TikTok, Xiaohongshu and Cultural Soft Power
We are living through one of these weird Internet Moments right now. Some of those are signals for a shift in culture, and I think this is one hinting at a shift of Internet soft power from the US towards the rest of the world.
Let’s unpack what is going on.
Please note: These are not well thought out predictions or even commentary. But these moments are somewhat hard to spot. Blink and you’ll miss them. As I want to get better at identifying these signals, I thought it would be interesting to share my thought process and why I think this is interesting. You can tell me in the comments why I’m right, wrong, or what I missed, so we can all get better at this sort of thing. Thank you!
TikTok
It all started when Chinese company ByteDance developed a cute little app called Douyin in 2016. Within a year it had 100 million users, with more than one billion videos viewed every day. A while later ByteDance planned to expand overseas, and they bought another cute little app called Musical.ly in 2018. Merging both apps created TikTok.
ByteDance was the still the parent company, operating in China, but TikTok kept the headquarter of Musical.ly in Singapore, now operating as TikTok Ltd., and eventually adding an office in Los Angeles.
Meanwhile, TikTok got really popular in the West, based on a mix of huge ad spendings (in 2016 TikTok ads were all over the Internet, especially on other social media sites), and it’s innovative algorithm that favoured interest over social connections. Bottom line, it quickly became a cultural phenomenon.
The US Government
President Trump didn’t like China. More importantly, he worried that the Chinese government would utilize the data collected from US citizens, or even worse, tune the famous TikTok algorithm to promote communist propaganda.
In 2020, president Trump signed two executive orders to restrict both TikTok and WeChat. After a long kerfuffle, Oracle purchased a 12.5 percent stake in TikTok in 2020. This created a new division of the company called TikTok Global and its US-based CEO was calling the shots. But, you know, it was still owned by a Chinese parent company.
So the US was still annoyed and there were hearings. It was weird. I mean, all congressional hearings are kinda weird, but this one was unhinged weird.
And since that got us nowhere the US courts eventually ruled that TikTok had to be completely split from its Chinese owner by January 19, 2025.
That is now.
Free Speech
In 2022, Elon Musk bought Twitter to turn it into a platform for free speech. Besides that being a bad idea operationally, it turned out that economical reality didn’t really matter. Musk did away with the brand, the content moderation, safety features, employees, and the revenue source. One result is that it’s now a platform filled with harassment, hate speech and bullies. A lot of people left. But the other result is that it somehow also got Elon Musk promoted into the White House. Sort of.
And now, Meta is following by “adjusting” its content review policies on Facebook and Instagram, getting rid of fact checkers and replacing them with user-generated “community notes.”
Predictably, users are not happy and many will leave. Let me rephrase: A specific archetype of user that doesn’t like shitposting, harassing, or being harassed, doesn’t like this change. Again, none of this is surprising. Really, really not.
Generations
When Twitter users looked for a new home, it was mainly older Internet generations looking for another platform that did more or less the same, hence going to Threads or Bluesky. With Facebook and Instagram, my guess is that it will be similar. This generation has a relatively set idea of what a social platforms are and what they look like.
But the demographics on TikTok is unique in that more than two-thirds of users are between 18 and 34 years old. It’s really the platform of the youth.
So here we are, the US Government is banning a social media platform that is operated out of the US and Singapore, but influenced by a Chinese parent company, while the US incumbent social media platforms do their best to mirror the weird and anti-social vibes of modern US politics. Where in the world would a young generation go?
Of course they are going to Xiaohongshu.
Little Red Book
Xiaohongshu, aka Little Red Book, aka RedNote, is a Chinese social media app somewhere between Instagram and Pinterest, mainly used for restaurant suggestions, shopping, fashion, makeup and lifestyle. You know, life. And yes, there is no international façade here, the app is in Chinese and content on it is also mainly in Chinese.
Within the span of last week, more than 700,000 US users have joined Xiaohongshu, along with the hashtag “TikTok refugee,” as the app took the top spot on the App Store and Play Store charts. These TikTok refugees are learning Mandarin, paying cat tax, meeting pen pals, and try to make a Chinese meme song trend on Spotify, because why not. Just people having a great time and maybe some hilarious misunderstandings.
But then, cultural soft power happens as “grocery haul” starts trending.
Cultural Soft Power
See, cultural soft power is an interesting thing. Since World War 2 the United States made sure to invest in their cultural exports, like the “American Dream”, Coca Cola, movies and mainstream media, Silicon Valley, and of course social media. American culture was managed as an aspirational brand to be cultivated. Because that is a huge driver of national pride and international reputation.
But that brand took a hit in the last decade(s) as American companies got greedy and politics got divisive (oversimplified). That’s bad for the US brand internationally, but still kind of fine as long as US citizens have no actual contact with other cultures.
And now we have a young generation that looks at Chinese citizens welcoming them with open arms, that can somehow make a good living, have healthcare, load up their cars with groceries and fresh produce for really not that much money, eating out for less than $1, and .. wait, what? WTF IS THIS?!
Simply put: A young and impressionable American generation gets their first direct and unfiltered look at how ordinary Chinese people spend their day, how they eat, how they work, how they culture. And they don’t like what they see. Or rather, they like it very much.
The solution is, well, panic, maybe?
Signals
As it is typical with Internet moments it’s all fun and memes until somebody starts an Arab Spring. So it’s always advisable not to take these things too seriously, but ignoring them is risky. Sure, some people are on RedNote now and will likely be gone tomorrow, but it tells us something about the current state of culture.
Interesting things happen if people from different cultures meet. And it looks like a young generation of US citizens has more interest in joining a foreign and non-Western culture platform than one of the local US platforms. That’s unheard of. And selling TikTok to a US company won’t really solve that.
It also shows that the Great Firewall has changed, or rather it’s maybe not the right term anymore for this evolved form of cultural-political instrument. I guess TikTok itself was a signal for the change from digital economic protectionism to digital soft power projection.
It also shows signs that new non-US social media platforms can exist at global scale and draw a US following. More interestingly, where TikTok had to spend an insane amount of ad money to get going, Xiaohongshu was an emergent phenomenon. Also, there was zero attachment to TikTok as a platform. This hints that social platforms have become commodities? If so, where did the relationship aspect go that previously made these platforms so sticky? Messaging apps?
I guess I was way too early with my prediction, but generally right. It just took a while. And I was wrong about who would do it.
I think many clever people in China, EU and Africa are looking into the opportunity to create new culture-shaping social platforms right now.
And as US politics is gearing up for a groundhog day the US social media platforms really, really want to repeat lessons from the 1980s and 1990s in terms of how to (not) manage an online community. That leaves an opening for a new flagship thing that defines US digital culture internally and abroad. I also bet many clever people in the US are thinking about that.
In the meantime, it’s nice to see the good old cheeky Internet again, in which teens and young adults roam around and have fun subverting expectations and use technology to create international mischief. You’re doing well, young ones.
