On January 16, the news that “Xiaohongshu (Red Note) has crashed” surged to the second place on the hot search list on Weibo.
Many netizens shared screenshots of Xiaohongshu, saying, “I was wondering why the pictures of the comments didn’t load while I was scrolling, I thought it was because of my phone, turns out Xiaohongshu has crashed.” “I thought my internet was bad, called the customer service of my mobile broadband, made an appointment for troubleshooting and maintenance.”
The screenshots showed a white screen on the phone interface, where only the titles were visible, and the images were completely not displayed.
According to a previous report by Reuters, with the deadline for TikTok being taken down in the United States approaching, many American netizens have suddenly shifted to the Chinese shopping and social platform, the international version of Xiaohongshu (Red Note). An insider close to the company told Reuters that just in the past two days, Xiaohongshu has gained over 700,000 new users. The US research company Sensor Tower estimated that this week, the downloads of Red Note in the US have increased by over 200% year on year, a growth of 194% compared to the previous week.
However, at the same time, whether American TikTok users can smoothly transition to Xiaohongshu and adapt to the network censorship of the Chinese Communist Party has become a hot topic recently. Since January 14, several American users have reported account bans, posts being censored and removed. Some American netizens also posted saying that Xiaohongshu has various “backdoors”.
Some netizens expressed, “Xiaohongshu has the strictest censorship system among all social applications.”
In an article by “China Digital Times” in July 2022, a leaked document from Xiaohongshu’s censorship database contained a large amount of detailed censorship information.
The 143-page document described the way Xiaohongshu monitors public opinion and the public opinion cases accumulated over several months, extracting sensitive words from them to allow their censors to efficiently review the posts of the platform’s 200 million active users. For example, the censorship system added 564 sensitive words related to Xi Jinping within two months.
On January 15, Hong Kong’s “South China Morning Post” cited analysts predicting that the recent influx of American users to Xiaohongshu is only a temporary phenomenon as users will soon discover that its content regulations are drastically different from the US version of TikTok. Xiaohongshu does not provide an English version or translation function, making long-term use difficult; the incoming government of Trump may question other applications owned or operated by mainland China.
Former CEO of a financial enterprise, “Old Zhou Heng Mei (@laozhouhengmei)” analyzed on the social platform X, saying: “American young people on TikTok generally have no awareness of real evil… This will finally allow them to experience what real totalitarian dictatorship is like… Currently, it’s just a honeymoon period of joy, eventually, the censorship mechanism for short videos in mainland China will definitely broaden their horizons.”
Previous reports:
American TikTok Users Rush to Xiaohongshu Encounter Supervision and Content Censorship