Recently, a large number of “TikTok refugees” have flocked to the Chinese platform Xiaohongshu, sparking attention. Subsequently, many suspected fake foreign bloggers’ accounts appeared on Xiaohongshu, with some bloggers saying, “You may not know that many foreigners are actually Chinese pretending to be foreigners.”
The international version of TikTok, known as Douyin, is going to be removed from the United States, leading to nearly a million American users migrating to the Chinese application “Xiaohongshu” International version, also known as RedNote. From midnight on January 14th to 2pm on January 16th, Xiaohongshu has consistently ranked first in the App Store’s free app download volume in the U.S. The platform posted over 60,000 notes with the tag “TikTok Refugee.”
Upon opening Xiaohongshu, a plethora of English content floods the screen, with some accounts receiving hundreds of thousands of likes with just one post, attracting numerous comments and interactions from netizens. Due to the noticeable increase in foreign bloggers’ followers on Xiaohongshu, some counterfeit foreign bloggers’ accounts have silently emerged.
According to a report by the Haiwai News, searching on Xiaohongshu revealed that many posts, though under different usernames and showcasing various images and videos of different individuals, used identical text templates, with some not even bothering to change the names in their self-introductions.
Additionally, there are two users named “auro” and “Auroa,” with nearly identical photos, images, attire, and similar backgrounds. This led some netizens to suspect that AI-generated images might be involved. Checking their IP addresses, one is located in Hubei and the other in Guangdong.
Douyin blogger “Dai Xiaopang” commented on this phenomenon in a video, saying, “You may not know that many foreigners on Xiaohongshu are actually Chinese people pretending to be foreigners.”
He mentioned, “Many teams now can just change their IP addresses, post two pictures of foreign beauties, and quickly gain tens of thousands of followers.”
According to him, besides the traditional method of reposting foreign beauty content from external sources, AI-generated overseas beauties are also experiencing an unprecedented surge in traffic. By using tools like Love Accelerator and VPN to change IP addresses, the effect becomes even more realistic. Combining this with trending titles trained by GPT can significantly reduce personnel costs as the traffic generated is no different from what real people would create. With traffic in hand, you can quickly monetize by selling followers or products.
The blogger also mentioned that his recent AI-organized posts and mind maps have garnered millions of views across the entire internet.
On January 16th, the Chinese Douyin platform also announced that a large number of fake foreign accounts have been shut down.
Li Liang, the Vice President of Douyin Group, posted on his official Weibo account, stating, “Having an overseas IP address does not guarantee it belongs to a foreign registered user. We found that many are taking advantage of this situation, reposting videos impersonating foreign users. Especially some black market groups are trying to inflate followers through this. Identifying these accounts can be challenging, but we have been actively managing the situation, and have already shut down over 10,000 fake foreign user accounts.”