Is TikTok living its last days in the United States? It is no longer improbable. Bytedance, the parent company of the social network, threw its last forces into an appeal to the Supreme Court last Friday. The decision of the highest American court is not yet known, but according to observers, the judges seem to lean more towards national security, more than the freedom of expression that TikTok claims.
Who knows? Maybe in the next few hours, Bytedance will have found a buyer — the only condition that would allow TikTok to stay in place. Or finally, the Supreme Court will give its approval for the app to remain in place. In any case, American influencers and content creators did not wait, asking their subscribers to join them on Instagram or YouTube.
Others, who want to "punish" the authorities of their country, decided to branch out to the apps Xiaohongshu and Lemon8, two other Chinese social networks whose applications are respectively number 1 and number 2 in the ranking of the US App Store! This is all the more surprising since Xiaohongshu is absolutely not designed for users who do not speak Chinese.
New American users thus landed on the app, not really understanding how things are done or how it works — and for good reason, it is not localized in English. Xiaohongshu (小红书), which can be translated as “Little Red Book” or “Red Note,” is unknown in our countries; it is nevertheless one of the most important players in Chinese digital.
The platform, founded in 2013, has more than 300 million users, mainly in China but also abroad via the diaspora. It looks more like Instagram than TikTok, even if it is possible to share videos vertically. The app has a great influence, with competitors shamelessly taking inspiration from it, such as… Lemon8, also very popular with TikTok “refugees”.
Lemon8, a Bytedance property, just like Xiaohongshu, are not out of the woods yet. These apps could indeed fall under the American law which seeks to ban TikTok. The text covers applications owned by a “foreign adversary” and which could therefore suffer the same fate. There is therefore no guarantee that these alternative apps will not be blocked in turn by the American government.
Donald Trump, who will take possession of the Oval Office on January 20, the day after the possible ban of TikTok, could however have his say. The president-elect has shown his support for the application on several occasions. But will it not be too late?
Source: Wired
0 Comments