I don’t normally cover social media apps, and so found this notable. As the potential ban of TikTok in the United States looms, many former users are migrating to the Chinese social media app RedNote, also known as Xiaohongshu, which has quickly climbed to the top of the Apple App Store download charts, gaining over seven hundred thousand new users in just a few days. In response to this shift, Duolingo reported a significant increase in interest, noting a two hundred sixteen percent rise in new learners of Mandarin Chinese in the U.S. compared to the previous year. The language learning platform connected this spike to TikTok’s impending ban and the surge in RedNote’s popularity. Duolingo’s statistic highlights a growing trend among users seeking to engage with Chinese content, as they adapt to the changing social media landscape. TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, faces a deadline to sell the app’s U.S. assets by January nineteenth.
Why do we care?
A second-order effect of shutting down one app is that technology-savvy users explicitly move to another Chinese-run app. This was certainly not the outcome lawmakers intended. While I don’t believe this has an explicit IT services impact, I wanted to note it due to the potential impact on the regulator’s approach we might see. If you like some good popcorn drama, this weekend could be fascinating.