos and photos of their vacations, make-up, clothing choices, pets and restaurants. The lifestyle app is intended for a Chinese audience only and only exists in Chinese. However, since Monday, January 13, it has been the most downloaded iPhone app in the United States, ahead of another previously little-known Chinese social media application, Lemon8, developed by Tiktok’s parent company.
The administration of US President Joe Biden considers that by harvesting the data of its 170 million US users, TikTok, an international version of a Chinese social media platform, constitutes a threat to national security. A law passed in April 2024 gives its owner, the Bytedance group, until this Sunday to give it up. It will otherwise no longer be possible to download it in the US, and risks becoming obsolete.
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