Today, Explained - From TikTok to 小红书

Episode Date: January 24, 2025

TikTok's uncertain future has driven a flood of users to a fully Chinese social media app full of opportunities for genuine cultural exchange. And it's given fresh fodder for proponents of a decentralized social media ecosystem known as the fediverse. This episode was produced by Travis Larchuk, edited by Jolie Myers, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Patrick Boyd and Rob Byers, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Transcript at vox.com/today-explained-podcast Support Today, Explained by becoming a Vox Member today: http://www.vox.com/members A logo for Xiaohongshu, aka RedNote, and a TikTok logo displayed on smartphone screens in China. Photo by VCG/VCG via Getty Images. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

TikTok is in a state of flux. About a week ago it disappeared for about 14 hours even though it didn't have to. Goodbye forever. Then it came back and sent everyone in the United States essentially a Trump ad. China. China. China. And then Trump enters office and signs an executive order saying he's gonna kick the TikTok deadline down the road but no one knows if that's constitutional. Oh yay, oh yay.

In the meantime a bunch of Americans downloaded a way more Chinese app called Red Note, and some of them started pledging allegiance to Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party. No joke. So we're waiting in line, wanting to hand our data to China. Long live China, long live Xi Jinping.

We got to mouse it on. China is the best country in the entire world. I love China so much. First off, Mandarin is amazing. Second off, the Chinese Communist Party, yes, Communist is the best government in the entire world, most transparent government in the entire world. We're going to ask why on Today Explained.

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Sean Ramos from here with internet culture reporter Steffi Cao, who's been using Red Note since before it was cool. So I downloaded Red Note, originally known as Xiao Hongshu, a little while ago before the wave really hit, but I've been following the trends for a few years now. It really started in China as an answer to Instagram, which is

censored domestically in the country. And its intent was to operate as an Instagram slash Pinterest. So the demographic really looks like women, young women living in urban cities. It's a lot of lifestyle. It's a lot of makeup, beauty, fashion, travel tips, things that you would see when you log on to Instagram. Can you pull out your phone and just tell us what Red Note's serving you right now? Okay, so this is sort of like what I'm seeing on my feed. This is automatically what I get. I see like four videos and they're not auto playing. I guess guess you have to pick one to play it? Yeah, so I see a lot of American versus Chinese

lifestyle content. Like, here's a vlog, the top one, it's just a woman shopping in a Chinese supermarket and saying, Americans, is this what you see in your supermarkets? We have many kinds of drinks. Fanta is 50 cents. A liter of orange juice is $1.80.

A little cultural exchange. Also, that's so cheap. Oh, here's a video of a guinea pig being brushed. How soothing is that? Oh, that is soothing. He's so combed. Okay, so you download this app, Steffi, before it was cool, but last week,

and up until the point we're recording right now, this remains true, it is the number one app in the Apple App Store. Why did Red Note become the destination for everyone who's nervous about what's going on with TikTok? So this sort of started ironically, because users in their frustration, and their ire over what was going to happen to their beloved app, then started saying, you know what, if the government wants us to be afraid of Chinese government surveillance and I think this is total nonsense, I'm going to stick it to the government and do the one thing

that they would fear the most, which is get even more Chinese. So you might be the perfect person to ask if the jokes about pleading fealty to the CCP and saying flattering things about Mao Zedong are actually jokes or not? Because I saw a lot of them last week and I really couldn't tell. They were so well crafted. I really couldn't tell if we were joking or not. What is going on? I think what it is is that American users are really frustrated with their government right now for many realistic reasons, right? Because the information cycle around the TikTok ban has been confusing at best and insidious

at worst, especially when effectively the shutdown became clear that it was very much about supporting President Trump as opposed to an actual concern of surveillance, data mining, et cetera. So I think as a way of expressing their frustration with everything and finding the most annoying and provocative, most provocative way. Incendiary. Incendiary. Oh, you got the thesaurus out. Don't play with him. Yeah, to find the most controversial way

to deal with these frustrations they take it out by making jokes and saying, actually, you know what, the CCP is not that bad. You know what? Mao kind of ate that one thing. So I think that it's not really about the Chinese government at all, because this is really everything to do with their perception of their own government. So, since you've been on this app since before last week,

