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.
For many Chinese, this is also their first time talking to Americans. There are a ton of stories of them asking us if school shootings and medical bankruptcy are real or if it is just CCP anti-US propaganda. It is gut wrenching when we have to tell them that all the terrible things they have heard about the US are not only true, but worse than they imagine
American general population are not intelligent enough to posit this. Signed, an American
I think this is actually why history repeats itself… the majority of people just aren’t smart enough to learn from past mistakes.
There’s a lot of evidence out there from American journalists that the Chinese are in fact, not forcing sterilization on the Uighur population or putting them in concentration camps. https://medium.com/@braisedporkblog/debunking-the-uyghur-genocide-a-resource-list-a31dd0ea3d87
Now I don’t know what to believe.
I guess I should look at all the foreigners who think the US is some lawless wasteland and not be surprised Americans have similar misconceptions about other nations.
Chinese Rednote users actually seem to have a relatively utopian view of the US. I’m seeing alot of posts asking if it’s true that most Americans can afford to own a house and being corrected by americans in the comments; stuff like that.
Also they really like Luigi Mangione lol, even before americans came into the app.
When you consider the school shootings, mass shootings, insane medical debt, and the fact that we have 8x the traffic fatality rate per capita of many developed nations, etc, I don’t blame people for seeing the US as being a lawless dumpster fire.
If you disagree, next time you are out driving try to estimate how many drivers actually follow the law (drive below the speed limit, stop at crosswalks, slow down even more when visibility is poor or there are pedestrians or children nearby, etc).
Also, how many people drive small cars that are cleaner and safer for our communities vs giant Wankpanzers? People who are willing to make our cities more polluted and more dangerous for everyone overall just to make themselves slightly safer are morally bankrupt even if they technically follow the law they don’t value the spirit of the law.
This is a textbook example of non-Americans not realizing how big and diverse America is.
Guaranteed you will always see only what the Chinese government wants you to see
Uhh… no. That’s not “guaranteed” and I feel sorry for you if you believe otherwise.
Is there a word for people who believe propaganda without a second thought?
If you asked an American if we use child labor they would say “of course not!” but we keep mysteriously finding kids in meat packing plants and auto manufacturing plants and farms and….
My point is that just because the average citizen doesn’t know about bad things doesn’t make the bad things non-existent.
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.
Yes it’s somewhat sanitised, all social media is sanitised.
And it’s all sanitized for good reason - the closest places to unsanitized, such as freespeechextremist, are literally just spambots, molesters, troll neo-nazis and people mechanically incapable of holding a conversation without bursting into nonsense screeds in all caps. Effectively, just the people no-one else wants to talk to.
As for the RedNote sanitizing, some of the ones I’ve seen newcomers getting tripped up on are rules which would make our local social media better. They seem aimed at countering grifters/influencers, sexualization for popularity (not being a prude, rather, there are plenty of other places for that content) and similar negative trends associated with TikTok.
Meirl
Just so you know, PRC is not a very inclusive place. Have a look at this article for more info.
Yeah they have a long way to go like most of the world; wish they’d just copy Cuba and the GDR on that.
Also you’d be better served with a specific documentary like this one instead of just lazily linking to wikipedia.
As of at least 2023, Chinese public attitudes towards the LGBTQI community continues to become increasingly favorable.
Literally all that “article” says is that China has its issues but is making progress in the right direction.
The important thing is that LGBTQ people in China can and do currently live free, safe, and open lives, and that the state is consistently moving towards providing queer people with further right and protections.
A crowd sourced encyclopedia is only as trustworthy as the editors that control the page. I wouldn’t trust wikipedia for anything to do with geopolitics or current affairs any more than I would trust any other mainstream media source.
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.
The consent machine is pulling triple shifts to convince people this is dangerous
seeing it nakedly displayed live on colbert, the daily show, and kimmel was mind blowing to me; are they panicking?
I’ll look around to see if I can find those show segments online, but as for ‘are they panicking?’, mass media has a vested interest in influencing public opinion (that’s effectively the only reason a private business bothers with news) and therefore control over public opinion. If the people who own the show and the channel give orders, the writers and actors probably won’t risk getting fired. (oh, and obligatory quick clip to demonstrate what ownership looks like, for those who haven’t seen it: “This Is Extremely Dangerous to Our Democracy”)
So, with that in mind, recall the reactions of almost all mass media to the UnitedHealthcare assassination: consistent critique and denouncement. Surely this wasn’t how all the news anchors felt, given how positive general opinion was! The people with ownership and executive power over these media channels obviously don’t want the idea of citizens shooting the dangerously rich and powerful to get popular, so we saw their ideas echoed in all the news.
Compare that to here: media channels outside of China don’t really want that counter-narrative to gain traction. It goes against their inherent interest of influencing public opinion, it’s a competitor which all the biggest media companies can agree to call bad news. So I have no doubt this unexpected and surprising turn would make them panic.
edit: the clips I found from Colbert and The Daily Show were a surprisingly mixed bag. For example, this Daily Show clip comes off more as a satirical jab at the US than any panic.
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.
It honestly sounds a lot like Hexbear. Made a rednote account today, but I’ve never used tiktok or instagram before, so the entire thing was kinda inscrutable for me lol, but I’m so glad that this is where the tiktok exodus is heading.
