US TikTok users are flooding to a popular Chinese social media app ahead of America’s looming ban, using the hashtag #TikTokrefugees.
RedNote, which is similar to Instagram, has quickly become the most downloaded app on the US App Store in recent days.
The app is hugely popular in Mandarin-speaking countries and has more than 300 million monthly active users, according to Bloomberg.
The homepage of the app is full of Mandarin speakers welcoming Americans and Americans introducing themselves.
“I’m American. Do y’all like us? We know y’all not the enemy. Can we all be friends?” reads one post with nearly 3,000 comments.
The replies are a combination of people asking about specific English American phrases like “y’all”, welcoming the US contingent and making jokes about stealing data.
“If you give me all your data we can get along,” said one reply, a jokey reference to the US’ concerns around national security and TikTok.
Users who don’t speak Mandarin must agree to privacy notices and terms and conditions they can’t read, which is prompting some security concerns.
In Taiwan, public officials are banned from using RedNote due to the alleged security risks of Chinese software, which is similar to a UK ban of TikTok on government devices.
As it stands, TikTok will be banned in the US from Sunday, unless the Supreme Court overturns the law this week.
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Congress passed a law last year that meant Bytedance, TikTok’s Chinese owners, would either have to sell the company or it would be banned.
That has sparked the mass migration to RedNote, or Xiaohongshu, with that ban coming into force in under a week.
However, social media expert Adam Tinworth told Sky News there may be a problem with US citizens trying to replace TikTok with another Chinese social media site.
“The legislation that Biden got through the House has, although it specifically names TikTok and Bytedance, provisions where the government can unilaterally apply the same process to any other hostile-foreign-power owned-service.
“So if it ends up everything on TikTok migrating to RedNote, then in theory, depending on how the Trump administration feel about it, [they] could just apply that same legislation straight away to rednote and shut it down equally easily.”