Endless Thread - Little Big RedNote

Episode Date: February 7, 2025

Sometimes, after a long day speaking English, former WBUR podcast fellow Cici Yu just wants to zone out and spend time on the internet where everyone is speaking her native language, Chinese. Her app of choice? Xiaohongshu, or RedNote. So, when Cici logged on recently to find a feed filled with English-speaking Americans, she was surprised. Show notes: "The great social media migration: Sudden influx of US users to RedNote connects Chinese and Americans like never before" (CNN) "More speech and fewer mistakes" (Meta) "Instagram hides search results for 'Democrats'" (BBC) "Instagram and Facebook Blocked and Hid Abortion Pill Providers’ Posts" (The New York Times) Credits: This episode was produced by Grace Tatter. Mix and sound design by Paul Vaitkus. It was hosted by Ben Brock Johnson and Amory Sivertson.

Support for endless thread comes from Mathworks, creator of MATLAB and Simulink Software, to design and develop engineered systems, accelerating the pace of discovery in engineering and science. Learn more at Mathworks.com. Support for WBUR comes from Is Business Broken, a podcast from the Merotra Institute at Boston University that explores questions like, why is innovation in healthcare so hard? Is ESG just greenwashing? And, of course, is business broken? Listen, wherever you get your podcasts.

WBUR Podcasts, Boston. Ben, you're not much of a TikToker. More just a talker. That you are. Which I can say because I am too. And while we have not spent a lot of time talking on TikTok, We have talked a lot about TikTok, especially the past few weeks as its future hangs in the balance.

Death to TikTok, long-lived TikTok. It's been a real roller coaster for TikTok users. A congressionally imposed ban was supposed to go into effect on January 19th. And it did. For 14 hours at least. But then the app was back up. With a message to users thanking President Donald Trump. Hmm, even though he was not yet the president.

Right. TikTok might have inaugurated Donald Trump on January 19th, but he did not technically become president until the day after. At which point, he issued an executive order saying that the ban won't be enforced for at least 75 days. This roller coaster ain't stopping. But some people are looking for a smoother ride. Before the TikTok ban went into effect and then out of effect, a lot of Americans began downloading another app. This is an app that neither of us knew much about. Nope. But fortunately, there was one person in the endless thread orbit who did. Former WBUR podcast fellow CCU.

Yay, that's me. What's up, Cici? Welcome to the studio. Cici was here to talk to us about Red Note. Actually, let's be clear. That's the official name that the company gave itself. In Chinese, we call it Xiao Hong Shoe. Shuo.

Shou. Yes, that's pretty good. Yeah, Shalhong Shu. Translation, Little Red Book. I'm Amory Sewardson. I'm Ben Brock Johnson, and you're listening to Endless Thread. Coming to you from WBUR, Boston's NPR.

Today's episode, Little Big Red Note. I know a little something about Little Red Books. Yeah? Because I've been to China, and I used to have a little red book. Oh, my God. When I went to China in 2002, Little Red Books were kind of everywhere. Some people not from China, who I was with at the time, treated them like a tourist curiosity, including early 20s me, admittedly, which is a little odd, I guess, considering everything connected to the cultural revolution in China.

Whatever the case, I just want to clarify, I am not a Maoist. I do not read this book every night before I go to bed. I mean, you don't read books. You scroll Reddit. I'm a Redditist. Yeah. But for the uninitiated, the Little Red Book is a compilation of quotations from Mao's A'D. And during the Cultural Revolution, Mao's government wanted to make sure that pretty much every Chinese person had one of these. Maybe that little cultural reference, the company used Rat No instead of Little Rat Book as a direct translation. Because they didn't want to freak anybody out.

Yeah, I guess so. Outside of China. Yeah. Red Note is pretty much Cece's favorite place to hang out on her phone. This app is a go-to app. It has more than one function. Design inspiration like Pinterest, chatting with friends. Career advice, recipes. It's all on red note.

If I have any question, I actually will use Xia Houxu to search and answer. Like, for example, I sprang my ankle like a month ago. I would type it on on Xia Houxu and be like, what should I do after I sprung my ankle? Right. And there are our answer from doctors because they are in Xia Hong Shu as well. Why are you personally choosing to search for answers about that in Red Note instead of just Googling it? Well, you know, because I am Chinese. That's a short answer.

Okay. Okay, so I'm living in America and I work here. I use English as my primary language, you know, most of my time. And when I'm off the work, like I would like to go back to my mother language channel. Like, I would like to switch back to another. bring and not think about English. So Cece was surprised on a recent Sunday to be scrolling on Red Note and to all of a sudden be hearing a lot of this.

