Why RedNote is a Bad Idea

[ResidentialBusiness]

As of this writing, the future of TikTok hangs in the balance, and swaths of “TikTok refugees” are popping over to RedNote. RedNote is China’s version of Instagram with around 300 million users.

This is a bad idea. I’ve been astounded at how cavalier people have been about it. I get a whiff of two distinct sentiments underlying this behavior:

1. A defeatism around being farmed for data, resulting in a “Who cares, what does it matter?” attitude.
2. A presumption that America—with its corporate oligarchs, big tech monopolies, and titanic military industrial complex—is just as bad as China, if not worse.

These points are simply not rooted in the real world. It does matter for us as individual and as Americans who has access to our data at scale. Those adopting RedNote as an “F-you” the U.S. government’s TikTok ban are cutting our country’s nose off to spite its face.

I know, I know

Big Tech is predatory

I’ll be the first one to call out the predatory nature of Big Tech. Twitter/X selling user data to surveillance firms and law enforcement with zero oversight. Facebook manipulating users through their news feeds on top of the Cambridge Analytica scandal. YouTube becoming a pipeline for radicalizing young men. Instagram damaging the mental health of children, particularly girls.

The buying, selling, and manipulation of our data and our minds has become so commonplace that it’s nihilistically accepted as a fact of life.

Big Tech is almost always backed by Big Finance. ByteDance, which owns TikTok, is backed by Sequoia Capital China, General Atlantic, SoftBank, Morgan Stanley, and Goldman Sachs, among others. RedNote itself enjoys backing from American-founded VCs like GSR Ventures, who, along with GGV Capital, Sequoia Capital, and Walden International, among others, have invested more than $3 billion in Chinese technology companies linked to the country’s military, surveillance, and human rights abuses.

Are we “cooked,” as the kids say? Maybe, but that’s no reason to turn up the temperature on ourselves.

The frying pan is better than the fire.

Care about yourself

Unlike TikTok, which stores American user data on U.S. servers owned by Oracle, RedNote would collect your data and send it straight to China.

Why should you care your data is being harvested, and where it’s going? Firstly, this data can be used against you in phishing attempts and identity theft, ordeals that can impact you for decades. While criminals are doing the phishing and identity-thieving in the U.S., I’d bet it’s being performed by more sophisticated, capable attackers in China. Your online content could be used to create deepfakes that fool other victims.

Secondly, you’ve probably heard some version of “TikTok is a psyop.” I don’t believe this is overblown. The Chinese version of TikTok restricts content under a certain age to educational, scientific, artistic, and otherwise more enriching content. It also limits how long minors under age 14 can use it—40 minutes each day, only between 6 a.m. and 10 p.m.

We are getting a more toxic version of TikTok. You may have at least a vague notion of how social media is diminishing your attention span, distracting you from meaningful relationships, or warping your worldview. This is intentional as part of TikTok’s cognitive warfare efforts.

Thirdly, there is value in being able to perceive the world for what it actually is. China is notorious for censorship, and I’m quite curious to see how Chinese RedNote users respond to content involving, say, Tiananmen Square or China’s arbitrary detaining of Uyghur Muslims.

If China will censor and manipulate its own people to this degree, imagine what they’ll do to you.

Care about the nation

There’s a lot of “f— America” going around these days, and I guess I get it. We live in a country united only by the vigilante slaying of a healthcare CEO. Trump, Palestine, school shootings, childcare costs, recession, Big Oil, military contractors, microplastics —we didn’t start the fi-yer!

We have to remember that our country is not any of these things. This country is We The People. The everyday folks grinding it out day after day. We’re getting up in the morning and going to work. Raising our kids. Paying bills. Finding small ways to enjoy life and not let it drive us insane.

Sometimes voting feels like pissing in the wind, but even though the lobbyists and corporations have huge sway over our government, our government is accountable to us. We can openly shout them down and vote them out. The administrators of our government are still subject to the law, unlike members of the CCP.

At the end of the day, we’re all in this big American boat. Whether you’re proud to be here (like I am) or not, this is your boat.

Jumping ship to RedNote would only exacerbate the schisms and grievances we’re all so tired of already. Because that’s what the Chinese government wants. They don’t have to have a precise aim, only to make us more confused and fractured.

Don’t fool yourself about China

RedNote’s Chinese name, Xiaohongshu, more directly translates to “little red book.” This name refers to Chinese dictator Mao Zedong’s Little Red Book, which contains over 260 political aphorisms like “political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” Styled after philosophical texts like those from Sun Tzu and Confucius, Little Red Book was key to building a cult of personality around Mao and enacting his “Cultural Revolution.” His ministry of culture mandated every Chinese citizen own a copy and carry it with them.

Mao would have loved RedNote, and TikTok, to be fair. It’s safe to say that RedNote’s name is more than a wink and a nod to the dictator, the personage of state power manifest.

While many fresh American users are loving getting to know regular Chinese people, it isn’t these people who are the threat. It’s the fact that the Chinese government can use whatever data it wants for whatever purposes it wants. That’s just how their regime is set up.

Most of what we complain about here in America, China is doing to a much greater degree, from the forced labor and even sterilization of Uyghurs to arresting monks in Tibet for their religious beliefs to silencing whistleblowers and journalists to harassing Taiwan with its military.

That regime has been busy in regards to the U.S. over the past several years. They’ve infiltrated networks within America’s telecommunications, energy, water, and other infrastructure sectors. They’ve stolen our military technology. They’ve hacked U.S. government departments and targeted U.S. citizens who have been critical of China

China is a clear and present danger. They aren’t playing nice, and we shouldn’t play into their hands. No matter how much it might entertain us.

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