how is its culture changing now that it's being flooded with angry and maybe less angry Americans? Yeah, the culture has completely shifted from when I downloaded Xiaohongshu. I think primarily the biggest difference is that there's a lot more English on the app. And when I did my piece of the Rolling Stone, when I spoke to women in China about their thoughts

on this cultural shift on Xiaohongshu, a lot of them said the biggest culture shock for them was seeing that much English on the app. Because while a lot of Chinese students receive English education, like as a second language, it's not really widely used in the country. And so to see that much of it on historically a very Mandarin app is jarring. I would also say that there's a lot of criticism now from Chinese users that it's a lot more like TikTok than it is Xiaohongshu. Because the thing is like Chinese

people already have TikTok, it's Douyin. So obviously when suddenly the TikTok refugees, as they call themselves, entered the app, the content itself shifted away from what Xiao Hongshu was originally known for and more towards a similar vibe of TikTok, which doesn't really strike the chord with some Chinese users. Okay, so that's the downside of all these Americans showing up. But I've been hearing a lot about the upsides. And I know you've written about them. In fact, your article for Rolling Stone that published this week is titled,

Red Note is the U.S.-China peace talks we need. Please explain. I think when you open up the app, when you start scrolling through, what you're first really struck with is these two sets of users who have historically been separated by a very strong firewall talking for the first time. And it's not anything that I've necessarily seen before in my lifetime. I grew up both in Shanghai and in America.

And when people are interacting for the first time on Red Note, you're seeing people interact and understand for each other these little things that Americans haven't really considered before about Chinese users, like the cost of living, like what going to school is like, what they eat, what they do for work, what they do for fun. Hello everyone! Welcome to TikTok refugees It's been a tremendous week of you guys coming over and us welcoming you guys

I like to knit, crochet, upcycle I'm gonna quickly run you through 10 emerging fashion brands in China I wanna talk about why some people say they never encounter a transgender person in China The cancer medication that they get is about $20 in China, and they are paying $22,000 a month in the US. The Chinese young workers typically only earn around $3,000 to $6,000 RMB per month. That's only around $500 to $1,000 US dollars.

There is, of course course still strong censorship happening on Red Note. I've heard stories that conversations about religion sort of have disappeared or conversations about politics are immediately censored. And I guess what some people who aren't on these apps are struggling with right now is that people are okay with this.

That people are okay being censored by some Chinese algorithm or even the Chinese government. I think that outrage is so funny because it's so clear that now people who are online and have a history of being online are very okay with the fact and know that many governments, many private entities and corporations are seeing their data. That's the price you pay when you download a free app. And I think that when the TikTok ban was looming and so much of it was around this hype that we need to protect ourselves from China, we need to protect ourselves from foreign governments and the threat that China poses, I think a lot of young people when they see a ballooning cost of

living, rising inflation, a very scarce job market that is pumped full of data collection, job postings that don't actually lead to anything, I think there's a very obvious pipeline between I think my government doesn't care about me, they care more about this threat that feels less real to me than the threats of my everyday life. And so I think that's why it makes sense that a lot of people are like, you know what, even if I am not on Red Note, I'm so mad at my government that on my way to work I'm to drop off my browser history at the Chinese embassy. I'm also considering putting my birth certificate and social security card and all of my data that I can collect into a physical file and mailing it to the Chinese embassy out of spite.

Does that mean that it's only a matter of time before there's some lawmaker in Congress trying to ban red note. I think the way I see it as a culture reporter is culture moves slow when it comes to old white men. So I do think that there is perhaps more leeway in that they might not even know about it until or necessarily fully understand it. But I do think that eventually, once they get one of the fact that it's fully Chinese,

I mean, TikTok was always Chinese by association. It was Chinese in the way of like, it has a Chinese uncle. It's a US based company with a Singaporean CEO whose ownership was based in China. So Hongshu was founded by a Chinese founder and is based in China in Shanghai. And it's up until last week, it was operating entirely in Mandarin.

So I think that obviously it makes sense that at some point lawmakers will try and make moves to censor Xiao Hongshu, which for me will be a loss because I need my makeup tutorials. Just download them all right now. I know I gotta save them. Steffi Qiao, read her on Red Note at Rolling Stone, also at Slate.

