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.
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.
I just checked it out today and it seems like at least a third of the active users are american. I’m sure that will die down some after the curiosity dwindles but there is absolutely a massive surge of English speakers on there.
Most of the activity is in the comments. Lots of culture shock happening as I type this.
There are English speakers on Lemmy too. And some of them post Chinese propaganda. I wouldn’t doubt if a lot of this “surge” is manufactured/faked.
Most of the English speakers on Lemmy post Five Eyes propaganda. They don’t mean to, they just don’t know any better. It’s all they’ve ever known. I try to point them toward developing real media literacy.
Looks like they’re starting to geolock some users, so americans mostly see posts/comments made from the US
Can't people just not be racist
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.
That’s the point? It’s people signalling they’re not dumb enough to believe the US’s “national security” shit and would trust China’s products over american ones like Meta or Xitter
It’d also be so fucking funny if the US forces people to use a VPN to access Xiaohongshu. How the turntables.
Soon we’ll be routing our internet connections like flight paths to get around sanctions.
Despite China history with the Uyghurs, child labor, and many other human rights violations and completely ignoring the fact that the people of China have a mile long list of apps they’re not allowed to download and a longer list of things they’re not allowed to speak about. These people sure know how to signal.
There’s more child labor, both legal and illegal, in the United States than in all of China.
The saddest downvotes are the “shoot the messenger” downvotes. I find this fact inconvenient so ⬇
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
