TikTok refugees are rushing to Rednote to live under Chinese censorship laws

It’s 2025, the TikTok ban is looming, and American users – who say they love their freedom of speech so much – are flocking to join Rednote, a Chinese app promoting communist values and censoring sensitive topics.

TikTok alternatives such as Lemon8 and Rednote shot to the top of app download lists in the US this week as people await official news about the potential TikTok ban in America. Already on Sunday, the popular platform could be banned and become unavailable.

The reason TikTok might soon be banned in the US is national security concerns – many lawmakers worry that the Chinese government (Bytedance, the parent company of TikTok, is Chinese) could access Americans’ data and use it in nefarious ways.

That’s why it’s truly mystifying that quite a few young Americans are now migrating to another Chinese-owned app, Rednote, which, unlike TikTok, might indeed be a tool of Chinese disinformation.

Besides, it’s pretty ironic for Americans to be jumping into the “great firewall” of Chinese internet censorship to escape a potential TikTok ban. That’s because Rednote, again, unlike TikTok, is available in China and has to enforce strict censorship laws – and they apply to overseas users as well.

“Florida doesn’t breed boring folks”

Cybernews has already reported how TikTok users have been signing up for Lemon8, another Bytedance-owned app with a layout similar to Instagram or Pinterest.

But Rednote is also on the rise. It’s the international version of Xiaohongshu, and its name translates from Mandarin as the “Little Red Book.”

This is what the book of quotations from Communist China’s first leader Mao Zedong young revolutionaries used to carry in the 1960s is called.

The short-video app, though, is owned by Xingyin Information Technology, a Shanghai-based private company, and some reports say that the platform’s founder Mao Wenchao chose the name to pay homage to the colors of his college and former employer – Stanford University and Bain Capital respectively.

Besides, the app, boasting more than 300 million users, does seem apolitical. Just like, say, Instagram, Rednote is full of travel tips, makeup tutorials, or restaurant reviews. There’s this familiar pervasive sense of influencer culture.

On Rednote now, new overseas users (there are reportedly half a million of them) who now call themselves “TikTok refugees” find almost an endless scroll of pictures and videos overwhelmingly in Mandarin. There’s no button to auto-translate text, either.

Chinese users seem bemused by the newcomers in general, posting videos with titles like “Hello from your New Chinese spy.” They also seem to want Americans to show them their cats.

When a user from Florida asked the Rednoters what they thought of the Sunshine State, someone replied: “Florida doesn’t breed boring folks.” The “Florida man” phenomenon is indeed global so it must be true.

Chinese regulation applies to foreign users

All this can sound appealing – but probably only until you dig a little deeper. What you find is a tightly controlled platform existing in an ecosystem designed to prioritize “core socialist values” over freedom of speech.

Some newbies have already found that posts addressing politically sensitive topics such as the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989, Xi Jinping’s leadership style, or human rights violations are being flagged or removed. It’s also impossible to share links.

It’s rather easy to be blocked on Rednote because the platform is essentially a walled garden that allows foreign users to join but is subjected to China’s censorship rules – and these are strict.

I tried , didn't work out too well :/ pic.twitter.com/5wLmWq89nE

undefined BigMeatyClaws 🍌 (@dont_report_hoe) January 14, 2025

Human Rights in China (HRIC), a nongovernmental organization founded in March 1989 by overseas Chinese students and scientists, points out that, unlike TikTok, Rednote operates under direct (emphasis by HRIC) Chinese Communist Party oversight.

“Discussions critical of the Chinese government – such as those about human rights abuses and the treatment of Uyghurs – are systematically suppressed, while state-aligned narratives promoting Chinese nationalism and the success of CCP policies are actively encouraged,” says HRIC.

RedNote’s terms of service also include bizarre statements. The platform can have access to different sensors on your device like GPS, audio, video, energy, and scrolling patterns – this, at least in theory, can lead to profiling and unwanted surveillance.

Of course, American tech companies also collect user data en masse – Rednote isn’t an outlier. But, even though it technically isn’t owned by the state, the laws in China say since 2017 that all firms are required to accede to government demands to provide information and data deemed necessary to protect the country’s national security.

“The governmental efforts to ‘protect’ data through this landmark ruling on TikTok are unintentionally backfiring amongst the people on the ground flocking to another app,” Lucy Finlay, director of secure behavior and analytics at ThinkCyber Security, told Yahoo News.

Another cybersecurity expert, NordVPN's Adrianus Warmenhoven also said: "The platform collects extensive personal data, including location, browsing activity, and device-specific information like IP addresses. It can also share this data with third-party service providers or government authorities, raising concerns about user privacy. "