Will RedNote get banned in the US?

I’m not the first to note the irony of TikTok users flooding RedNote this week. The TikTok divest-or-ban rule was supposed to drive Americans away from a foreign-owned social network that was subject to influence or data harvesting by the Chinese government. Instead, it pushed them onto a different foreign-owned social network that poses the exact same hypothetical risks — and that might be subject to the exact same kind of ban.

TikTok faces a ban under the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, which passed with overwhelming bipartisan support and was signed last year by President Joe Biden (who is reportedly experiencing some buyer’s remorse right now). While it mentions TikTok and its parent company, ByteDance, by name, it could apply to any company that meets the following criteria:

• It operates a website or app with more than 1 million monthly users and lets those users make accounts to create and share content.
• It isn’t a service that primarily lets users “post product reviews, business reviews, or travel information and reviews.”
• It’s controlled by a foreign adversary, a definition that covers North Korea, China, Russia, and Iran. “Control” can mean the company is headquartered there, a resident of that country holds at least a 20 percent stake in it, or it’s otherwise “subject to the direction or control” of someone living there.

RedNote reportedly had more than 300 million monthly active users as of 2023, plus a reported 3 million more US users who recently moved over. It’s headquartered in Shanghai, China. It offers a service very similar to TikTok.

If a company meets the legal criteria, the buck passes to the president, who can decide whether to initiate a divest-or-ban procedure. This requires a series of steps:

• The president must publicly propose a determination that the company’s app presents a “significant threat” to US national security.
• The president must issue a public report to Congress, laying out the “specific national security concern involved and containing a classified annex,” plus a description of what assets the parent company would need to divest. (Congress doesn’t need to approve this — it just has to receive it.)
• The president makes an official determination at least 30 days after notifying Congress, and the company has 270 days to make a divestiture that satisfies the president’s requirements. Within the first 90 days, the app’s parent company can challenge the law in the DC Circuit Court of Appeals, like TikTok did.
• If it fails to get a court to stop it, the company would need to make a “qualified divestiture” or face a ban in the US. The 270-day clock keeps ticking unless a court pauses it, and the president can only extend the deadline up to another 90 days.
• The app can avoid a ban if it’s divested from the foreign adversary’s control. The president must determine, with the help of an “interagency process,” that the sale would result in the app no longer being controlled by a foreign adversary and that it prevents any kind of future operational relationship, like a data-sharing agreement.
• If this doesn’t happen, the law forces app store operators and internet hosting services to cease supporting the app, resulting in its effective shutdown in the US.

The law mentions TikTok by name as a national security threat, so that platform is basically cooked — the divest-or-ban deadline was set in motion once the law was signed, bypassing much of the process above. The law says any subsidiary of ByteDance is also covered by the law, so while the company and US government have not yet commented on apps like its social network Lemon8, they’ll likely face scrutiny, too. But the president has significantly more leeway in deciding the fate of other apps.

Where does RedNote stand, then?

RedNote, as far as publicly available information indicates, could be forced to divest or face a ban under the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act. A US official has confirmed that, saying it “appears to be the kind of app that the statute would apply to.”

But pragmatically, this is where we exit the realm of policy and enter the world of politics. The question isn’t really how RedNote operates; it’s whether RedNote makes President-elect Donald Trump or the Silicon Valley oligarchy mad.

TikTok does pose potential security risks, but the pressure to ban it was about a lot more than that. Meta was behind a public campaign calling for scrutiny of TikTok — one of its chief competitors — and its ties to China. Members of Congress complained that TikTok was serving too much pro-Palestinian content; there’s no known evidence China was behind this alleged imbalance, so presenting it as a national security threat looks fairly suspect. Now, conversely, Trump is looking for ways to save TikTok because he thinks it helped his election campaign.

Based on all of this, let’s extrapolate a path for RedNote. Right now, its American user base appears comparatively minuscule; it’s not clear how many US users it had before the past week, but Reuters reports that it gained about 3 million US users in one day this week, compared to about 170 million monthly US TikTok users as of last year. The risks Congress saw in TikTok — mass data harvesting, covert propaganda — appear to affect a far smaller number of people. The risks that may actually decide its fate are a little more complicated.

Will RedNote maintain a momentum that threatens the egos or businesses of MAGA-approved billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk? Will it produce political activism that antagonizes Trump (or a future president)? Will growing US hostility toward China’s government manifest in a broad crackdown on Chinese apps? All these things, while difficult to predict, wouldn’t bode well.

For now, though, have fun learning Mandarin.