Could the Chinese-owned social media app Xiao Hongxu, or RedNote in English, be a replacement for TikTok?

While RedNote had previously catered almost exclusively to Chinese audiences, Americans are flooding onto the platform this week, making it the number one app on the App Store for two days straight.

RedNote was founded in 2013 as an online shopping guide before pivoting to social media and e-commerce.

Over 300 million people use the app, which is filled with travel logs, beauty tutorials, and animal videos.

Before this week, the few American users of RedNote had been musicians looking to tap into the Chinese market, like John Legend and Mariah Carey.

But this week, many TikTokers announced that due to the upcoming ban, they were migrating to RedNote as well.

Videos containing the hashtag TikTokRefugee have been viewed 100 million times.

One user of this hashtag is Marcus Robinson, a 29-year-old fashion designer who created a RedNote account to share his thrifting adventures and promote his fashion brand, P13.

I've been using TikTok since around 2020.

But to find out that TikTok will be banned in the US, I was kind of upset.

So immediately, I wanted to download the app and get ahead of the curve.

I've probably had the app for about 36 hours now, and it's already at 10,000 followers, which is insane to me.

It is unlikely that Americans will settle on RedNote or a similar Chinese app called Lemon8 in the long term.

Those apps face the same regulatory pressure that TikTok does.

However, the interest in these apps shows that Americans are frustrated with the ban they see as paternalistic, worry about TikTok's top American-owned competitors, like Instagram, and looking for a new social media destination.

While Congress's bill from last year singles out TikTok and other ByteDance apps, it also regulates other foreign, adversary-controlled applications.

And so if RedNote gets popular enough, it could be banned too.