Chinese social media app 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.
The Chinese-language app had about 3.4 million daily active users across both iOS and Android devices in the United States as of Monday, up from fewer than 700,000 the day prior, and around 300,000 the week prior, according to the Similarweb estimate.
The influx of users has been driven by a looming U.S. ban on TikTok, used by 170 million Americans, on national security concerns.
The data suggests an even larger shift to RedNote by U.S. users this week than was previously known, explaining its dramatic rise to the top of U.S. app store download rankings. Reuters reported on Tuesday that more than 700,000 new users had joined the app in only two days.
Meanwhile, U.S. usage of TikTok declined ahead of the ban, down 2.1% week over week to about 82.2 million daily active users, Similarweb said.
This is the first time americans are talking directly to chinese people en masse like this, no? The state department must be scrambling to get things in order. I don't think they expected the ban to backfire this bad lol
Wonder how long it'll last before it's closed off.
Not for me but seems like a win overall? People are generally far less willing to hurt/fight people they know well compared to some nebulous concept of a nation. If American and Chinese people get to know eachother in a social setting it can only be a good thing.
It's surprisingly easy to agitate over there, being a leftist on the western internet and especially reddit is like training your arguing skills in a high-gravity environment. I'm accustomed to maneuvering around such unrelenting hostility that the friendliness of rednote is shocking to me.
The fear is ridiculous. Yes it's somewhat sanitised, all social media is sanitised. Shit even on lemmy large instances are going to remove a video of me showing how to inject heroin or, for a more moderate thing, explain how trans people can DIY hormones.
It is good when people from different cultures share stuff. It is good when state barriers break down and people see how we're all so similar at the end of the day.
The consent machine is pulling triple shifts to convince people this is dangerous, and some people even on this site have so thoroughly doomer-pilled themselves that they can't see the positives. I've been on there a lot this week and there is a real cultural exchange taking place, a lot of people asking questions about what it's really like to live in each country. Just in my little slice I've seen dozens of comments from USians expressing that they are surprised to learn the reality of life in China and that they feel they have been deliberately mislead.
Honestly since I've learned about how the Chinese people seem to be taking it and really like the interaction with "us" I've been more interested in checking out weibo. That seems more similar to this and is more about communicating instead of pictures and videos of specific topics.
Just can't make an account for some reason lol keep getting errors in Chinese even though I'm using the international site lol
Democrats had tried on Wednesday to pass legislation that would have extended the deadline, but Republican Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas blocked it. Cotton, chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said that TikTok has had ample time to find a buyer.
“TikTok is a Chinese Communist spy app that addicts our kids, harvests their data, targets them with harmful and manipulative content, and spreads communist propaganda,” Cotton said.
Yes please everyone from the banned app move to an app that has a solid chance of being banned for the exact same reason. Unbelievably dumb but I guess we are talking about the tictok user base so I shouldn't be surprised.
Is any reporter going to actually look into this? I have serious doubts that a slew of English speaking TikTok users who can barely use their phones to begin with are going to mass migrate to a Chinese language app just to watch lame ass videos. This really feels like some sort of propaganda campaign.