praxis

Lilian Kong and Shiqi Lin, “Hello My Chinese Spy, Take My Data”: Welcome to the Playground of the Digital Cold War

On January 12, 2025, just days before the short video platform TikTok was pressured to shut down in the U.S., a sensational “migration” began. Millions of American internet users flocked to the Chinese-language social media app RedNote (Xiaohongshu 小红书) in protest against their own government and existing American tech hegemons such as X and Meta.[1]  Half-jokingly, they called themselves “TikTok refugees.” As TikTok was criticized by the U.S. administration for allowing the Chinese government to spy on Americans and steal data, a number of TikTok refugees sardonically turned this into a meme. They waved hi to their new friends on RedNote: “Hello my Chinese spy! Take my data, take my data!”

With the backdrop of China-U.S. rifts and a looming new Cold War, what ensued from this mass digital migration was an unexpected outburst of joy, laughter, and awe. Direct dialogue broke out between American and Chinese digital media users and attracted users from across the world to join their carnival on RedNote. The influx of TikTok refugees dramatically disrupted the algorithms of RedNote and threw all users into a chaotic intercultural, bilingual environment:[2]  English content mushroomed across Chinese-language users’ screens and exposed them to scenes as random as fishing in the Dakotas and farming in Missouri, while non-Chinese users often encountered content of Chinese food and started a viral trend of cooking Chinese steamed eggs following an algorithm-guided recipe. Up until January 19, there was no feature of auto-translation embedded in the app, meaning that Chinese- and English-language speakers often had to take on the manual labor of Google Translating every comment in order to communicate with each other. Whether they speak Chinese or English, the majority of these users had never visited each other’s countries. This unlikely moment of exchange sent waves of shock to them as they came to learn about each other’s life without intermediaries such as politicians or media spokespersons. Oftentimes amassing thousands of replies over one post, they responded to each other with “cat taxes,”memesflirty jokes, and love notes. They started to compare each other’s work hours, salaries, rents, and insurance, until they realized that they were the same ordinary people carrying the heavy burden of life in different ends of the world. 

Fig. 1: A popular meme on RedNote in response to the arrival of TikTok Refugees.

Across hours of time difference, RedNote was transformed into a playground of memes, flirtations, and deep hangouts, against the apocalyptic ambience of the political crises of our time. People were addicted to this intercultural hodgepodge, so much so that many of them stayed up till 3 or 4am in order to chat with each other and follow each other’s daily life globally. Just as one user from the U.S. posted, “Wake up, my Chinese friends, it’s lonely here while you sleep.” A user from Shanghai responded, “I woke up, my friend. I’ve been staying up late for three consecutive days using this app, hahaha.” Another user from Sichuan replied, “Good morning my friend, I have already got up and am preparing to have breakfast. If possible, I would share my breakfast with you.” It is no wonder how such an interface/interphase of communicative upheaval and algorithmic mess has prompted an American user to ask, with over 9700 likes and 2100 replies: “Is it just me, or does it feel like we’re dating China right now?”

As bilingual media studies scholars, long-time users of RedNote, and members of the Chinese diaspora based in the U.S., we think and write together in this ephemeral moment when the ecologies of both TikTok and RedNote are transforming by the day. We argue that the intercultural encounters on RedNote may be fleeting, but they are not a fad. Those playful and even erotic exchanges forge a conceptual switchpoint for us to unpack the deeply structural confluence of technology, geopolitics, and trans-border agency in our contemporary global social history. Such a lively mode of play also guides our writing as a method of thinking along with social media. If the TikTok ban and U.S.-China rivalry signify the surge of a so-called “digital Cold War,” what we archive in this piece are some alternative, transgressive moments beyond the rigid lines of macro geopolitics. As these horizons of a “global village” re-enter our realm of imagination, this essay critically reflects on the techno-political architectures of digital platforms and the structures of feeling of our time. Most importantly, we invite you to come think and frolic with us within this memefied playground.

Come on in.

