Chinese-owned TikTok is set to be banned in the United States on Jan. 19, 2025, and another Chinese-owned app is welcoming American "TikTok refugees."

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.

RedNote, or Xiaohongshu, became the most downloaded iPhone app in the US on Monday.

Several social media apps have appearing high in app store chart rankings as a potential U.S. ban hangs over the heads of TikTok and its American users.

“The feed is a lot like TikTok now,” she says. Chinese users already have a domestic version of TikTok — Douyin — and Xiaohongshu was always posited as a more lifestyle-geared, Instagram-esque platform. There’s also been a strong culture of ...

TikTok has resumed operations in the US following a shutdown overnight on Saturday, after the incoming US president Donald Trump pledged to “save TikTok” by delaying the proposed ban.

In April, President Joe Biden signed into law a bill that requires TikTok’s Chinese parent company, ByteDance, to sell the app to a U.S. company or shut down operations in the United States by Sunday, Jan. 19 — arguing that the app poses a risk to national security.

The American migration to Xiaohongshu (RedNote) may be the craziest accidental cultural exchange ever. Hundreds of thousands of users landed in an app not localized or in their language. One day in, and it’s already considered rude not to subtitle videos in the other language. pic.twitter.com/eG08cH1ID9

Sensor Tower collects its ranking data from “publicly accessible estimates provided by the Apple App Store and Google Play [store].” While the firm doesn’t have direct insights into Apple’s and Google’s algorithms for determining rankings,