When we're back on Today Explained, we're gonna try and fix social media once and for all. No big deal. Support for Today Explained comes from select quote insurance services. Getting insurance coverage can be a headache, especially when insurance brokers offer impersonal one size fits all policies

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of experience, having helped over two million customers find over $700 billion in coverage since 1985. There are some figures for you. You can get the right term life insurance for you Today Explained is back, our friend Steffi is gone, but our friend David Pierce is here from The Verge, he's the editor at large there. An editor at large? D, thank you very much. Hell yeah.

David, social media is in a weird spot right now. You got like Nazi adjacent Twitter, you've got MetaMark and his Zuck Your Feelings era, you've got the TikTok mess, Supreme Court, this president, that president. Ugh. Let's take a step back from that whole scene and tell us, if you could sum up what is wrong with social media right now, what would it be?

I think if you made me boil it all the way down to one thing, I think it's that social media is not for you anymore. I don't know that it ever was, honestly, but this idea that these were networks full of people connecting with each other and that that was like a good thing for us and for the world. No, we're past that now. Social media is about engagement, it's about money, it's about monopolizing your attention, it's about somebody's agenda for what to do with that attention.

It's not about you having a good time, it's about you being there so that things can happen to you. And I think to some extent, that has always been a part of these networks, but as there has been more money and as these things have become more central to like how we live our lives, those incentives have gotten so intense and

so lucrative for these people that they've just broken the whole system. And it's easy to despair, but there is something of a possible solution out there and you've been advocating for it for some time now. Can you introduce it to our audience? The world can be better, Sean. It doesn't have to be terrible and horrific and full of people trying to sell you stuff on the TikTok shop. There is this thing called the Fediverse. -♪ Ooh! -♪ Say it again.

It's called the Fediverse. Ha-ha-ha! Why is it called that? Fediverse, F-E-D-I-V-E-R-S-E. It sounds like what the federal government would call its internal banking system. I like to think of it as a video game only for FBI agents. The Fediverse.

It is federated and universe, and it's a problem because nerds are bad at naming things. But the idea of it is very exciting. And the idea of it is to take social networks out of being these individual platforms where Instagram is its own thing and Facebook is its own thing and Twitter is its own thing and TikTok is its own thing and just smash all of those things together into something the size of the internet and make it work. Something very big.

It would be huge. And that's the thing that's so exciting is that instead of having a bunch of followers and posts and content that lives inside of a little box that some nefarious billionaire controls, you have something that is so much bigger than that, that is open and chaotic and that anyone can build tools for and anyone can participate in

and anyone can decide how they want to participate in it, it changes the whole dynamic and it's a complete shift in how we experience the internet now. But let me just give you one sort of concrete example. Think of the Fediverse as basically just a giant bucket of posts. They are a bunch of text or a video or an audio clip or an image bunch of text or a video or an audio clip or an image, and they come with who sent them and when. You, in a Fediverse world, can choose any app that you want to make those posts. I can read them any way that I want.

In a Fediverse world, you have Snapchat and you post something on Snapchat. I open up Instagram and I can see the thing that you posted on Snapchat. And if I comment on it or like it, it goes back to your Snapchat where that information lives. And you can be on Snapchat and I can be on Instagram and we can have that relationship. And that's just cool because it means that A, if you stop liking the app that you're using, leaving it doesn't mean losing all of your content

and losing all of your followers and losing everything that you've ever done there. You can pick that stuff up and move it somewhere else. And given what we've seen from these social networks, that's really important. There are a lot of people who make their living on these networks now. And then Elon Musk shows up and changes the algorithm

so that if you're not spewing right wing propaganda, there's no way to get reach on the platform, that hurts people's business. Or TikTok shows up and says, well, instead of doing dance challenges, if you're not selling stuff on the TikTok shop, we're gonna bury you in the feed. That just kills people's livelihoods.

And so being able to pick up and say, my followers, my content, my experience on this platform is now portable somewhere else, is powerful on its own. The other side of it is that what it does is it takes a social network and just sort of explodes it into a thousand pieces. So right now, if you sign up for Facebook, you're signing up for Facebook's app, you're signing up for Facebook's content moderation ideas, you're signing up for Facebook's photo compression experience, you're signing up for Facebook's executives and how they feel about advertising.

