By banning TikTok, the United States may have handed China its greatest intelligence and cybersecurity victory in decades. This massive unforced error would be another cascading disaster for American intelligence agencies and opens Americans up to Chinese influence operations, the exact opposite of what U.S. lawmakers had in mind when they banned TikTok.
TikTok’s services in the U.S. were shut down around 10:35 p.m. ET on Jan. 19. On the day of his inauguration, President Trump instructed the attorney general not to enforce the ban. The panic caused by the shutdown is having real-world consequences. TikTok currently has more than 150 million users in the U.S., and fears of a potential ban have led to a search for an alternative. Nearly 3 million TikTok users have joined RedNote, the Chinese version of TikTok.
The desperation to find an alternative to TikTok isn’t just about entertainment. Around 7,000 Americans work directly for TikTok, and around 2 million American influencers rely on TikTok as their primary source of income, demonstrating significant economic clout.
RedNote, also known as Xiaohongshu or Little Red Book, has seemingly unlimited access to a significant amount of user data. This information includes location, browsing activity, device details, and potentially sensitive information depending on the content posted. While TikTok also collects this information, RedNote strictly adheres to China’s data-sharing laws and explicitly states so when signing up for a new account.
By banning TikTok, the United States has created a massive target by pushing millions of Americans directly to the Chinese platform.
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