US ‘TikTok refugees’ flee to Chinese alternative app

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As TikTok faces an imminent shutdown in the United States, American content creators have fled — to another Chinese social media app.

Xiaohongshu, known as Red Note in English, rose to the top of Apple App Store downloads on Monday as users flocked to its Instagram-meets-Pinterest style layout.

“Oh, you don’t want the Chinese to have our very sensitive personal data?” influencer Jen Hamilton sarcastically asked in a video sent to her 3.9 million followers on TikTok promoting her move.

The US government passed a law last year that forced TikTok’s Chinese owner ByteDance to either sell the wildly popular platform or shut it down. It takes effect on Sunday.

While critics of the legislation have argued that it restricts free speech, the US government has argued that TikTok allows Beijing to collect data and spy on users and is a channel for spreading propaganda.

China and ByteDance strongly deny the allegations.

Users like Hamilton aren’t worried.

“It’s impossible how little I care about the Chinese (having) my data,” she said in her video, sharing a joke about a user who “changed their username to their social security number,” so alleged spies could “be promoted faster.”

“Come on over,” she said to her fellow “TikTok refugees.”

That Xiaohongshu’s platform is almost entirely in Mandarin doesn’t seem to deter curious Americans.

TikTok has around 170 million users in the US.

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