I tried the Chinese app RedNote and saw how TikTok ‘refugees’ are trolling the US government

The RedNote app is surging with dark humor memes. 

I spent time on the Chinese app Xiaohongshu, also known as RedNote, that Americans are flocking to as a potential TikTok ban looms.

It was an amusing and utterly confusing experience.

The app is flooded with posts deriding the US government. It seems impossible to parse what’s potentially propaganda, what’s ironically pretending to be propaganda, and what are earnest complaints about the US government — or earnest welcome messages from Chinese citizens.

What’s clear, however, is that many Americans are furious, and they’re doing what angry Americans do best from their couches: make memes. One video with over 30,000 likes shows a scene from the movie “Brokeback Mountain,” where the two main characters reunite and hug, with the caption, “Me being reunited with my Chinese spy.”

Many users joked — using the hashtag “TikTokrefugee” — about giving all their data to the Chinese government. One speculated that RedNote users were being assigned a new Chinese spy to watch them.

My feed, overall, was chock full of dark humor about being fine with giving data to China or using the app “just to say FU to our govt,” as one user put it.

RedNote going well pic.twitter.com/qxpDYdM4Js

— Katie Notopoulos (@katienotopoulos) January 14, 2025

Many posts expressed anger toward the US government, or at least joy in what people perceived to be the government’s embarrassment when it discovered that young people were signing up for an app that could be even worse of a national security issue than TikTok.

Sure enough, RedNote and Lemon8, an app owned by TikTok parent company ByteDance, hit the top two spots on the Apple app store rankings on Monday. I mean, yes, it is pretty funny!

Admittedly, I also chuckled at another genre of memes about how people would rather sign up for a dubious Chinese app than switch to Instagram Reels. One video I saw showed a cat labeled “Americans” loudly rejecting a cup of yogurt with the Instagram logo on it.

The RedNote frenzy may be short-lived, however. The app is difficult to navigate for English speakers, and some new users have reported it banned them (although it’s possible these issues relate to the phone verification system, which I also found to be buggy).

It’s also possible that users are downloading RedNote and other Chinese apps not to replace TikTok, but to to send a signal to the US government.

“It really is just retaliation towards the government in the simplest way, but in a way that feels very native to Gen Z,” Meagan Loyst, the founder of the investor collective Gen Z VCs, told my colleagues Dan Whateley and Sydney Bradley.

But for one or two days, at least, there’s some level of cathartic steam being released — the frustration that millions of TikTok users feel that the app they enjoy is likely going away.