A Blockbuster Digital Escape Movie: TikTok Refugees Flood to RedNote

It’s not every day that the impending shutdown of a social media platform triggers a global digital migration—yet that’s exactly what happened in January 2025. As the U.S. government moved to ban TikTok, over half a million American users, by conservative estimates, fled to an unlikely refuge: Xiaohongshu (a China’s social APP), or as many Americans now call it, RedNote. The ban was imminent on January 19, and before the clock could strike midnight, TikTok—after bidding farewell to its 170 milli