In the days leading up to the TikTok ban in the U.S. on Sunday, U.S. users flooded the Chinese app RedNote, which offered a similar experience to their favorite short-form video app. The app, which is listed in the U.S. App Store under its Chinese name Xiaohongshu, quickly became the No. 1 free app in the U.S. But after Trump paused the ban, use of RedNote in the U.S. rapidly declined. By Monday, RedNote had lost over half its daily active users in the U.S. after reaching a high of 32.5 million daily actives on the day of the ban.
Uh, what? People were obviously using RedNote as a protest against the TikTok ban. They got what they wanted, so they went back. That seems like they successfully stuck it to the US government to me.
I wish we lived in a world where banning a brainrot app wasn’t the thing that US citizens cared about enough to stand up to the government, but that’s not the world we live in.
People jumped on rednote because influencers early on latched on to it. The average tiktoker isn’t using these platforms to prove a point, if they were, they would be posting about why exactly they are using it. I never saw any traction on any post specifically saying they were on rednote because they wanted to support a non-US platform.