'TikTok refugees' migrate to Chinese app RedNote in an 'ironic' protest of looming ban

In the days before a ban on the popular app TikTok is set to take effect in the United States, other Chinese social media platforms have seen a spike in downloads among American users. But whether any of these Mandarin apps will actually replace TikTok, which boasts 170 million American users, remains to be seen.

In particular, the popular Chinese app Xiaohongshu, referred to by most Americans as RedNote, became the top most downloaded free app in the U.S. Apple store this week. Xiaohongshu originally launched in 2013 and has a layout more similar to Pinterest or Instagram than TikTok, and boosts several shopping features that blew up during the COVID-19 pandemic. According to Sensor Tower, a market intelligence firm, U.S. downloads of Xiaohongsu between Jan. 8 and Jan. 14 were 30 times greater compared to the number of U.S.-based downloads this time last year. U.S. users made up 22% of the RedNote app downloads in January 2025.

Americans who have joined the platform — which is all in Mandarin — have gathered under the hashtag #TikTokrefugee in an apparent rebuke of the U.S. government's stated national security concerns about TikTok’s Chinese ownership.

“Honestly, I think a lot of people, including myself, are doing this out of spite and irony,” Jaden, a 23-year-old TikTok user, told Yahoo News of her decision to download RedNote, noting that it has not “fully replaced” TikTok for her.

Another 30-something Reddit user, who asked to remain anonymous, told Yahoo News they also downloaded RedNote “in protest” against the law to ban TikTok.

“I found the first Chinese-run video-sharing app that I could find, which was RedNote,” they said. “Two months later, it caught on and everyone started doing the same thing to protest the actions of Congress.”

Last April, President Biden signed a law passed by Congress that requires TikTok’s Chinese parent company, ByteDance, to sell the popular app to an American company or be banned from U.S. app stores. ByteDance has thus far refused to divest from TikTok, which argued before the Supreme Court last week that the ban violates the company’s First Amendment right to free speech. Unless the Supreme Court rules in TikTok’s favor this week, the ban will take effect on Jan. 19.

Xiaohongsu did not respond to Yahoo News’s request for comment.

The language barrier is one factor that seems likely to keep Xiaohongsu from fully replacing TikTok in the U.S. The app does not have translation features and therefore is not optimized for an international user base.

Duolingo, the popular language-learning app, reported to Yahoo News that it had noticed a 216% increase in new Chinese (Mandarin) learners in the U.S., compared to January 2024. Duolingo also reported there was a spike in new users answering “TikTok” as to why they chose to learn Mandarin.

Since the app is fully based in China — compared to TikTok, which is actually based in the U.S. but owned by a Chinese parent company — there are also issues with censorship on the platform already.

“As a Chinese company, it’s subject to China’s cybersecurity laws,” said Lily Li, a cybersecurity lawyer who founded Metaverse Law, a California-based law firm dedicated to global AI and data security issues. Because Xiaohongsu is fully based in China, Li said that it “will probably face some of the similar concerns that TikTok has faced with respect to foreign ownership and control.”

Lemon8 is another app that’s gotten more popular in anticipation of the TikTok ban, going from the 82nd most-downloaded free app in the U.S. app store to the second, following Xiaohongsu, Sensor Tower reported.

But Lemon8 is also owned by ByteDance and will inevitably face similar restrictions if it reaches the same level of success and influence that TikTok has achieved in the U.S.

Li also noted that the federal government is not trying to shut down access to all Chinese apps in the U.S. She cited the fact that TikTok has become the go-to news source for many Americans — especially young ones — as a driving force behind Congress’s decision to target TikTok in particular, as opposed to other popular Chinese shopping apps like Shein or Temu.

“Think of it more as if it was a national radio station or if it was a national newspaper, that you would be concerned about foreign ownership and control of the sources, of content and information that a large percentage of the population is reliant upon versus goods and services in commerce,” Li explained.

Ultimately Li, whose parents are Chinese, called the migration by TikTok’s American defenders to Xiaohongsu “a little ironic.”

“The Chinese characters for Xiaohongsu don’t translate to ‘Red Note,’ they translated to ‘Little Red Book,’ which is the name of the little red book that essentially had the communist dictates of Chairman Mao [Zedong] where, if you were a kid growing up in China during that era, you had to have it,” she explained. “So it's a little bit ironic to me that there's kind of a First Amendment argument and people are flowing toward an app that is called the Little Red Book.”