From Architectures of Control to Architectures of Communication

We learn from cultural theorist Eyal Weizman’s work (2007) that state power builds architectures of control by exerting its dominance over spatial infrastructures, such as walls, roads, tunnels, water access, and the airspace. The digital world we are inhabiting today is likewise not a free space but an extension of architectural power. The geo-blocking system of the Chinese internet, i.e. the (in)famous Great Firewall of China, provides a historical and vivid illustration of how the architectures of control work in the digital realm (we trust that you don’t need more examples from us to add to the clichés here). We also want to make clear that such a question of infrastructural control and power imbalance is not simply a matter of region or regime, but rooted in the history and present of global digital media. As scholars of Black feminist media studies such as Simone Browne (2015), Ruha Benjamin (2019) and Safiya Umoja Noble (2018) remind us, mechanisms of surveillance, discrimination, and filtering have been encoded in the everyday design of digital technology even in web interfaces that appear open and democratic. Configurations as inconspicuous as regulating one’s methods of creating a social media account or shifting the rule of algorithmic recommendations may not only alter one’s internet experience, but also dictate what kind of data gets produced and how digital environments get segregated by identity, by language, by platform. If each social media platform has developed its own user ecology and digital vernaculars,[3]  here we probe into the architectural setups of RedNote to unravel the ironic twists and turns associated with the outburst of intercultural carnival in this app. We demonstrate how, at this moment, techno-political architectures designed to segregate and control people are paradoxically retooled into architectures of communication.

As the common explanation goes, TikTok refugees chose RedNote because they specifically wanted to pick a Chinese app to mock current U.S. policy decisions, and RedNote was the only one that allowed for registration without Chinese IDs or phone numbers. As a mix of TikTok, Instagram, Yelp, Pinterest, and Amazon, RedNote is known as a lifestyle app for food, travel, beauty, and fashion. It thus felt like a politically “safe” option for Americans.

The backstory, though, is much juicier. The Chinese name of RedNote, which literally means “Little Red Book,” insinuates Quotations from Chairman Mao (1964) in the age of Cultural Revolution and global Maoism. In reality, this app couldn’t be more different from the Maoist quotation book. Known for its consumerist, peer-sharing functions, the app is subject to strong censorship of political content but fairly lax with most other topics. Similar to TikTok, this is an app guided by big data and algorithms: the more you click onto certain posts, the more the app reads your desire and feeds you the same category of posts.

Moreover, in contrast to Web 2.0 social media such as Facebook and WeChat that focus on your acquaintances, RedNote, revealing the viral logic of AI-based social media platforms, puts you in contact with strangers: when you enter this app, the default page is structured less around people you follow than around algorithm-guided feeds tailored to your interests. Because of this emphasis on randomized algorithmic encounters, the app cultivates a sense of decentered community and pseudo-anonymity. Users trust that algorithms will connect them with strangers with similar interests, while they are less likely to encounter their real-world connections in this app than elsewhere. This architectural focus on decentered anonymity has made RedNote remote from contemporary political events up until the dramatic influx of TikTok refugees, but it is precisely this non-politicized culture of the platform that allowed for alternative, low-stake dialogue when TikTok users arrived from a hyper-polarized and hyper-anxious climate at the dawn of Donald Trump’s second presidency.

Fig. 2: “Long live Chairman Mao! Long, long live!” 1970 poster of people holding copies of the Little Red Book and celebrating Chairman Mao. Photo by The Mao Era in Objects.

Beyond its seemingly nonpolitical nature, RedNote is in fact transgressive in its own terms: among Chinese digital media users, it has an underground reputation for being one of the most queer and erotic social media platforms in the Chinese-speaking world. This introduces its moniker among some of its users: Little Yellow Book (小黄书). As “yellow” means “pornographic” in Chinese, Little Yellow Book refers to the extent to which the algorithm of RedNote may respond to users’ inner desires and take them to highly sexualized content in all types of sexualities. Let us recall: randomized algorithms as a measure of control have created a decentralized and depoliticized environment of anonymity, but this structure of anonymity is exactly what gives space to the incubation of sexualized desires on the app. Anonymity has encouraged a number of people to use RedNote like a tree hole, into which they share their intimate life experiences and seek resonance with strangers on a range of topics such as dating, cheating, and the exploration of sexuality. Meanwhile, since lexicons such as “LGBTQ+” are censored in RedNote, one has to know the specific codes, memes, and vernaculars specific to this app in order to enter its world of homoerotic communities. It is a form of “digital masquerade,” but also an art of infrapolitics of dancing between the lines. Beneath the Maoist revolutionary cover of the consumerist app Little Red Book, who knew that there would be a whole differently-colored world?

