Unless president elect Donald Trump issues a special exemption for TikTok the Chinese social media app will most likely “go dark” in the U.S. on January 19. Fearing losing their favorite short-form video content platform, a large number of TikTok’s user base is migrating to RedNote. However there is also a third app that has found itself entangled in the whole ordeal.Duolingo — the extremely popular language learning app — has seen a massive surge in downloads as TikTok users shift to RedNote. This is because RedNote, for now, isn’t available in English and requires users to navigate the platform in Mandarin. Duolingo reported that it saw a 216 percent increase in American users enrolling for Mandarin courses.
The company took this moment to humorously poke fun at the new people flooding in and mocked them for finally finding a reason to learn Mandarin. RedNote is understandably also seeing a spike in popularity in the U.S. but isn’t nearly as thrilled as Duolingo.
The platform is considering setting up a filter that will separate all foreign IP addresses from Chinese ones. This is so that U.S. influence on the Chinese user base can be minimized.
Image credit — PhoneArena
RedNote has already started banning accounts of new American users who posted content deemed inappropriate. An IP filter might let the app split into two completely different platforms for Chinese and international users. Something similar happens on TikTok where the content displayed to Chinese users is heavily curated and very different from what is shown to Western audiences.I find the whole ordeal quite amusing: the U.S. wants to ban TikTok to reduce Chinese influence on its citizens and Americans respond by flocking to another Chinese platform instead. No doubt Instagram and similar apps were hoping to see an increase in users and are quite disappointed by RedNote’s success.
While it’s not set in stone that TikTok will be banned in the U.S. it very much seems to be heading that way. Trump may delay its ban for a short while but unless TikTok is acquired by an American business it likely doesn’t have a future in the U.S.
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