TikTok Alternative Rednote Shares Similar Security Risk, Expert Says

The Xiaohongshu app, also known as RedNote, is displayed on an iPhone screen in Los Angeles on Jan. 17, 2025. Andy Bao/AP Photo

As the fate of TikTok hangs in the balance in the United States, tens of thousands of Americans flocked to Chinese social media platform rednote.

However, rednote “presents significant privacy concerns, similar to TikTok” because the app collects extensive data and is subject to the same Chinese law that compels companies to hand data over to the state, LJ Eads, director of research intelligence at Ohio-based Parallax Advanced Research, told The Epoch Times via email.

“For example, it collects extensive user data, including phone numbers, gender, interests, age, browsing history, search queries, and even device-specific details such as IMEI, IP address, and location information,” Eads said.

Meanwhile, some new rednote users said their accounts have been banned, and results of searches made by The Epoch Times show the app is censoring content critical of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

RedNote, known in China as Xiaohongshu (little red book), mostly features fashion, crafts, and other lifestyle content that is popular among younger women.

Before TikTok briefly went offline in the United States before a ban of the app took effect, tens of thousands of so-called “TikTok refugees” migrated to rednote.

According to App Magic, in the past 30 days, the app has been downloaded more than 2 million times from the United States.

On Jan. 15, Chinese tech news website mydrivers.com reported that rednote is urgently hiring English-speaking content moderators.

The outlet published a screenshot of rednote’s recruitment advertisement, which says successful candidates would be responsible for reviewing texts, photos, and videos.

Censorship

Some new users took to other social media platforms to say they had already been banned from rednote.

On TikTok, a content creator said on Jan. 14 that she had been banned from rednote within 24 hours for “impersonating” herself. Another user posted a note on the same day saying they were suspended but didn’t know the reason.

On social media platform X, a user said on Friday that their rednote account had been banned after they posted a message saying Taiwan is a country.

Venture capitalist Sheel Mohnot posted on Jan. 19 that his rednote account had been banned permanently for “harming national interests” after he posted a image of Winnie-The-Pooh.

Images of the fictional bear have been censored in China since July 2017 after “Winnie-the-Pooh” became an online reference to Chinese leader Xi Jinping.

When The Epoch Times searched “Winnie-The-Pooh” on rednote on Friday afternoon, some images of the bear showed up, but the app rendered no result for “Xi Winnie,” which is commonly used to refer to Xi.

Similarly, The Epoch Times could not find any content relating to the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and massacre, or human rights violations against Uyghurs and practitioners of Falun Gong, a religious belief based on truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance.

The rednote account was banned from posting shortly after the reporter posted a image of both Xi and Winnie-the-Pooh, with the tag “Xi Winnie.”

A warning message contained a link to the app’s Chinese community guidelines, which have been in effect since Dec. 24, 2021. The document says rednote “will use the strictest methods” to eradicate a range of behaviour that “harm national and social security,” including contents that “subvert state power,” “promote cults and superstitions,” and “attack or defame party and state leaders, fabricate negative information about leaders, and abuse their image.”

Much of the rules are not included in the English version of the app’s community guidelines and its recently updated terms of service.

The search function in TikTok on the same device stopped working during the same hour. Before the search function stopped working, the device was also used to search and access aforementioned posts on TikTok.

In 2022, China Digital Times obtained a 143-page document detailing how rednote monitored public opinions and select keywords to effectively censor content.

According to the report, rednote carried out censorship instructions from the CCP’s Office of the Central Cyberspace Affairs Commission in real time, and self censor to toe the party line.

Logs covering a 75-day period in 2020 show that rednote’s team of content reviewers flagged 271 posts involving Xi, and added 564 additional keywords related to the CCP leader, the report said.

The Epoch Times has not reviewed the document.

Privacy Concerns

Some features in the rednote app, such as purchasing and streaming, also require users to verify their identity.

The collection of users’ identification, their device identifiers, geolocation data, and behavior data such as likes, shares, and comments, “can enable detailed user profiling, potentially accessible to foreign entities,” Eads said.

“Its algorithm could be weaponized for disinformation campaigns or influence operations, undermining democratic processes and personal privacy. Additionally, sensitive data shared during transactions or account recovery processes could be vulnerable to misuse or unauthorized access,” he added.

Under Chinese law, all individuals and entities, including private businesses, are required to support the Chinese regime’s intelligence work, and listed companies in China are required to set up CCP units within their offices to ensure that business policies and employees toe the party line, leading to concerns that the CCP can access data of the companies’ overseas customers.

ByteDance, founded in March 2012, set up its party committee in October 2014. TikTok previously dismissed concerns about its potential threat to U.S. national security, saying that the lack of evidence of past data sharing between ByteDance and the Chinese communist regime is enough to clear it from concerns about future actions, but its assurances have failed to convince the U.S. government and the Supreme Court, which on Jan. 17 upheld the law forcing TikTok to be separated from its China-based company in order to operate in the United States.

TikTok is being forced to separate from ByteDance because of the app’s “scale and susceptibility to foreign adversary control, together with the vast swaths of sensitive data the platform collects,” the Supreme Court said when it dismissed TikTok’s challenge to the law on Jan. 17.

Shanghai-based Xingyin Information Technology Ltd., which owns redbook, was founded in Shanghai in 2013.

The company set up its first CCP branch in 2019. According to Chinese media outlet eastday.com, Xinyin’s party branch was upgraded in December 2021 to a party committee with four branches, and as of February 2024, the company had almost 200 CCP members.

Rednote didn’t respond to The Epoch Times’ request for comment.

Andrew Chen contributed to this report.