America’s TikTok ban totally backfires as users flock to rival Chinese social media app

TikTok will be banned in the US on 19 January after Supreme Court ruled the short-form video app is a threat to national security, but many of its 170 million American users are just jumping another app in a “cheeky middle figure to the US government”.

The ban on TikTok in the US has “completely backfired” as users have piled in to another Chinese app rather than take their accounts to American versions such as Instagram and Facebook.

RedNote, known as Xiaohongshu, which means ‘Little Red Book’ in China, was unknown days ago but has now surged to the top of the Apple App Store downloads, and today was the most downloaded free app in the UK. Brits appear to be following Americans by downloading the social media app, which has gained nearly a million users in the last two days, in what has been described as a “cheeky middle figure to the US government”.

And social media users have pointed out the irony that those legislating to ban TikTok, which is actually based in Singapore, on the basis that it is a threat to national security, have inadvertently pushed users to another app which really is owned by China.

One user, Ryan shared a meme of a man in shock with the words: “The US Government watching Americans jump from TikTok (not even a Chinese owned app) to RedNote (which is in fact a Chinese owned app)”.

Another, Abby, wrote on X: “Lmao at thousands of people downloading RedNote (the version of Tiktok that is actually owned by China) to spite the U.S. government”

She added that users were “finding themselves having lovely interactions with the millions of Chinese citizens on the app & inadvertently undoing decades of U.S. propaganda.”

Johannes Maria posted a video on X called “RedBook is changing everything” pointing out how new American RedNote users were discovering how similar Chinese users are to them. He said: “The wildest part about this entire shift to RedBook is that US citizens are now connected to Chinese citizens. The entire US propaganda machine that makes us afraid of them, that makes us think their lives are sh***y and in this authoritarian realm is completely shattered.”

The spike in RedNote users comes before a January 19 deadline for TikTok’s owners, ByteDance, to sell their app to an American company over claims it is a threat to national security.

But others have noted how its American rivals are hoping to gain from the ban. Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, reportedly paid consulting firms to push stories portraying TikTok as a danger to children and society in the run up to the US Supreme Court judgement.

And reports today claim the social media app could be sold to Elon Musk, the owner of X, formerly Twitter, and a close-ally of US president-elect Donald Trump.

Milton Mueller, a professor at the Georgia Tech School of Public Policy said the fact so many of TikTok’s 170 million mostly young users appear to have deliberately rejected American alternatives shows how “foolish” the ban was.

“It is deliciously ironical that the threat of a ban is backfiring so quickly, even before it is put into place,” he said.

“It does seem as if the TikTok ban is pushing users towards other apps that have a much less clear division between the Chinese Communist Party and the app itself.”

Stella Kittrell, a content creator from Baltimore, said she is one of the so-called ‘TikTok refugees’ who have created an account on RedNote. “Americans using RedNote feels like a cheeky middle finger to the US government for its overreach into businesses and privacy concerns,” she said.

Even before the mass exodus, RedNote, which was founded in 2013, already had 300 million active Chinese users, most of whom are females aged 18 to 35.

They use the app to share photos and videos about travel tips, style and life abroad as a foreign student.

But like other Chinese apps, it is required to share certain data with the Chinese government if requested.

In 2021, the app had its domestic social media account shut down amid an investigation by Beijing’s cyber watchdog into a post it shared on the anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown.

More recently, one of RedNote’s most high-profile backers, Chinese tech giant Tencent, was designated a military company by the US government – a warning to American businesses about the risks of doing business with it. In response, Tencent, which also owns the messaging app WeChat, along with a stake in Fortnite maker Epic Games, said its inclusion on the list was “clearly a mistake”.