I am a TikToker. I feel like a foreign exchange student on this app, and I'm loving it. I'm going through and just following everybody that is a TikTok refugee. I want to show you guys in China, right? This is the Chinese app. I don't know any Mandarin. I'm a little bit scared. Hopefully we can just follow over.

bunch of people and build the algorithm to show us more TikTok folks. And I'm like, what the heck? What happened? This was January 12th, a week before the TikTok ban was supposed to go into effect. And American users heard about this app, Red Note, which, like TikTok, uses an algorithm to deliver you content instead of just serving you what your own social network is posting. So at first, C-C is not thrilled to see and hear these Americans. self-proclaimed refugees in her feed. My secret social media has been discovered.

Like, why? She's also just confused, because this app is super Chinese. All the condoms are in Chinese. Like, if you are here, you know, doesn't know anything about Chinese, you'll be so confused. You're just looking at characters that you don't know. But soon her confusion and consternation... Turn into delight. I saw these, you know, really funny interaction between Chinese people and Americans.

Hi, refugees. It's Roxie Kayakassistra, aka your 10th refugee guy. There are two main things we do here. Checking and throw shat. Say it with me. Daqa. Since you're in my home, please enjoy the massive hospitality. And please do speak as much of Chinese as you could.

My grandma does read the comments and I don't want to let her hanging. Chinese people will post a meme of, a dog holding two guns and just be like, give me your data. Let me show you. This is really fun. So it was like the Chinese users were inhabiting the ridiculous caricature of what they felt Americans assumed about Chinese users. Yes. Everyone was in on the bit.

And the irony that TikTok was being banned for its ties to the Chinese government, only for American users to download another app with ties to the Chinese government. There's also some riffing on taxing each other, but these are not President Trump's tariffs. If you want to be, you know, welcome in this community, you should pay cat tax. Cat tax? Yeah. Oh, you have to, like, post your cat to introduce yourself properly? Yes. Yes.

Happy to pay the cat tax. All of the interactions Cici was seeing between her two countries on this app were pretty wholesome. I started to learn English when I'm in elementary school. And starting in, like, maybe third grade, we will have English class. In every English test, there will be a writing section asking you to pretend that you'll be Li Hua. And you write a letter to your pen pal in America. and introduce your life, introduce a food in your city, introduce your culture, introduce Chinese New Year to your pen pal in America.

This is an experience that people share across China, embodying this fictional character, Li Hua, and writing to a fictional American pen pal. Bad fictional pen pals who never write back. Until now. So people, like American people, are starting to respond and be like, dear Li Huai, I hope you're doing well. I'm sorry that it takes so long for me to respond your letters.

That's nice. I know. It's really nice. So I just feel like such, you know, cultural exchange moment just make me feel like, yes, maybe this is just what Internet is because Internet is supposed to connect people from all over the place. Great job, Internet.

Cici told us that this kind of online interaction between American people and Chinese, Chinese people living in China is pretty rare. Chinese people do not have access of Western media. For example, like Google, Facebook, Instagram, because they're banning China. Even TikTok, which is famously owned by the Chinese company BiteDance, isn't available in China. In China, they use the original app, Doyin. It's also owned by ByteDance, but you need a Chinese phone number to download it.

Anyone can download Red Note, though, leading C-Sycin. to wonder. Maybe this is like an app that create this bridge between Chinese people and Americans that they can share with each other what is going on in their life. Well, some of what is going on in their lives. On this app, there are a lot of things that you cannot discuss, for example, political topics. Because in order for it to actually exist at all in China, there can't really be like expressions of huge political resistance. Yes, the app need to work under the Chinese regulation, which does not allow them to promote any religious conversation, political speech. Where does Red Note fit into our social media future?

We'll discuss after a break. Support for this podcast comes from Nature is the Solution, a podcast from the Nature Conservancy. When it comes to the environment, it's easy to focus on doom and gloom. But that's not the whole story, especially when there are so many projects working towards bringing people and nature together. In this moment, optimism isn't naive. It's necessary. Follow nature is the solution wherever you listen to podcasts and discover stories of impact and possibility. At Radio Lab, we love nothing more than nerding out about science, neuroscience, chemistry. But we do also like to get into other kinds of stories.

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the Creative Studio from WBUR's business partnerships team. Become a thought leader. Recruit new talent. Reach new audiences. Whatever your goal, we can help. Discover how the magic is made at WBUR.org slash creative studio. In the days leading up to the U.S. TikTok ban, thousands of users jumped to the Chinese app Red Note,

which will probably just be a footnote to all of the social media upheaval so far this year. In January, META announced that it was changing its fact-checking. Instead of partnering with independent third-party fact-checkers from news organizations, it's copying Elon Musk's X, crowdsourced fact-checking via community notes. Meta also updated its hateful conduct policy, specifying that they now do allow, quote, allegations, of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation. Woof.

