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With the US government on tiktok set to go live on Sunday, Americans have been flocking to an alternative social media platform, but it’s another Chinese app, and experts say it could present the same problems, if not more. There has been a spike in downloads in the United States of the Chinese-owned app Xiaohongshu, or “RedNote,” as many users call it.

A US official told CBS News on Thursday that RedNote, like TikTok, could face an ultimatum to divest or be banned.

“This appears to be the type of app that the statute would apply to and could face the same restrictions as TikTok if it is not sold,” a US official told CBS News.

CBS News reached out to Xiaohongshu for comment on whether the company would agree with that assessment.

What is RedNote?

Xiaohongshu has been the most downloaded free app on the Apple App Store in the United States since Tuesday. Analysis from Sensor Tower, a market intelligence firm, showed that downloads of the platform in the US had increased 200% year over year and had seen a 194% rebound since last week.

QR Code Generator, a company that provides statistics on online trends, said there had been a 4,900% increase in Google searches for Xiaohongshu in the United States on Monday alone.

Xiaohongshu was founded in 2013 and is a lifestyle platform “where more than 300 million users each month share their life experiences,” according to a description on Apple’s App Store.

The Chinese photo and video sharing platform has often been compared to Instagram. It functions as an e-commerce platform, a travel and good food advice manual, as well as a vehicle for users to share content from their daily lives.

Xiaohongshu literally translates from Mandarin as “little red book,” likely a reference to the famous little red book of quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong, the founding father of the Communist Party. Porcelain.

That reference has not deterred many American users who have taken to the app to share their experiences as so-called “TikTok refugees” before the US ban. Videos including the use of the term “TikTok refugee” on RedNote have racked up millions of views and impressions this week.

“This is to my fellow TikTok refugees and Americans, behave on this app! You better behave because everyone in China is being so nice to us while we colonize their cheesy, tootsy app just because our government sucks,” says one user. American with the name “Savannah” published on Wednesday. The post had garnered nearly 128,000 impressions as of Thursday.

tiktok, in its international format, it is not available to mainland Chinese users, meaning that the American exodus to Xiaohongshu has brought Americans into closer contact with Chinese users than ever before. It has led to some fun cultural exchanges.

An American “TikTok refugee” with the username “anieladiaz” posted a video asking Chinese users if they had any questions. A Chinese user commented below the post with a screenshot of what appeared to be their English homework. Anieladiaz was happy to provide the answers to the exam questions, which they shared in their own screenshot. Other Chinese users have been posting videos teaching Americans how to use Mandarin slang words.

Is RedNote safe?

The rapid increase in downloads in the United States may be a cause for concern for the same US lawmakers who ushered in the TikTok ban. A cybersecurity expert told CBS News that RedNote may actually pose an even bigger threat.

“RedNote was never intended for outside of the China market. All the data sharing and all the servers that the data is shared with are in China,” Adrianus Warmenhoven, a cybersecurity expert at Nord VPN, told CBS News on Wednesday. “It means that they are exempt from all these data protections and outside the view of the US government.”

Warmenhoven said TikTok and its parent company ByteDance had at least stored data on U.S.-based servers, giving the U.S. government “some restraint or limitations on what data can be sent to China.” and how much and in what way”.

He also said RedNote’s terms and conditions lack transparency, which he said presents a huge cybersecurity risk to Americans.

“Their terms and conditions are in Mandarin, leaving non-Chinese speaking users confused about what data is collected and how it is used,” Warmenhoven said. “I’m pretty sure those millions of people who are moving aren’t using Google Translate to read (the terms and conditions), so they don’t know what they’re agreeing to.”

the specific US legislation used to ban TikTok: The “Protecting Applications Controlled by Foreign Adversaries Act,” which President Biden signed into law last April, gives the federal government broad latitude to crack down on foreign social media platforms.

Under the law, Congress can force a platform to divest its U.S. operations of foreign ownership, and can shut it down if it qualifies as a threat. The law can apply to any platform that allows users to share content with each other and that has more than 1 million monthly active users, is owned by a company located in a foreign country controlled by an adversary, and has been determined by the president to present a significant threat to national security.

The legislation is currently subject to a legal challenge by ByteDance, which has argued that it is unconstitutional and violates the First Amendment protecting free speech. A failure of the The Supreme Court is pending then.

CBS News asked President-elect Donald Trump’s transition team whether the incoming administration might consider RedNote a national security threat that should be subject to the law. The transition team had not responded at the time of this article’s publication.

Trump has recently spoken out against the TikTok ban. Last month, he said he had a “warm place in my heart” for TikTok, a reversal from his stance the last time he occupied the Oval Office.

The Federal Trade Commission, the agency tasked with enforcing the ban and ensuring that U.S. Internet service providers and app store companies like Apple and Google comply with the law, declined to comment.

RedNote is heavily censored

RedNote content seems to be much more heavily censored than posts on TikTok. A CBS News analysis found that any search for “Xi Jinping,” China’s autocratic president, on RedNote returned no results.

The term “free Hong Kong” also did not work. A search for “Taiwan” will return several memes that welcome Americans to the platform, but note that users should recognize the narrative imposed by Beijing that the democratically governed island off the coast of China, which the United States is legally forced to help defend from invasion, it is an inseparable part of China.

A similar search for those terms on TikTok returns a wide range of users’ political opinions, including posts highly critical of Chinese censorship.

RedNote even appears to be expanding its operations to monitor content given the large number of Americans logging into the app. Found CBS News local job listings posted by the online company in mainland China advertising jobs for reviewing English content and promising a monthly salary of between $950 and $1,200.

“Users don’t go somewhere more freely. RedNote is moderated differently and the algorithm is different than TikTok,” Warmenhoven told CBS News. “It won’t get traction or spread politically sensitive issues, or maybe sensitive social issues, especially issues that are socially sensitive in China.”