TikTok Ban
TikTok Ban
TikTok Ban
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The Chinese social media app, popular in the United States a week after being flooded by TikTok users, has added language translation features.
transcript
Hello again, from a TikTok refugee. Nihao. Hello. I think I came to Red Note with a sense of rebellion, that if there’s going to be some of our opportunity taken away, then we may as well just go all the way with it. This idea that we’ll just flock back to whatever we’ve had in the past. Because we have no better options. No, we have options. This is the free market showing you what they want. This just happens to be the one where it seems to be the most people were going to. What happened in the past 24, 48 hours was something I would say phenomenal. And it’s never happened before. I made a video after I saw what’s happened on Xiaohongshu, TikTok refugees just flooding in. Our first reaction was — do you have a cat? So “cat tax” means show my pet. OK, well, I have a dog. I can do that. People are talking to each other. Some of them are actually sharing their farm life in America. And that’s really fascinating. People are curious about my artistic style, which is different than traditional Chinese. I posted a video explaining the concept of sweet tea, which everyone was baffled by how much sugar. A lot of people are interested in what it looks like to be a woodworker in the United States. I think there’s a lot of common ground that we share. I can see why that would be potentially limiting. For my case, It doesn’t feel like that. I think I can talk about woodworking and that should be able to be there. I remember even 20 years ago when we don’t have a wall on our internet, people in every country could just actually talk to each other. I just wish that this sweetness and friendliness and this conversation between these two groups of people can just last longer.
Meaghan Tobin and Claire Fu
Meaghan Tobin reported from Taipei, Taiwan, and Claire Fu from Seoul.
TikTok got an apparent reprieve from being forced to shut down, 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 closure.
TikTok, owned by the 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 soon came back online after President-elect Donald J. Trump said he would issue an executive order to put off a ban once he took office on Monday.
Many questions remain about TikTok’s fate in the United States. For now, Xiaohongshu, which many people are calling RedNote, is leaning into its sudden celebrity in the United States.
Over the weekend, Xiaohongshu added a feature to let users translate posts and comments between Mandarin and English. On Monday it was at the top of Apple’s ranking of most downloaded apps, a spot it has held for much of the past week.
According to data on RedNote, 32.6 million notes have been posted with the hashtag “tiktok refugee” as of Monday, gaining 2.3 billion views.
Americans on the platform said they planned to keep posting on RedNote, even though TikTok had come back online.
“TikTok is back. Will I still continue using this app? Absolutely,” a user in the United States posted. “I am going nowhere.”
The initial users of Xiaohongshu outside of China had to overcome significant language barriers. In interviews and on the app, early joiners 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 seeing their cultural differences from ours and it’s all merging,” said Sky Bynum, 18, who creates beauty videos from her home in New Jersey. “That’s something that you can’t do on TikTok or Instagram or Facebook or YouTube.”
transcript
So I just went a little viral on Xiaohongshu. Let me show you some of the comments because everyone is so sweet. “Oh my gosh, my Wi-Fi, my Wi-Fi.” They meant wife, but it was so funny and everyone was just joking about it in the comments. A lot of them were talking about how there were so many foreigners and they were so confused. And I don’t know if this TikTok ban will really go through, but it’s getting down to the wire so you guys can find me on Xiaohongshu.
Chinese users were also helping their new social media friends navigate China’s strict censorship. Don’t post any photos involving nudity or guns, they advised.
Americans have posted videos taking Chinese viewers along for a shopping trip to Walmart and talking about how much it costs to take their four children to dinner. The conversations have brought up topics that are often considered sensitive online in China, including whether people can be open about their sexuality and the long hours that many work. On a video about how people in China’s tech industry work long hours, commenters in the United States shared their job 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 has not updated its English-language company news page in almost two years.
Xiaohongshu has posted nearly a dozen job openings every day for the past week on its recruitment website. Among the positions listed were one for an engineer to work on the platform’s “content security emergency response capability construction.” It is also looking for someone to be in charge of content security risk assessment and analysis, and interns with “excellent written and spoken English skills.”
Xiaohongshu, a privately held company, is operated by Xingyin Information Technology, which is based in Shanghai and owned by the 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 ubiquitous app, WeChat.
The app lets users share short videos as well as still, text-based posts, which sometimes attract long, Reddit-like comment threads. Like TikTok, Xiaohongshu is powered by a proprietary algorithm, which recommends content targeted to keep people scrolling.
Meaghan Tobin covers business and tech stories in Asia with a focus on China and is based in Taipei. More about Meaghan Tobin
Claire Fu covers China with a focus on business and social issues in the country. She is based in Seoul. More about Claire Fu
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