Mehta has been adamant that these changes are made in the spirit of less censorship. In a video message, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that these changes were in response to Trump's election, which he said felt like a, quote, cultural tipping point. The fact checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they've created, especially in the U.S. These changes made some users uneasy. And then the day after President Trump was inaugurated, Instagram briefly hid results when users searched terms including Democrats.

Meta told the BBC that was a glitch. Meta also blocked content from abortion access organizations. A company spokesperson told the New York Times that this was due to, quote, over-enforcement of a policy against selling pharmaceutical drugs on their platform. These changes and reported glitches have led to calls to boy. boycott meta products, including Facebook and Instagram. Meta intentionally lobbied against your First Amendment rights. Stop using their platforms.

I'm going to lose considerable money by leaving Meta. I would rather not lose my integrity. February 1st, I will not be here no more. Although it's unclear how many people are actually logging off. We have seen a mass exodus from popular social media platforms before. Millions of people have already deactivated their X accounts since Elon Musk took over what used to be Twitter. And now many subreddits are even banning links to X. Combined with the TikTok ban, it feels like a global turning point for online communities and social media.

And Red Note is just a small piece of that. In the past few weeks, Red Note has scrambled to hire English language moderators and up its translation game. Cece noticed some of these changes. I think retina will be more, you know, international in a way that it already adopts translation to. And you can also filter English preferred content on your feed. So it's definitely, you know, adopting their system to be more international and more welcoming to foreigner. to foreigner.

But at the same time, are Americans going to stay? Yeah. Not sure. I think this is a really good question. And I also think I'm really like of two minds about this in some ways, Amory. I mean, on the one hand, what I see in the history of like tech companies and acquisitions

in this kind of like endless cycle of money in the tech world, is really, they're not as much technology acquisitions as they are audience acquisitions, right? A lot of the time they're doing it just to buy an audience that has been gained by that app, because people understand that that's really hard to do. That's the thing that's really hard to do, is build a massive audience that stays and wants to stay. And then on the other hand, I think about this sort of like the historic battlefield of technology that is littered with the corpses of, do you remember,

have you ever heard of Friendster? Yeah. And MySpace. Oh, MySpace. Yeah. And to a certain degree, Tumblr, you know, like I just,

I feel like there are these other, you know, so I'm kind of two minds about this. I also recognize that this is different, right? Like, this is not just sort of the, the usual acquisition churn. Yeah.

It's not an app dying a natural death. the way that, like, MySpace did, yeah. It's this government ban that feels like we're in a very kind of like in-between space where there's like a ban, but there's not a ban, or the band might continue or it might not continue, and like some people can still access it and some people can't. And it has a bunch of people on the internet going, don't tell me what to do.

Yes. You know what I mean? As always. And as they should. Producer Grace Tattered dropped a story into the chats. week about how some people are spending thousands of dollars on phones that still have access to TikTok because if you deleted it or you got a new phone, you can't get access to TikTok via the app store right now. Wow. Yeah, and I think we go, I guess I should only speak for myself in

feeling like, wow, the internet gives me access to all of these people and places that I can't reach otherwise or I wouldn't know otherwise or I wouldn't be. able to connect to any other way and also just wanting my world to be very, very small and, you know, resorting to my actual favorite app, which is just texting, just contacting someone close to me who, you know, maybe isn't on social media anymore because of everything that's happening in these spaces right now. And I want to be able to find out what's going on in their life. And so I'm like, oh, I should just send them a message and say, hey, how's the news? job or whatever, you know?

Yeah, I have something like that, but it's leaving two-minute-long voicemails for people. Some of which start and end with meow. You know, you got to bring annoying joy in the world as much as he can right now. So, you know, I guess we're curious if listeners have changed how and where they spend their time online in the last few months. We would love to hear more from you. You can email us at Endless Thread at WBUR.org. And, you know, we should say, we don't really know how this is all going to play out.

But Red Note has certainly had its moment, maybe. Yeah, at the time we're recording this, Red Note has dropped quickly from the number one free download in Apple's App Store to number 128. The app at the top of the list as of recording this episode is another Chinese-owned app, not TikTok, of course, DeepSeek AI. And you're going to hear more about Deep Seek in our next episode. This episode was produced by Grace Tatter. It was co-hosted by me, Amory Sievertson, and Ben Brock Johnson. It was mixed in sound design by our production manager, Paul Vicus.

And thanks to our former podcast fellow CCU for tipping us off to her, secret favorite app, we promise not to mess up your algorithm, CC. Endless Thread is a show about the blurred lines between online communities and two-minute-long voice notes. If you've got an unsolved mystery and untold history or a crazy story from the internet that you want us to tell, hit us up. Endless Thread at wb.org.org.