Perhaps, in the light of these algorithmic architectures of tree holes, the steamy intercultural affairs on RedNote this month are not coincidental at all. The ambient but elusive homo/erotic energy of this app mirrors perfectly the multiple threads of desires, affects, and social imaginations at this uncertain moment of U.S.-China relations.

There is one more point to make about the irony played out around the architectural setup of RedNote: like any other Chinese social media app, RedNote has been required by the Cyberspace Administration of China to display users’ locations based on their internet protocol (IP) addresses since April 2022. Amidst zero-COVID lockdowns and the Russia-Ukraine War, the design of this policy was clearly about information control. For IP addresses within China, the users’ provinces will be shown when they post something, while for IP addresses outside China, the users’ countries will be shown. On other Chinese social media platforms like WeChat and Weibo, where discussions of current politics were more visible, such an architecture of control often led to harsh measures of control and censorship over politically sensitive content. However, since long-time RedNote users have been accustomed to its non-politicized culture, the same architecture of geo-tracking has paradoxically raised people’s awareness of cultural difference and facilitated transregional conversations before the arrival of TikTok refugees.

For example, after IP addresses were mandatorily revealed, people from Taiwan, Malaysia, Singapore, and other parts of Southeast Asia as well as overseas Chinese diasporas and international students in Europe, North America, and Oceania emerged as sizable populations on RedNote. From time to time, conversations broke out between Taiwanese and PRC users to ask about each other’s lives and demystify stereotypes across the Strait. By 2024, precisely because the app can geo-track and generate strong algorithms, a trend has taken off among Chinese-speaking businesses in Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia to open accounts on RedNote and attract post-COVID tourists. To some extent, by the time of the TikTok ban, RedNote had already grown into a dynamic platform for border-crossing conversations in the global Chinese world. What’s new in regards to the arrival of TikTok refugees, then, is the introduction of a multilingual environment into the app and the foregrounding of translation as both a physical process of communication and a conceptual question of how ready we are to imagine our cohabitation with distant Others in this age of growing political divides.

Letters to Li Hua

As intercultural chats took off on RedNote, one person’s name came up time and again. English-speakers kept getting emotional replies from their new Chinese besties: “Li Hua finally got a letter back!” 

Who on earth is Li Hua?

The story circulated: Li Hua 李华 is a fictional character who haunted a generation of Chinese schoolkids in the last essay prompt of their English exams, from primary school all the way to high school. Every kid was asked to write short letters to an imaginary English-speaking penpal on behalf of “Li Hua.” Li Hua would be busy with a variety of tasks such as inviting the penpal to visit China, introducing amazing Chinese culture, and arranging plans to celebrate Lunar New Year together. First appearing in the Chinese exam system back in 1995, Li Hua symbolizes not only so many grownups’ childhood nightmares of getting tested on a foreign language, but also their nostalgic memories of 1990s and early 2000s China associated with a lax Internet environment, the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics, and an infinite curiosity about the world. In their exams, all kids ended their letters with “I look forward to hearing from you,” even though in reality they never heard back from Li Hua’s foreign penpal.

The influx of TikTok refugees into RedNote brought the buried memories of Li Hua back to life. The visceral interactions across language barriers and geo-technological divides not only gave Chinese users an uncanny sense that they were reconnected with their lost penpals, but also prompted global users to learn about the story of Li Hua for the first time. Sometimes shocked, sometimes tearful, English-speakers wrote back letters of thanks to Li Hua on RedNote, one after another. The majority of these letter writers were TikTok refugees from America. For them, the story of a distant character who tried to communicate with them for years hit hard in a moment when they perceived from the threat of the TikTok ban so much antagonism in their home country and displacement of their own digital habitats. As for Chinese users, since they had never expected to hear back from their imagined penpals, they responded to these boomerang letters equally with shock, tears, and gratitude. In the context of an increasingly restricted media environment and the looming new Cold War, they were grateful that these letter writers reached out to them from the other side. To them, this moment of “unwalling” was even analogous to breaking through the Berlin Wall. As one Chinese user posts, “The Berlin Wall cracked, and the letters from Li Hua were finally answered.”

