- A Chinese app known as RedNote is surging with new users from the US.
- I downloaded it and found users posting gleefully about giving away their data to China.
- The frenzy around RedNote might be short-lived, however.
I spent time on the Chinese app Xiaohongshu, also known as RedNote, which Americans are flocking to — a phenomenon that could become even more interesting after the Supreme Court upheld the TikTok ban on Friday.
It was an amusing and utterly confusing experience.
The app is flooded with posts deriding the US government when I visited it earlier this week. It seems impossible to parse what’s potentially propaganda, what’s ironically pretending to be propaganda, and what are earnest complaints about the US government — or earnest welcome messages from Chinese citizens.
What’s clear, however, is that many Americans are furious, and they’re doing what angry Americans do best from their couches: make memes. One video with over 30,000 likes shows a scene from the movie “Brokeback Mountain” where the two main characters reunite and hug, with the caption, “Me being reunited with my Chinese spy.”
Many users joked — using the hashtag “TikTokrefugee” — about giving all their data to the Chinese government. One speculated that RedNote users were being assigned a new Chinese spy to watch them.
My feed, overall, was chock full of dark humor about being fine with giving data to China or using the app “just to say FU to our govt,” as one user put it.
Many posts expressed anger toward the US government, or at least joy in what people perceived to be the government’s embarrassment when it discovered that young people were signing up for an app that could be even worse of a national security issue than TikTok.
Sure enough, RedNote and Lemon8, an app owned by TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, hit the top two spots on the Apple App Store rankings on Monday. I mean, yes, it is pretty funny!
Admittedly, I also chuckled at another genre of memes, about how people would rather sign up for a dubious Chinese app than switch to Instagram Reels. One video I saw showed a cat labeled “Americans” loudly rejecting a cup of yogurt with the Instagram logo on it.
The RedNote frenzy may be short-lived, however. The app is difficult to navigate for English speakers, and some new users have reported it barred them (though it’s possible these issues relate to the phone-verification system, which I also found to be buggy).
It’s also possible that users are downloading RedNote and other Chinese apps not to replace TikTok but to send a signal to the US government.
“It really is just retaliation towards the government in the simplest way but in a way that feels very native to Gen Z,” Meagan Loyst, the founder of the investor collective Gen Z VCs, told my colleagues Dan Whateley and Sydney Bradley.
Who knows what will happen with TikTok after the Supreme Court’s ruling. It’s likely going to go dark on Sunday, but it could get a reprieve from the incoming Trump administration.
One way or the other, for at least a few days this week, there was some level of cathartic steam being released — the frustration that millions of TikTok users feel that the app they enjoy is likely going away — at least for a little while.
