I’m not the first to notice the irony of TikTok users flooding RedNote this week. The rule to remove or ban TikTok was supposed to keep Americans away from a foreign-owned social network that was subject to influence or data collection by the Chinese government. Instead, it pushed them to another foreign-owned social network that poses exactly the same hypothetical risks — and that could be subject to the same kind of ban.
TikTok faces a ban under the Protecting Americans from Applications Controlled by Foreign Adversaries Act, which passed with overwhelming bipartisan support and was signed last year by President Joe Biden (who is reportedly experiencing buyer’s remorse now). While it mentions TikTok and its parent company, ByteDance, by name, it can be applied to any company that meets the following criteria:
- It operates a website or application with more than 1 million monthly users and allows those users to create accounts to create and distribute content.
- It is not a service that primarily allows users to “post product reviews, business reviews, or travel information and reviews.”
- It is controlled by a foreign adversary, a definition that covers North Korea, China, Russia and Iran. “Control” can mean that the company is headquartered there, a resident of that country holds at least 20 percent of the shares in it, or is otherwise “subject to the direction or control” of someone who lives there.
RedNote reportedly had more than 300 million monthly active users as of 2023, plus a reported 3 million more US users who recently moved over. It is headquartered in Shanghai, China. It offers a service very similar to TikTok.
If a company meets the legal criteria, the money goes to the president, who can decide whether to start a sale or freeze procedure. This requires a series of steps:
- The president must publicly propose a determination that the company’s application poses a “significant threat” to US national security.
- The president must issue a public report to Congress outlining the “specific national security concern involved and containing a classified annex,” plus a description of the assets the parent company would have to divest. (Congress does not need to approve this—it just needs to receive it.)
- The president makes a formal determination at least 30 days after notifying Congress, and the company has 270 days to make a sale that meets the president’s requirements. Within the first 90 days, the app’s parent company can challenge the law in the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, as TikTok did.
- If it fails to get a court to stop it, the company will have to make a “qualified distribution” or face a US ban. The 270-day clock continues to tick unless a court stops it, and the president can only extend the deadline by up to another 90 days.
- The application can avoid a ban if it is removed from the foreign adversary’s control. The president must determine, with the help of an “interagency process,” that the sale would result in the application no longer being controlled by a foreign adversary and that it prevents any kind of future operational relationship, such as a data-sharing agreement.
- If that doesn’t happen, the law forces app store operators and web hosting services to stop supporting the app, effectively shutting it down in the US.
The law mentions TikTok by name as a national security threat, so that platform is essentially cooked — the sell-or-ban deadline was set in motion after the law was signed, bypassing much of the above process. The law says any ByteDance affiliate is also covered by the law, so while the company and the US government have yet to comment on apps like its social network Lemon8, they are likely to face scrutiny as well. But the president has significantly more leeway in deciding the fate of other applications.
Where does RedNote stand, then?
RedNote, according to publicly available information, could be forced to withdraw or face a ban under the Act to Protect Americans from Foreign Adversaries Controlled Applications. A US official confirmed this, saying it “appears to be the type of application to which the statute would apply”.
But pragmatically, here we leave the realm of politics and enter the world of politics. The question is not how RedNote works; it’s whether RedNote drives President-elect Donald Trump or the Silicon Valley oligarchy crazy.
TikTok poses potential security risks, but the pressure to ban it was far greater than that. Meta was behind a public campaign calling for scrutiny of TikTok – one of its main competitors – and its ties to China. Members of Congress complained that TikTok was serving too much pro-Palestinian content; There is no known evidence that China is behind this alleged imbalance, so presenting it as a national security threat seems rather dubious. Now, conversely, Trump is looking for ways to SAVE TikTok because he thinks it helped his election campaign.
Based on all this, let’s extrapolate a path for RedNote. For now, its US user base seems relatively small; it’s not clear how many US users it had before last week, but Reuters reports that it gained about 3 million U.S. users in a single day this week, compared to TikTok’s roughly 170 million monthly users in the U.S. since last year. The risks that Congress saw in TikTok — massive data collection, covert propaganda — appear to affect far fewer people. The risks that may actually decide her fate are a bit more complicated.
Will RedNote maintain momentum that threatens the egos or businesses of MAGA-endorsed billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk? Will it produce political activism that antagonizes Trump (or a future president)? Will growing US hostility towards China’s government manifest itself in a broad crackdown on Chinese apps? All these things, while difficult to predict, would not be good.
For now, though, have fun learning Mandarin.
