TikTok took a notable break from the forced shutdown, but Americans on Monday were still using and downloading Xiaohongshu, the Chinese social media app that surged in popularity last week in anticipation of TikTok’s shutdown.
TikTok, owned by Chinese internet company ByteDance, went dark in the United States ahead of a federal law requiring it to be sold or banned on Sunday. TikTok quickly bounced back online after President-elect Donald J. Trump said he would issue an executive order to delay a ban once he takes office on Monday.
Many questions remain about TikTok’s fate in the United States. Right now, Xiaohongshu, who many people are calling RedNote, is leaning towards his sudden fame in the United States.
Over the weekend, Xiaohongshu added a feature to allow users to translate posts and comments between Mandarin and English. On Monday it topped Apple’s list of most downloaded apps, a spot it has held for most of the past week.
According to data from RedNote, as of Monday, 32.6 million notes with the hashtag “tiktok refugee” had been posted, garnering 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 still be using this app? Absolutely,” one user in the United States posted. “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 members of the union 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 seeing a completely different country and we’re seeing their cultural differences from ours 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 any photos that include nudity or weapons, they advised.
Americans have posted videos of themselves taking Chinese viewers on a shopping trip to Walmart and talking about how much it costs to take their four kids out 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 they work. In a video about how people in China’s tech industry work long hours, commentators in the United States shared their work schedules working on oil rigs, in hospitals and at 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 nearly two years.
Xiaohongshu has posted nearly a dozen jobs every day for the past week on its recruitment site. Among the positions listed was one for an engineer to work on “building out the content security emergency response capability” of the platform. It is also looking for someone to be responsible for content security risk assessment and analysis, as well as interns with “excellent written and spoken English skills.”
Xiaohongshu, a private company, is operated by Xingyin Information Technology, which is based in Shanghai and owned by billionaire entrepreneurs Charlwin Mao and Miranda Qu. As of last July, Xiaohongshu had raised nearly $1 billion since it was founded over a decade ago, according to Crunchbase, from investors including Alibaba, HongShan and Tencent, the Chinese internet giant behind the country’s most popular app. WeChat.
The app allows users to share short videos as well as still, text-based posts, which sometimes attract lengthy Reddit-like comment threads. Like TikTok, Xiaohongshu is powered by a proprietary algorithm that recommends targeted content to keep people moving.
