With the Chinese-owned video-sharing app TikTok on the cusp of a ban in the U.S. on January 19, its American users have flocked to a similar alternative called RedNote, sending it racing to the top of app store download charts.
Officials in Washington say TikTok's ownership by Chinese company ByteDance leaves it vulnerable to exploitation by the CCP regime in Beijing, putting the security and privacy of Americans at risk.
TikTok is facing a ban over these national security concerns unless its Chinese owners divest. ByteDance and TikTok deny it poses any such threat or that it is under CCP influence, and warn the popular app will disappear for its 170 million users in America.
But there is a familiar potential problem with RedNote: It is also owned by a Chinese technology company, raising the same kind of national security questions for the U.S. as TikTok has.
Shanghai-based Xingyin Information Technology is the owner of RedNote, also known as Xiaohongshu in China. Newsweek reached out to Xiaohongshu via a general contact email for comment.
So is RedNote a national security threat to the U.S. like TikTok is believed to be? Newsweek put the question to experts. This is what they told us.
Lindsay Gorman: How RedNote Evolves Is Key
First of all, migration of TikTok's user base to another Chinese app doesn't solve any of the problems around data security and covert foreign influence.
But this was always a risk by not passing comprehensive legislation that could address all autocratic information platforms and instead focusing squarely on the most acute threat of TikTok.
The extent to which RedNote becomes a national security concern or alternatively a helpful tool for democratic expression will depend on how speech on the platform evolves—the size of the audience it gains, whether it becomes a big locus for political speech, and the extent to which China's censors succeed in controlling speech on it.
It's also not a foregone conclusion that RedNote will suddenly enjoy TikTok's success and popularity. We've seen this before with the emergence of platforms like Lemon8. Actually gaining the traction TikTok has is rare.
And size of the national security threat is really proportional to the size of the user base. The more Americans that get news and run political campaigns on a Chinese-owned platform, the more of a vehicle for PRC influence it becomes.
There is also one interesting dynamic with RedNote that is absent with TikTok: There isn't a separate Chinese version or non-Chinese version.
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.
These kinds of online spaces where PRC-based users can interact freely with users in democracies with all our political idiosyncrasies are rare and often fleeting.
Lindsay Gorman is managing director and senior fellow of GMF's Technology Program.
Aynne Kokas: RedNote Faces Same Chinese Oversight as TikTok
Like TikTok, RedNote is subject to a number of Chinese government regulations that assert oversight over the app's data and algorithm, including the same national security export controls the TikTok algorithm is subject to and the same data security regulations.
The app's increasing user base creates similar national security dynamics that led Congress to ban TikTok.
Aynne Kokas is professor of media studies and the C.K. Yen Professor at the Miller Center, University of Virginia.
Ashley Keller Nelson: Apply Same TikTok Logic to RedNote
If you apply the same logic to RedNote that we used to decide if TikTok was a threat, then yes, RedNote could be a potential security risk. If the Chinese government can take personal data from your phone for TikTok, it can take your data for RedNote.
Remember, the Chinese government constantly monitors its citizens, and one way of monitoring them includes their social use. If you accept this as true, the mechanisms are already in place to collect the users' private data.
Ashley Keller Nelson is senior professor of practice at the AB Freeman School of Business, Tulane University.
Justin Sherman: The TikTok Discourse Is Nonsense
Anyone who perceives that the Chinese government can't pick a tech company in its borders and coerce it to support state efforts is kidding themselves.
But that doesn't mean it can completely control all companies in China, at full effectiveness, at all times, or that we should (or can) just ban every Chinese tech firm in the U.S.
The challenge with RedNote—as with TikTok or any Chinese tech firm in Washington's crosshairs—is determining what RedNote might provide Beijing that other companies can't, like unique data or more easily exploitable code, and what's the likelihood Beijing would actually act on it out of all the tools at its disposal.
Jumping right to a yes-no, binary debate about whether 'there's a risk' is exactly how we got the nonsense TikTok discourse, where so much time was spent arguing if it's possible for Beijing to pressure a tech firm (obviously), rather than breaking it down into how likely that was, to what ends, and how the U.S. should respond.
Justin Sherman, CEO of Global Cyber Strategies and author of the forthcoming book Technology and National Security Collide
English (US) ·