Updated at 10:49 a.m. ET on January 17, 2025
What’s going on with TikTok right now? Following the Supreme Court’s ruling to uphold the Protecting Americans From Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act—the law that requires the app to be divested from its Chinese owner or banned from the United States—TikTok is poised to go dark on Sunday. It’s possible that something may yet save it, such as a last-minute sale or an intervention from the Biden administration; an official told NBC News Wednesday night, somewhat firmly, that it was “exploring options” to prevent the ban from taking effect. “Americans shouldn’t expect to see TikTok suddenly banned on Sunday,” the unnamed official said. But then Bloomberg reported that the administration will not intervene on behalf of the app, citing two anonymous officials with knowledge of the plans. Who knows! If all else fails, President-Elect Donald Trump has also reportedly expressed a desire to save the app.
If TikTok does indeed get banned or directly shut off by its parent company, it would be a seismic event in internet history. At least a third of American adults use the app, as do a majority of American teens, according to Pew Research Center data. These users have spent the past few days coming to terms with the app’s possible demise—and lashing out however they could think to.
Some have been posting satirical videos in which they say goodbye to an imaginary Chinese spy that they pretend was personally assigned to watch them and tinker with the recommendation algorithm on their behalf. Many more have been spitefully downloading another Chinese app, Xiaohongshu, which is referred to in English as RedNote and functions like a hybrid of TikTok and Instagram. It has shot to the top of the App Store rankings, and Reuters reports that more than 700,000 new users joined in just two days.
Earlier this week, I downloaded it myself to see what was going on—most of my feed was quickly populated by videos tagged with #TikTokRefugee. American and Chinese users alike appear to be reveling in brief moments of absurd cultural exchange. I saw a weird amount of content glorifying Luigi Mangione, the accused assassin of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, which seems to be a common experience on the app so far. Much of the text on RedNote is in Mandarin. This has become the subject of further jokes as well as a marketing opportunity for the language-learning app Duolingo (which has reported a surge in new Mandarin learners).
RedNote is not particularly usable for English-speakers. It also seems likely to be subject to the same legislation that is (currently) set to kill TikTok, because of its Chinese ownership. The mass downloading, then, is driven not by practicality, but by a mix of curiosity, pettiness, and that special type of half-snotty, half-sincere rebellion so common online. A viral post saying “Not only do I willingly give my data to China but I also freely give my heart” is obviously a joke. But other users who had posted on TikTok about moving to RedNote told me that they were serious about it and genuinely viewed the impending TikTok ban as a free-speech issue.
Mia DeLuca, a 24-year-old TikTok user from New Jersey who has joined RedNote, told me that she sees the popularity of the app as sending a deliberate message to U.S. lawmakers—“a way for us to stand our ground.” Abby Greer, 27 and from Chicago, told me she was aware that social-media platforms derive their value from user data and that she specifically wanted to “hand” her own data “off to the people that will upset Congress the most.”
In banning TikTok—unless its Chinese owner, ByteDance, sells it to an American company—Congress cited concerns about national security and Chinese propaganda. Critics of the ban have argued that the national-security concerns are vague, that such a ban is legally dubious under the First Amendment, and that politicians are being disingenuous about their motivations in wanting American young people off the super-popular app—that they are just taking the opportunity to make a ham-fisted move to curtail social-media use.
Britton Copeland, a 26-year-old full-time content creator from Nashville, told me that downloading RedNote rather than an American-owned app was an act of defiance against what she perceives as exactly this kind of government overreach. TikTok, she said, was “being singled out because it is a platform that allows us to speak freely, without control.” She was optimistic that seeing RedNote at the top of the App Store charts could pressure Congress to vote in favor of a bill introduced by a handful of Democrats that would delay the ban by 270 days. (This appears to be a lost cause.) “I hope that this has been a wakeup call that my generation takes censorship very seriously, and we will find a way to make our voices heard,” she told me.
This is where things get a little convoluted and nonsensical. Most Americans downloading RedNote probably don’t even know what its content policies are, given that they are, again, in Mandarin. Those terms of service appear to be highly restrictive, as TikTok’s were before it faced significant pressure to hew closer to American norms regarding online speech and was most ardently criticized for removing or minimizing a wide range of content discussing LGBTQ issues and experiences. New users of RedNote have already noticed similar takedowns, and reporters have pointed out that political content is heavily censored on the app.
Of course, it would seem far more logical for Americans to move over to Instagram Reels, the shortform-video product that Meta created to compete with TikTok. Many will. But some TikTok users that I spoke with resented Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg personally. One referenced his public statements about TikTok’s possible dangers. (In a 2019 speech that name-checked TikTok just as it was growing popular in the U.S., he cited social-media apps exported from China as one of the biggest threats to free speech worldwide.) Another referenced indirect lobbying efforts by Meta that may have contributed to the passage of the anti-TikTok bill. “Knowing that Meta lobbied for this bill to pass makes me want to disengage with their apps entirely,” Kris Drew, a 27-year-old TikTok user from Texas, told me. Greer expressed even more disdain. “I won’t touch Instagram,” she said. Of Zuckerberg, she added, “The last thing I want to do is give him the satisfaction.”
The RedNote surge aside, TikTok’s rapidly approaching deadline represents the end of an era in online life and a strange moment for many—even those who don’t consider themselves ardent users. The ban is unpopular and has become even less popular over the past two years among all kinds of Americans. Though it is known as the Gen Z app, tens of millions of other Americans use TikTok; many have fond associations with it stemming from the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, when they first turned to it for entertainment and connection to the outside world. (Writing in Bookforum, the author Charlotte Shane described the app as “a precious source of solace during an unendingly precarious time.”)
Platform exodus is usually somewhat voluntary. Take for example the #DeleteFacebook movement, which came in a few waves during the first Trump administration, or the reports of large numbers of users leaving Elon Musk’s X, an outflow that has also gone through phases. People first looked to Mastodon before Meta launched Threads in the summer of 2023—but now Meta is following in Musk’s footsteps by rolling back content-moderation policies, so many find that Bluesky makes more sense. Although it’s often the case that a platform becomes inhospitable to a large segment of its user base for any number of business reasons (Tumblr’s emptying-out in 2018) or political reasons (Livejournal’s in 2017), it’s relatively rare for one to disappear overnight. The most well-known example is that of the shortform-video app Vine, but it’s never happened with a platform of TikTok’s size and economic import.
This is a unique situation and people are responding to it with a unique sort of stylized strangeness. Every time I check the X feed, I see another viral bit of gallows humor about the whole thing. For example: “If the government bans rednote i’m just going to start printing out my browser history every night before i go to bed and dropping it off at the Chinese consulate the next morning on my way to work.” That one’s got 118,000 likes and counting.
This article has been updated to include news on the Supreme Court’s ruling.
