TikTok users wave goodbye to their 'Chinese spies' as they they ditch the app for another, er, Chinese one
TikTok users are reportedly ditching the Chinese-owned app in droves as a possible US ban approaches, many jumping onto the «Goodbye to my Chinese spy» meme in the process. But the kicker is that many of them are choosing to jump onto RedNote. Yup, RedNote is Chinese, too.
Apparently, more than half a million TikTok users have «recently» left the platform in favour of RedNote, all in protest at the imminent US ban. “Our government is out of their minds if they think we’re going to stand for this TikTok ban,” a user called Heather Roberts reportedly said in a video message on RedNote.
Speaking of the ban, the shizzle there is that the US Supreme Court is expected to uphold an earlier lower-court ruling. If upheld, the ban would go into effect on January 19—unless, that is, Chinese owner ByteDance sells TikTok's Chinese assets, though ByteDance has said such a divestiture «is simply not possible: not commercially, not technologically, not legally.»
Meanwhile, RedNote very roughly is a Chinese analogue to Instagram with added search engine aspects. Its Chinese name, Xiaohongshu, translates to «Little Red Book», which commonly refers to the famous (or, you might say, infamous) collection of utterances by Chinese Communist leader Mao Zedong.
More recently, RedNote has moved into live streaming, too. According to Reuters, it has more than 300 million monthly users, which is pretty big, even for China.
Anyway, by some accounts, the mass exodus has seen US and Chinese social media users connect like never before. CNN says that most Chinese users have warmly welcomed their new US RedNote siblings.
«It feels like so much has changed in an instant. Ordinary people from our two countries have never really connected before,» CNN reports one Chinese user as commenting.
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