Fig. 3: A widely circulated screenshot on RedNote in the height of the utopic Li Hua moment from January 16 to January 19, 2025.

The significance of such an emotional moment lies in the way in which it circles multiple layers of media and social history back to the present. Like the delayed letter responses to Li Hua, history is a boomerang that constantly re-cites and recycles elements of the past to strike back and interconnect with the affective present. If Francis Fukuyama’s linear vision that history ended in 1989 with the decline of the Socialist bloc can’t be more problematic, what we are learning from the letters to Li Hua is that history, with its fissures and apparitions, keeps coming back to us in new forms and situations. For example, on RedNote, what came along with the Li Hua phenomenon is a revived, positive feeling of creating a “global village,” a sentiment that used to be popular in China with the spread of the Internet at the turn of the millennium. However, the very idea of the “global village,” originating from Marshall McLuhan’s theorization (1964) in Cold War Canada, carries traces of the deep entanglements between paranoia and utopic yearnings in the geopolitically-charged history of the Internet. As we transition into our current world of panoptical algorithms and segregated platforms, visions of the global village strike back as counter-imaginations against the “new Cold War.” From McLuhan’s imaginary of an interconnected world altered by media communications to the millennial dream of the Internet, from the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall to contemporary crossings of the Great Firewall, we see histories syncopate, rhyme, boomerang, and produce utopian resonances across ideological divides.

Ugly Feelings in the Global Village

RedNote’s transformation into a utopian “global village” can be seen as a moment of what Arjun Appadurai (1996) might call “disjuncture.” Media, ideologies, and technological infrastructures shift in relation to each other like tectonic plates, rumbling open cross-platform digital flows that in turn transform the feel of algorithmic architectures. These transregional digital flows appear to have momentarily subdued, sometimes outright cancelled, instantiations of hatred and fear that have so often been mobilized by Cold War politics. Despite the euphoric embrace of open dialogue and mutual enchantment as opposed to antagonistic paranoia, however, different kinds of negative emotions linger. What makes these emotions noteworthy is that they do not directly adhere to Cold War geopolitics. Instead, they are best described as ambivalently dysphoric, stemming from long-time RedNote users (mostly overseas, diasporic, or native Chinese) who struggle to make sense of this month’s mass exodus. This struggle often manifests as small, at times hardly justifiable feelings of unease during an otherwise joyous occasion of cultural exchange. To take these feelings seriously is to think through the tensions inherent within this moment of tectonic disjuncture, which, as Appadurai reminds us, always simultaneously condition new global convergences and divergences.

First, where do we locate such feelings? We can begin by exploring the negative sentiments that lurk within a specific brand of humor. On TikTok and RedNote, a small wave of videos has echoed the same set of phrases, recited almost verbatim: “Finally after so many years of being yelled ‘go back to China’ and ‘go back to your country,’ we’ve got a shot. So now, go back to America and go back to your country!” A pause ensues before the creators relax their poker face into a chuckle. “Ok, just kidding. Welcome, TikTok refugees.”

“Go back to America” is a grating sound bite that exposes an entire tangle of affects. Namely, gnarly racial and colonial resentments overflow the parameters of fully memefied Cold War metaphors. One commenter from the U.S. writes under a video, “I feel like you were not kidding,” and someone else responds, “he wasn’t.” Just as tension surfaces, it is crucially tamed by a Toy Story penguin meme and a string of laughing-tears emojis posted by the commenters. Indeed, in most contexts, this kind of resentment never fully crystallizes into anger. Instead, it dissipates into the grey territory of a “wisecrack,” or an intimately mocking joke, an insult that bears no malice. Wisecracks, in these cases, open up a liminal space for ambivalent affects to reside, helping us cope with the less articulable and absurd injustices that we encounter in daily life.

Fig. 4: Emoji- and meme-laden comments below a “Go back to America” wisecrack video on RedNote.

