Micah McCartney is a Newsweek reporter in Taipei, Taiwan. It covers the relations between the United States and China, the Safety problems of the East and Southeast Asia, and the ties of China-Taiwan line. You can touch Micah by sending an email to m. mccartney@newsweek . com.
According to the facts, first hand was observed and verified through the journalist or informed and verified from competent sources.
As self-described “TikTok refugees” pour onto the Chinese social media app RedNote, also known as Xiaohongshu, some foreign netizens are already running up against the country’s extensive censorship apparatus.
Newsweek reached out to Xiaohongshu with a request for comment via a general contact email address.
TikTok’s parent company ByteDance has until Sunday to divest from the video-sharing site or see it banned in the U.S, as required by a law passed by Congress last year, citing risks to users’ data. Chinese companies are legally required to comply with government requests for information.
The move would affect some 170 million American users and hit the pocketbooks of 2 million creators. Ahead of the ban, many have started accounts on RedNote, known in China as Xiaohongshu (Little Red Book), earlier this week propelling the app to become the most downloaded on the Apple and Google app stores.
RedNote is an amalgamation of lifestyle and social commerce content, featuring elements from TikTok, Instagram, and Pinterest.
The flood of English-speaking videos has been largely met with curiosity on the app, which has become a space for rare interaction between American and Chinese netizens.
Many newcomers are bound to come up against government censorship, and some are already probing these limits.
An X (formerly Twitter) user with the handle Dispropaganda shared a screenshot of an account suspension notice they received after posting on a range of topics considered sensitive by Beijing, such as “Taiwan is a free country” and “Uyghur concentration camps.”
Social media commentator Christine Lu also made an experimental post, uploading an artwork by American artist Tristan Eaton “inspired by the iconic video of the ‘tank man’ ” who blocked the path of tanks in Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989.
Lu realized that his publication “violated the rules of the platform” and not visual to others, showed a shared screen capture in his X account.
Some seemingly noncontroversial political topics are also being screened, as Australian anti-Chinese government activist Drew Pavlou learned when he asked, “Chinese friends, what do you think of [Chinese] Xi Jinping and Xi Jinping Thought?”
Liu Pengyu, spokesman for the Chinese embassy: “The United States deserves that corporations in all countries invest, work and work in the United States.
Lindsay Gorman, GMF’s general manager and senior director of the Generation Program, has in the past told Newsweek:
“TikTok itself is banned in China like most social media platforms that allow users to speak freely on topics China doesn’t like. That means that an influx in Western users—a sizable fraction of whom hold progressive views—will have to contend directly with censorship on RedNote that’s made in China for China. The flip side of this if RedNote’s U.S. user base does expand rapidly is that the censors may have a hard time keeping up and keeping the political content off the platform.”
RedNote’s surge of popularity in the U.S. may be short-lived, given that data from it, like TikTok can also be requested by the Chinese Communist Party.
In this sense, Rednote would possibly represent an even greater risk than Tiktok, which has maintained the slightest knowledge about servers in the United States, Adrianus Warmenhoven, a skillful cybersecurity in Nord VPN, he told News News.
The Byteye rejected requests to sell the application. Last week, the Supreme Court heard the case of Tiktok, but largely maintains the prohibition, after a similar resolution of a federal appeal court last month.
The president, elected, Donald Trump, expressed the request, presenting a friendly history before the Supreme Court last month to request an extension of the date of divestment until after its inauguration on January 20.
The Biden administration is reportedly seeking ways to keep TikTok available until Trump takes office, NBC cited people familiar with the discussions as saying Wednesday.
Micah McCartney is a Newsweek reporter in Taipei, Taiwan. It covers the relations between the United States and China, the Safety problems of the East and Southeast Asia, and the ties of China-Taiwan line. You can touch Micah by sending an email to m. mccartney@newsweek . com.
Micah McCartney is a reporter for Newsweek based in Taipei, Taiwan. He covers U.S.-China relations, East Asian and Southeast Asian security issues, and cross-strait ties between China and Taiwan. You can get in touch with Micah by emailing [email protected].