I Don’t Want to Lose TikTok—But I’m Kind of Into RedNote

I’ve never been a TikTok fanatic; given the choice between scrolling through updates from people I actually know on Instagram and watching viral dances, I tend to prefer the former. But with TikTok on the brink of being banned in the United States—and amid the emboldening of bigoted hate speech and prevalence of bots on X, and Meta dispensing with its fact-checking protocols as Mark Zuckerberg dives further into the right-wing manosphere—I, like others, have found myself seeking a new home base online.

Enter RedNote. Founded in 2013, RedNote, also known as Xiaohongshu (translation: “little red book”), has become one of China’s most popular social media and e-commerce apps, with some 300 million people using it for tips on fashion, makeup, travel, and more. Now, in an act of defiance against the United States government, which has deemed TikTok a possible threat to national security due to its Chinese ownership, Americans are downloading RedNote in droves. (As one X user has noted, Cold War-era anti-Chinese propaganda doesn’t necessarily work on Gen Z.)

Well, encouraged by friends of mine who recently made the same migration—many of them using Google Translate in order to parse the app’s various memes—I, too, decided to fire up RedNote.

While I’m not yet ready to declare it an objective force for societal good, what I can say is that when I log into RedNote, all I see on the app are memes from Chinese users jokingly but seemingly genuinely embracing the flood of new Americans on their favorite site. (That, and the requisite cute-animal clips and mukbangs that I require from any video-sharing site I’m going to use regularly.) What can I say? A little hospitality goes a long way, even online. Plus, I kind of relish the fact that, because most of the text is in Mandarin, I only really have photos and videos to run with on RedNote. Maybe one day I’ll brush up on Duolingo, but until then, some degree of ignorance about the pervading discourse is bliss.

I’m not deleting Instagram or even X for now, mostly because both sites are still useful sources of safety and volunteer-opportunity information as Los Angeles, where I live, attempts to survive its devastating wildfires. But when it comes to meme-based levity, while we wait in a bizarre kind of legislative limbo to find out exactly what’s going to happen to TikTok in the US, I’m all RedNote, all the way—at least until that goes, too.