A Chinese application can hide another. As the potential ban on TikTok across the Atlantic approaches, if the Chinese giant ByteDance does not find a buyer for the platform’s American assets by this Sunday, January 19, some of its American users are exploring alternatives in anticipation of the deadline.
In a form of snub to the American authorities, who intend to protect American Internet users from the risks of espionage and manipulation that TikTok would pose to them, this plays into the hands of another Chinese application called Xiaohongshu, “RedNote” in English . Despite the language barrier, in recent days the latter has risen to first place in the ranking of the most downloaded free applications on the Apple App Store in the country.
Launched in 2013, RedNote is generally considered to be the Chinese answer to Instagram, with an interface reminiscent of Pinterest. Its name literally means “Little Red Book”. The expression would not refer to the famous collection of quotes from the former Chinese communist leader Mao Tse-Tung, but rather to the passage of its creator, Charlwin Mao in an American consulting firm and at Stanford University, two establishments of which red is the main color.
Lifestyle recommendations and social shopping
Before the exodus of American “refugees” from TikTok, RedNote recently claimed 300 million monthly usersalmost exclusively based on the Chinese market. The app saw its strongest growth during the Covid-19 pandemic. It especially appeals to young Chinese consumers, fans of its social shopping features and lifestyle content. Many city dwellers use it in particular as a powerful tool for recommending restaurants, beauty products, design, decoration and travel. On the economic front, the application has already raised nearly a billion dollars from backers like Tencent and Alibaba. It expected more than a billion dollars in profits in 2024.
The sudden success of RedNote in the United States can be explained by the promotion carried out by TikTok creators in recent days to encourage their subscribers to migrate to the platform using tutorials and advice provided in English. On RedNote, the hashtag “tiktokrefugee” had accumulated nearly 300 million views this Wednesday, January 15. American Internet users denounce the contradictory injunctions of their government’s policy, which stigmatizes the threats that TikTok poses to the data of its citizens but allows American platforms like Instagram and Facebook to flourish, which are no more virtuous in this area.
RedNote is also a chatty app
No one knows, at this stage, if this migration was encouraged on the sly by TikTok. The American media The Information understands that the platform is determined to mobilize American public opinion on the eve of Donald Trump’s inauguration to push the next tenant of the White House to take up the issue. In the meantime, several observers have not failed to point out the irony of the situation. “The phenomenon shows how ‘stupid’ a ban would be,” Milton Mueller, a professor at the School of Public Policy at Georgia Tech in the United States, who filed a case with the Supreme Court, told AFP. in opposition to the measure.it’s deliciously ironic that the threat of a ban backfires so quicklyeven before it was put in place.” “It’s as if the ban on TikTok is pushing users towards other apps that have a much less clear separation between the Chinese Communist Party and the app itself,” he said. also observed Robyn Caplan, from Duke University, in the United States.
While American authorities suspect TikTok of being a spy tool in the service of Beijing, the RedNote application is also particularly talkative. French cybersecurity expert Baptiste Robert, director of the company Predicta Lab, warned on X against the appetite of the Chinese platform for the personal information of its users. In its sights: technical data, such as the telephone number or mobile advertising identifier, and information specific to the device used, the operator, the IP address and the country, information likely to cause tracking activity and location. So many markers are transferred in a few minutes to servers in China from the first use.
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