Lawmakers have fought to end the reign of TikTok due to ties they say it has with the Chinese Communist Party. But they may have made things much worse.
The Chinese apps RedNote and Lemon8 have exploded in popularity as TikTok faces an imminent ban and the Supreme Court upheld the law forcing its sale.
The rise of the apps shows TikTok’s U.S. users are rejecting American platforms like Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts that were expected to be the beneficiaries of a ban. Instead, they’ve moved to alternatives that have even closer ties to China than TikTok, a Beijing-based company with a U.S. subsidiary and many Western investors.
Now, those alternative video-sharing apps have ignited a new challenge for lawmakers worried about foreign influence via social media.
Justice Neil Gorsuch, a conservative appointed by President-elect Donald Trump, pointed to just such a possibility of other apps taking TikTok’s place and undermining the aims of the law in his concurring opinion Friday.
“Whether this law will succeed in achieving its ends, I do not know. A determined foreign adversary may just seek to replace one lost surveillance application with another,” he wrote.
RedNote in particular — whose official Chinese name translates to “Little Red Book,” a reference to the late Communist leader Mao Zedong’s signature text — has surged to become the most-downloaded app in recent days, according to the Google Play and App Store rankings. ByteDance-owned is Lemon8 right behind it.
“This migration towards RedNote is a very good example of the law of unintended consequences, which the Congress right now doesn’t know anything about,” said Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), an outspoken proponent of extending the deadline for divestment.
Rep. John Moolenaar (R-Mich.), chair of the House China Select Committee, said the TikTok law gives the president the power to deem any app owned by a foreign adversary a threat to national security and force it to divest under the threat of another ban. In particular, the law calls out TikTok and ByteDance, putting Lemon8 directly in the spotlight.
“The good news is that President Trump has the authority under the TikTok bill to force divestment of other [Chinese Communist Party] controlled applications that pose national security risks as well,” Moolenaar said in an email Wednesday.
Unlike TikTok, which saw more political candidates embrace the platform heading into last year’s elections, it doesn’t appear that any lawmakers have joined RedNote. But a look through the app showed several accounts impersonating President Joe Biden, Trump and Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) — and only some marked as parody.
Biden’s White House and the Trump transition team did not immediately respond to questions about the Chinese alternative apps.
The impending ban on TikTok is set to take effect over inauguration weekend and has thrust the issue into uncharted legal territory. The outgoing White House has indicated Biden will neither grant TikTok an extension nor enforce the ban’s giant fees on companies like Google and Apple for hosting it.
Trump said Friday that “everyone must respect” the Supreme Court’s decision, but he has vowed to strike a deal that saves the app and is expecting TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew to attend his inauguration. In his first term, Trump tried to ban both TikTok and the Chinese app WeChat.
In a TikTok posted after the Friday court ruling, Chew made a direct appeal to Trump, while pledging that TikTok would do “everything in our power to ensure our platform thrives” for years to come and previewing “more to come.”
China’s embassy in the U.S. celebrated the arrival of American users to RedNote.
“The platform opened a window for cross-cultural communication, and for both #Chinese and #American people to learn more about each other,” spokesperson Liu Pengyu wrote on X Thursday.
RedNote is one of the few social media apps available both inside and outside China. TikTok is unavailable in the country, and Beijing has long implemented a “Great Firewall” that bans U.S.-owned platforms like Facebook, Instagram and X.
The popularity of Chinese TikTok alternatives may take U.S. social media companies that expected to gain from the ban of the wildly popular video-sharing app by surprise.
“I know that there are plenty of alternatives by great American companies like Meta, Instagram, Facebook, X and YouTube, where consumers can migrate to continue to have expression,” said Carl Holshouser, head of government relations at the TechNet group that counts Meta and Google — but not TikTok — as members.
Meanwhile in Congress, while lawmakers agreed RedNote and Lemon8 are a problem, few had ideas for how to solve it. Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.), a senior member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, told POLITICO he imagined the law to force the sale of TikTok was a special case and hadn’t thought about the possibility of using it to knock down others.
“Any of them which have an ownership interest with the Chinese Communist Party or where they control it, we have concerns about,” said Rounds Thursday. “I would hope that we don’t have to do this to other organizations. This is a very serious one. We’ve not done this like this in the past.”
Multiple lawmakers struggled to articulate a more comprehensive approach to foreign-owned apps would look like even as they expressed alarm at the rise of platforms like RedNote.
“You cannot have a site-by-site or app-by-app approach to the Chinese strategy to infiltrate American homes with their technology,” said Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.). “So you’re going to have to make a broader decision about how comfortable we are with China penetrating into the lives of Americans.”
They likened the current situation to a game of Whac-A-Mole, but indicated Congress had little choice but to continue playing it.
“Just keep knocking them down,” deadpanned Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.).
Other Republicans said they had to deal with TikTok first, before turning their attention to the apps that could take its place.
“Right now, we’re taking it one at a time, and TikTok is the issue for us,” Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) said Thursday.
It’s unclear if apps RedNote and Lemon8 are here to stay — especially with the slim chance that TikTok gets an eleventh-hour reprieve. University of Pennsylvania law professor Gus Hurwitz said app stores would likely be wary of Chinese alternatives becoming liabilities under the TikTok law.
“They’re not going to be allowed any more than TikTok is,” he said. “The companies — the Googles and Apples — they’re going to be vigilant looking for these non-TikTok apps that also need to be removed.”
Alfred Ng contributed to this report.
