What did you do on the day when TikTok was banned? Woke up and try to scroll TikTok before actually leaving your warm bed and then realized it had become unavailable? What should be the next steps? Looking for a substitutional entertainment app? This was exactly what happened: the downloads of RedNote went on the podium of the US App Store without any warning.
SUBStitutes of Tiktok? what is Rednote?
The first solution pop into your mind should be creating a Chinese Apple ID and download the Chinese TikTok, but you would soon realize that you are not able to create an account. Well, you can still browse it without an account, but just not able to post any content or leave any comment. Then some people discovered that another trendy Chinese social media app, Rednote, is an accessible option for them to use as a substitute of TikTok.
As a Chinese person who has used Rednote since high school, I have to say that Rednote is not exactly the same thing as TikTok: it’s more like a combination of TikTok and Twitter, but its significance has already goes beyond that among Chinese people. It can also be a searching engine as there are users sharing professional knowledges and their own experiences of coping with abnormality. It can also be a private account for people to post their thoughts that they don’t want to share with their families and friends, as most Rednote users other than the influencers are anonymous on the platforms. Similar to the entanglement of Instagram Reels and TikTok, there are influencers who uploads the same contents on both RedNote and TikTok, which is also kinda annoying for me as a user of both platforms.
Rednote wasn’t called this before: it used to be translated as Red if your phones are in English Language setting. Initially, I was really surprised when my college friends in US asked me if I have ever used Rednote before. What is Rednote? This had been my first thought before I realized it is the platform operators had changed its translation.
Tiktok refugees? Who are they and what did they do?
The hashtag of #tiktokrefugee caught so much attention on Rednote among Chinese internet users. Due to the algorithm, if you click on a post with a hashtag, the platform will continuously send you contents with this hashtag. That’s what happened when I clicked on a post of a fashionable lady dressing in American style — this is actually easy to tell because it’s very different from the trendy styles in China —I thought that’s someone else reposting the content they saw on Instagram to Rednote, as there used to be many people reposting the contents they viewed on IG just to share the trend in other countries.
But when I click on the post, the moment I saw the English caption I realized that’s the photo of the account owner. I encountered the TikTok refugee my Chinese friends told me sometime earlier that day and since then, my homepage was full of foreigners.
You may now understand that TikTok refugees is a name given by the TikTok users who at that time were not able to use the app anymore. They called themselves refugees because they were temporarily forced to move from their TikTok home due to the new policy. What they did was basically posting what they supposed to send on TikTok, sharing their daily events and social posts, trying to make friends with the Chinese internet users. These visitors also created another hashtag called #cattax and posted adorable pictures of their cats under this tag, attracting a bunch of new followers in a short time.
Dear tiktok refugees: Messages from the Rednote locals
The views on TikTok Refugees are quite polarizing: most of the Rednote locals really welcome the visitors, as China hasn’t fully open the accessibility to Instagram, Twitter, and other social media platforms. Now the foreign visitors can post their stories on the Chinese platform, definitely saving us a lot of effort to find an affordable and accessible VPN.
Here’s another interesting voice from the locals: most of these TikTok Refugees are posting directly in English or even other languages such as Spanish and German, while China is not an English speaking country and there’s still a large number of people who cannot read English. Rednote also hasn’t experienced this before, so they did not install the translation function, nor do they have sufficient employees who can innovate the new function in such a short amount of time.
For international students like me, the translation shouldn’t be a problem. But having said that, we can barely go back home except for the long holidays, Rednote is one of the limited resources that we can use to connect our hometown, getting to know what’s happening on the other side of Pacific Ocean. Because of the short video platform algorithms, we are more inclined to be promoted the post with hashtag of tiktok refugees, whose lives are closer to use compare to those back in China.
For me, I personally really welcome my college friends to browse and post on Rednote, though it becomes a bit awkward when they want to follow my account where I post some secret gossip from high school (oops!). Another issue is that, after spending a whole long day in school speaking and reading English all the time, it’s kind of disheartening to see all the English posts again when I was looking forward to reading content in my mother tongue. But as a local, I have to say, dear my TikTok Refugee friends, welcome to my place and make yourselves at home.