You could break those things into their component parts and essentially say, okay, I want to read posts in this app because I like the way that it looks, but I want this version of content moderation because I think that fits better with how I see the world and what I want my experience to be. You get to just build your experience of the internet sort of piece by piece, rather than having to sign up for someone's entire idea about how it should be. Do we have smaller scale Fetaverses out there already? I think the best example right now is probably an app called Mastodon, which,

uh, had its real moment in the sun right after Elon Musk bought and immediately started ruining Twitter. So right now, if you have a Mastodon account, you can follow any threads user, which means I could see your threads posts from my Mastodon app. Without even having threads. Correct. Your stuff is part of the Fediverse.

It's just in this giant bucket of content that I am able to read and respond to. That's pure Fediverse stuff, right? Like, that is the beauty of this system, is that I can be on threads and you can be on Mastodon, and we can hang out, and that's great. Is there an incentive beyond, like, idealism that could actually get us there? Because in this country, it seems like the incentives

usually work better when someone's getting paid. Yeah, we're not big there, because in this country it seems like the incentives usually work better when someone's getting paid. Yeah, we're not big on idealism in this country at this point. I would say the ruthlessly capitalistic take on this is that if we do this right, the opportunity becomes gigantic. And again, if you build something

that's not just the size of Instagram or the size of Twitter, but is the size of the internet, you can build all kinds of things on top of it. I mean, you can think of Google as just a tool on top of the internet. All Google does is search a bunch of web pages for you. That's a pretty good business, it turns out, because you can put ads on those search results

and then you have to go to court about how successful your business has been. If we do the Fediverse right, there are going to be lots of those things too. There will be lots of companies that get to build and charge for tools. There will be companies that get to charge for really cool algorithm ideas about how to sort things or really great apps for how you want to read or watch or listen to the things from there. The moment we're in right now feels like idealism because it's a bunch of happy developers coding against several trillion dollar companies.

But if we can make that turn, the opportunity gets really big and much wider for companies. I'm going to ask you a big question, David. Uh-oh. The Fediverse ultimately feels like a reminder to users of social media that they are actually the ones who have the power and the control. It's easy to feel like, oh, I hate this platform because of the guy who runs it, but I got nowhere to go because this is where I get all the stuff that I need or this is where my income is based or this is where I find out how to cook or take care of my child or make my face look pretty in the morning. But if we all did something as a group, we could have a lot more say. Is the Fetiverse ultimately just like a metaphor for our democracy?

Oh, wow. That is a big question. I think it is a little bit of a metaphor for our democracy. It's a question of who's in charge, right? And I think the story of the last two decades of the internet is that we gave away everything in exchange for convenience and cool features. And we picked the things that were easy to sign up for. We picked the things that made it easy to talk to our friends. We picked the things that shipped to us fastest and we didn't reckon with any of the consequences of that. And then I think really over the last decade,

the consequences of that started to become really obvious. And what the Fediverse promises is to give us some control. My information, my content, my followers, my network becomes mine again, and I get to choose what to do with it. The process of getting there, like democracy, messy and weird and full of mistakes, but it is the right goal. And before we get there, we have to rename it. Can I interest you in open social web, which is the other thing the nerds like to call it? Yeah, please. There we go. It's the people like the social web, which I think is fine. I just call it the internet. If we do this right, it's just the internet.

The internet. Now there's an idea. Someone call Al Gore. David Pierce, the editor at large at The Verge. Thank you very much. Our program today was produced by Travis Larchuk. We were edited by Jolie Myers mixed by Patrick Boyd and Rob Byers. But wait, there's so many more at Today Explained. Noelle Cold, Avishai Artsy, Amanda Llewellyn, Andrea Christensdottir, Hadi Mawagdi, Miles Bryan, Peter Ballinon-Rosen, Victoria Chamberlain, Amina Alsati, our executive producer Miranda Kennedy, and our senior researcher Laura Bullard, the only one of us who's on Red Note.

I recently posted a photograph of my woodworking shop with all my old refurbished hand tools. And within a matter of hours, I had hundreds of people in my comments and DMs about woodworking, American joinery, Chinese joinery, ancient Chinese architecture put together using said joinery with no nails. You know, like things tend to do on the internet,

I'm anticipating that this might go south at some point. But for now, I'm going to stay and hang out with my friends and talk about whittling.