Many who are worried about Tiktok’s fate in the United States have chosen as their new platform an application that doesn’t even have an English name.
US users have flocked to the Chinese and completely Chinese-language app that doesn’t even have an official English name. Taidgh Barron
The social service Tiktok is about to face fateful moments in the United States. On January 19, a law is about to come into force, based on which the US operations of the service must be sold or the service will be banned in the US. The Supreme Court’s decision is still awaited in the matter, but some users have already started to move their digital home elsewhere as a precaution.
Among others Wired reportedhow on Monday a previously unknown Chinese app topped the download list of Apple’s app store in the United States. Xiǎo hóng shū is a thoroughly Chinese application intended as a social media platform for travel and lifestyle content. It doesn’t even have an official English name. Its name means little red book and US users call it Rednote.
According to Wired, Xiǎo hóng shū, founded in 2013, is one of the trendiest Chinese services among locals in recent times. However, the service is more like Instagram, which is focused on images and their accompanying texts, than the video service Tiktok.
After Xiǎo hóng shū, Tiktok’s parent company Bytedance’s application Lemon8 also rose to the top of the app store download list, which has been considered to be Bytedance’s attempt to imitate the Xiǎo hóng shū application and the popularity it has achieved.
A Chinese application as an expression of opinion
Admittedly, many Tiktok users transfer their videos and video viewing to Instagram or YouTube, but many have chosen the Chinese application also as a protest against the US administration and the Tiktok ban.
Self-proclaimed “Tiktok refugees” users have to rely on translation apps to know how to navigate inside the Chinese-language app, but according to some publications, even this is a lesser evil than the apps owned by Mark Zuckerberg, in practice Meta’s Facebook and Instagram.
Wired points out that the Xiǎo hóng shū application is not mentioned in the legal text that Tiktok is being shut down or forced to sell. However, the legal text also allows other “applications controlled by foreign enemies” to be banned. In other words, if the app is deemed to be under the control of the Chinese government, it may as well end up on the blacklist.