With the wildly popular video app TikTok set to be disabled in the U.S. this weekend, hundreds of thousands of young people are moving over to a competitive Chinese social media platform, heavily invested by the Chinese military, the Washington Examiner reported on Thursday.
RedNote, known in China as Xiaohongshu, gained nearly 3 million U.S. users in one day earlier this week, as a flood of self-proclaimed "TikTok Refugees" joined, according to new data from analytics firm Similarweb. RedNote or "Rebook" is a video-sharing and e-commerce platform that has been described as the Instagram of China.
The app has benefited from large investments from the Chinese technology conglomerate Tencent. The U.S. Department of Defense designated Tencent on Jan. 7 as a "Chinese military company," meaning it is "directly or indirectly owned, controlled, or beneficially owned by" the Chinese military or that it is a "military-civil fusion contributor to the Chinese defense industrial base."
"If elected officials in Washington are concerned about ByteDance's ownership of TikTok, they should also be concerned about Tencent's stake in Xiaohongshu," Michael Sobolik, American Foreign Policy Council senior fellow and author of "Countering China's Great Game," told the outlet. "Earlier this month, the Department of Defense added Tencent to its blacklist of PRC companies affiliated with the People's Liberation Army. We cannot allow the Chinese Communist Party to effectively control the algorithms of America's most popular social media apps."
RedNote may face the same scrutiny as TikTok, with some experts predicting it could have more privacy issues. A U.S. official told CBS News RedNote could face an ultimatum to divest or be banned. "This appears to be the kind of app that the statute would apply to and could face the same restrictions as TikTok if it's not divested," the official said.
TikTok, meanwhile plans to shut U.S. operations of its social media app used by 170 million Americans on Sunday, when a federal ban is set to take effect if it does not divest itself from its China-based parent company, ByteDance. President-elect Donald Trump is considering issuing an executive order to suspend enforcement of a shutdown for 60 to 90 days, according to The Washington Post.
Reporting from Reuters was used in this report.
James Morley III ✉
James Morley III is a writer with more than two decades of experience in entertainment, travel, technology, and science and nature.
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