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
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.
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.
Interesting indeed, both countries’ governments don’t want truths out
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.
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.
That’s why encyclopedia’s list their sources?
Removed by mod
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
At least the chuds are screeching though lol
DON’T 👏 INSTALL 👏 小红书 — It gave me third degree Havana syndrome, which my health insurance won’t cover.
If the CIA agents in Havana don’t get Cuban healthcare benefits, they should just quit.
The saddest downvotes are the “shoot the messenger” downvotes. I find this fact inconvenient so ⬇
i need to figure out how to make the rick & morty “your boos mean nothing to me; i’ve seen what makes you cheer” meme more accessible somehow for this exact reason. lol
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
Yeah seems like Rednote is specifically centered around lifestyle and art while Weibo and Baidu are for general use
Uhmmmm no thanks lol WTF
If only there was a no button…
But why would any legitimate app ask for a permission for which there is practically no legitimate use? I thought Rednote was a social media thing, not a Caller application, so why does it need to make and manage phone calls on my behalf?
What else is it doing that it doesn’t need to ask permissions for? Please think critically.
And yes before someone mentions It, yes this can be used for getting a phone number automatically, but It can just prompt for my phone number (which it doesn’t need anyway, unless you post), no legitimate need to ask for such a broad permission.
More to the point, why tf are y’all so chill about this? Surely this is like literally a sign of malware 101? Like I’m only a compsci & cybersec grad so what do I know, but this to me is equivalent to opening “not a virus.exe” from “veryrealmoviedownload.com”. Literally first malware I got as a kid on Android was like this.
I thought awareness of this was pretty commonplace. The below image is literally a Facebook-tier meme that even grampa probably knows.
Are y’all just that desperate for a win? Sorry, good things don’t actually happen in our hell world.
Is this a normal thing for apps to do these days? I don’t use any other SM apart from Lemmy and only F-Droid FOSS apps so i’d legitimately like to know. Does tiktok also prompt for making and managing phone calls?
Basically every mainstream social media apps do want your contacts these days, yes. Obviously bad for OPSEC so you should avoid them if you’re worried about that even after blocking those permissions.
“Contacts” is a very very different permission from making and managing phone calls, and is prompted for separately.
The former harvests data, the latter can be used to steal money directly via the same mechanism we used to text numbers to buy ringtones and J2ME apps back in the day.
Now I’m not saying that Rednote is definitively malware and I actually kinda like some of the content I saw, which I couldn’t say for TikTok (I’m way too ADHD for short form videos, it’s very unstimulating), but maybe just keep it in mind.
Rednote isn’t tik tok. You’ll absolutely be monitored on there. That’s an implicit agreement for all Chinese apps that has Chinese citizens as users. In fact they do what US government keeps accusing tik tok of but tik tok doesn’t do. If your worried about the Chinese government getting your info, absolutely do not use rednote. It wasn’t made for you to begin with. Accusing them of doing what they promised they would do however is a bit strange to me.
lmao what the fuck
Thousands of people download this shit too.
There’s a “don’t allow” button right there. And the message on top of it for “System Permissions” literally says, “you can say no to giving permissions and only certain functions of the app will not work”
I don’t know what the issue is here. You can probably call people through the app, since you sign up with a phone number.
It’s for collecting phone number, network cell data etc. It’s basically the most sensitive permission and usually not needed for apps to request.
If an app only needs a phone number, it can ask it with user input instead.
you need to give them your phone number to create an account
for the rest, you can simply select “don’t allow”. That’s why its not really a concern.
I wanted to see if I could run it through an emulator but if it needs a phone number then no thanks. People are way too careless with their data.
Just read this. Is it Opposite Day? Why are dems being corporate shills and republicans being based??
https://apnews.com/article/tiktok-ban-trump-executive-order-1e95d9836bf6f8c0c245ed1c3234d968
Democrats had tried on Wednesday to pass legislation that would have extended the deadline, but Republican Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas blocked it. Cotton, chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said that TikTok has had ample time to find a buyer.
“TikTok is a Chinese Communist spy app that addicts our kids, harvests their data, targets them with harmful and manipulative content, and spreads communist propaganda,” Cotton said.
They’re equally racist. Dems are probably trying to damage control and convince people not to join Rednote and stay on Tiktok until it’s banned
Never forget the broad bipatisan support for blind support of the genocide being carried out by Israel.
The current Republican party is definitely the worse of the two, but it’s small margins. The Democrats, with a few exceptions (that I’m sure would be Independents if there was actually any point to that in the American electoral system,) only barely qualify as liberal these days. They keep shifting further right to try and capture some of the less rabid “disenfranchised” republican voters. End of the day this is doing damage to American democracy too.
Neither party in America is anti-corporate
