After years of rejecting the idea of a sale of TikTok’s US assets to an American buyer in order to avert a ban, China and ByteDance may have found an owner they could live with: Elon Musk.

RedNote, called Xiaohongshu in Chinese — which literally translates as Little Red Book, an apparent reference to former dictator Chairman Mao Zedong — is also required to follow the Chinese Communist Party’s regulations, but has yet to exert its moderation of English language content to meet these standards.

This has two knock-on effects that are much longer term. First, we now know that a U.S. TikTok ban will be difficult to bypass if it comes back — and the same will be true for any other Chinese (or other) app banned in the same way. There are some options, as I reported over the weekend, but none of them are especially compelling.

The bizarre surge in popularity for Chinese social media app RedNote has sparked alarm among policy experts who warned it carries even greater security risks than TikTok.

The founder of the app’s parent, Beijing-based ByteDance, met with Elon Musk last year.

State media hailed RedNote's success among American "TikTok refugees" as a repudiation of U.S. government "demonizing" of China's development.

Anti-TikTok sentiment rapidly accelerated through all branches of government. A congressional bill demanding ByteDance sell its stake in their app to an American buyer or face expulsion from the country vote received a bipartisan vote, was signed by President Joe Biden and upheld by a 7-2 Supreme Court decision.

The US president pardons 23 anti-abortion activists, including some convicted of blockading a reproductive health clinic and intimidating staff and patients.

“I think we’re going to do things that people would be shocked at,” President Donald Trump declared on his second day in office. It was one of the few true things he said all week.

In trying out Chinese apps as a form of protest — language barrier be damned — many of TikTok’s 170 million American users discovered the same features that had made TikTok

DeepSeek has a free website and mobile app even for U.S. users with an R1-powered chatbot interface similar to OpenAI's ChatGPT.