
16.01.2025
The U.S. TikTok Ban: Is the Future RedNote?
2 min read by Annabel Wood
With The Supreme Court set to ban TikTok on Sunday – the day before Trump’s inauguration – the question is: who is ready to scoop up TikTok’s share of the social media market?
In a funny twist of fate, Chinese app RedNote, a TikTok lookalike, has become the most downloaded app in the States this week.

U.S. content creators have directed followers to their Instagram pages ahead of the ban. Though Facebook has fallen from favour with Gen Z and younger Millennials in the past decade (not helped by Meta’s recent back-pedalling on its fact checking and DEI policies), it remains one of the most popular apps in the U.S. This could mean great news for Meta who will be vying for TikTok’s displaced users alongside the likes of YouTube Shorts and Snap.
Brands will need to follow their audiences, keeping their finger on the pulse of which platform moves the needle.
Unfortunately for Zuckerberg and The Supreme Court, TikTokers have made one thing clear already: they won’t be easily swayed. ByteDance, the Chinese company who own TikTok, have encouraged users to head over to TikTok’s sister app Lemon8, a lifestyle app specifically designed by ByteDance for the foreign market. But a different underdog has emerged, one that is also Chinese-owned but not intended for the foreign market: enter Xiaohongshu, or RedNote, owned by Shanghai-based Xingyin Information Technology.
To the surprise of RedNote’s 300 million mostly Mandarin-speaking users, U.S. TikTok users are flooding the app in a laughably ironic protest. As a result, RedNote has become the most downloaded app on the U.S. Apple App Store in the past few days, followed by Lemon8.

While they’ve mostly been welcomed with open arms, the so-called “TikTok refugees” have been reminded by RedNote users to kindly maintain China’s regulation laws, including not discussing politics, religion and drugs for starters. China’s internet censorship system, also known as the ‘Great Firewall of China’, which blocks content or apps deemed sensitive, will undoubtedly face unprecedented regulatory issues in light of what’s happening.
There is another question as to whether the ban will take place at all, since Trump has been making efforts to delay it. It’s safe to say that Donald Trump’s history with TikTok is a chequered one.

Let’s not forget when TikTokers came together in 2020 to book out tickets for a Trump rally in Tulsa with no intention of going, leaving Trump presenting to tumbleweeds. Though Trump, it seems, has forgotten this, and when asked how he plans to stop the ban, he said he has a “warm spot” for the app, as he “won the youth by 34 points” in the recent election.
So, while it’s uncertain whether Trump will have any power over stopping or even delaying the ban, or whether TikTok can find a U.S. buyer instead, the question remains: is RedNote’s new following at all sustainable, or will TikTok users flood back towards Instagram’s familiar face?
