Why are TikTok users in the US flocking to the Chinese app RedNote?

CGTN Europe interviewed Dr Conor McKeown, Lecturer in Digital Media at the University of Stirling

Transcript

00:00Dr. Conor McKeown is a lecturer in digital media at the University of Stirling in Scotland.

00:07I think it's really important that when we see the kind of numbers that are coming in,

00:13hundreds of thousands of users, some people saying millions of users moving from TikTok over to Xiaohongshu,

00:20we don't try to read this as any kind of long-term migration

00:26because one app is better or more enticing than another.

00:31This is because the U.S. government have made it very clear

00:36that TikTok needs to change the way they operate within the United States

00:40or they were going to ban access from the app through various ISPs.

00:46That has now happened, and people in America particularly are now trying to use a rival Chinese app

00:54to make their voice heard and to say that they would have much rather continued to use TikTok

01:01than to have this kind of experience.

01:04So we're seeing one app in particular seeing the benefit from these TikTok refugees,

01:08known in English as red notes.

01:10Why are people from the U.S. choosing this app in particular?

01:13People are choosing this, I think, because this is a form of digital protest

01:18and nothing makes their voice more clear than signing up to the app

01:23that sounds most explicitly like a Chinese app.

01:27A lot of users are reporting that they have no idea how to use the app,

01:32they're getting help from other people that are bilingual on the app

01:36that happen to be based in America to help them navigate its Chinese user interface.

01:40So I think that it's all about sending a message

01:43and they have gone for the little red book to try and make their voice clear.

01:48When it comes to Chinese social media apps,

01:51until now we haven't really seen them be popular outside of China,

01:54unlike perhaps e-commerce sites like Timu and Shein, for example.

01:58Do you think this is going to signal a shift, them expanding more aggressively outside of China?

02:03So I think that that's a little bit of a misunderstanding,

02:07and it's a real problem with the way the West views the Internet

02:12and their use of the Internet now.

02:14Everywhere you go in the West there are signs for Alipay,

02:19and we have to understand that the big companies,

02:23ByteDance, Tencent in China, have had a huge role to play

02:27in what we as Westerners would consider to be our online infrastructure for a very long time.

02:34And I think what is really good about this is that it signals kind of an attitudinal shift in users

02:40that possibly we're going to start waking up to just how international our online access is

02:47and just how political our online presence is.