In the New Year, the word refugee has a connotation which has nothing to do with tragedy, mass killings or natural catastrophe. It’s about social media users moving in mass from one app to another, in this case from TikTok to RedNote (or Xiaohongshu to use its Chinese name).
Reason For Migration
Why are they moving? Because TikTok could be banned in the US in the next few days unless an American firm buys it from its Chinese owner ByteDance. The irony is, RedNote is another Chinese app owned by Xingyin Information Technology headquartered in Shanghai.
Reports suggest ByteDance is among the investors in Xingyin and this is a purely Chinese app (therefore heavily censored), meant for Chinese users (over 300 million of them), with little or no English in it. And the buzz is the flood of an estimated 700,000 users in two days along with English language memes and so on, has caused some unease among Chinese users.
But as they say the more the merrier. The million-dollar question is whether the TikTok refugees will reverse course if Elon Musk acquires the app (as some media reports suggest).
Or does the exodus from TikTok suggest a political message being conveyed by its American users, angry and resentful over the manner in which access to their favourite app (even if it’s Chinese owned) is being sought to be curbed by the government.
The Future
Does the average American Joe, who is said to prize his right to own (and use?) guns, see TikTok in the same or similar light? As government transgressing on his or her personal space, interfering with his freedom (and limiting his creative instincts)?
We have to leave that to a social media researcher to study and come up with answers although some media reports have touched on that issue.
One TikTok user named Heather Roberts was quoted in a voice message on RedNote as saying: “Our government is out of their mind if they think if they think we are going to stand for this TikTok ban. We’re just going to a new Chinese app and here we are.”
Another in a video message said “This is so much better than TikTok”, which underscores the point that RedNote may be emerging as Beijing’s latest propaganda tool, to infiltrate and undermine American society.
In the Age of Trump that would be the ultimate irony!