Of course, coping mechanisms of humor sometimes just won’t cut it. For example, as some Chinese RedNote users witness non-Chinese refugees obtain hundreds upon thousands of views over what’s simply a self-introduction or silly meme, jealousy mixes with an all-too-familiar feeling of unfairness and inequality. Those RedNote users wonder aloud: why is it that non-Chinese users can so easily obtain the “passcode to virality” (流量密码) on a Chinese platform, when the reverse has been painstakingly difficult? Go back to America!

It is within this interplay of hostility, confusion, warm welcome, and good-natured humor that we can locate the manifestation of ugly feelings, that frictional malaise that hovers between contrasting emotional tendencies across online and offline spaces. Interspersed with the joyous, flirtatious moments of cross-platform encounter, these instances of dysphoric ambivalence complicate our understanding of the “digital Cold War” as more than a simple binary of total connection versus total antagonism. Instead, we experience the uneasy fusion of the somber and comical, the insulting and endearing. As Sianne Ngai (2007) has argued, contemporary socio-political conditions have

“[called] upon a new set of feelings – ones less powerful than the classical political passions, though perhaps more suited, in their ambient, Bartlebyan, but still diagnostic nature, for models of subjectivity, collectivity, and agency not entirely foreseen by past theorists of the commonwealth” (5).

In this framework, the “digital Cold War” goes beyond macro-political abstractions or the micro-political singularities of everyday emotions. Instead, this moment of our global history gives rise to emergent structures of feeling that traverse various levels of social organization, from ambient affects to collective political drives, from wisecrack emojis to platform infrastructures.

Architectures of Home

Ugly feelings hold together various techno-social orientations and assemblages on online platforms. These feelings in turn reveal how such algorithmic platforms are not just black-boxed technical systems, but rather lived-in spaces.

Consider another moment where dysphoric ambivalence creeps into the flood of mass migration onto RedNote. In a TikTok video, @alibihu laments the drastic change of her RedNote feed. Before, it was filled with feminine influencers offering soothing, aesthetic vlog videos and makeup tutorials, reminding us of RedNote’s primarily female-identifying, middle-upper class user base prior to mid-January. Then, she shows us her recent feed, saturated with a very different assortment of TikTok users, many of whom hastily say a quick hi to RedNote. @alibihu’s lamentation might come across as a selfish, petty desire to hold onto her materialistic, girly corner of the internet. And yet, similar feelings permeate across other videos, especially weaving into “tutorial” videos that want to teach TikTok refugees how to thrive on RedNote. These tutorials belabor the point that RedNote is not TikTok. One user even starts the video by snapping their fingers at us: “Pay attention! […] All the content on this app is very ‘high quality.’”

Fig. 5: @alibihu displays her RedNote feed before (left) and after (right) the TikTok refugee takeover.

The real issue is not whether RedNote actually offers superior—or even fundamentally different—content compared to TikTok. What matters is that, with the influx of TikTok users, there emerges a sudden awareness of, and subsequent contestations over, the stakes of inhabiting the murky, ever-shifting, but also palpably shared terrain of platform specificity. Tutorials become places where long-time users also re-familiarize themselves with RedNote’s demographics and its quirky mix of various platform interfaces. One influencer emphasizes in such a “tutorial” that RedNote users may feel a bit uncertain about the refugee situation because “newcomers don’t even know what Xiaohongshu is to us.” Indeed, the mid-January migration has led these users to rethink their connection to a platform that they may have once used with less examination.

As their digital space rapidly transforms, newfound feelings of attachment and belonging arise. These users become sensitive to the “platformative” subjectivities that they have co-formed with RedNote’s algorithm, subjectivities that stretch across platform, user, and the “screen life” of their feeds. Indeed, the platform has co-curated with them a heterogeneous amalgamation of content. As a viral TikTok phrase goes, users have “built” their personal feeds “brick by brick.” No longer exclusively perceived through frameworks of control, algorithms condition fragile and varied architectures of home. These processes of homing have never been insular or stable, but are nonetheless subject to permutations when the equally heterogeneous algorithmic architectures of another social media platform suddenly knock on the door, uninvited yet all too eager to play around.

We began this essay with a collage of cat memes and flirty notes. Now, prompted by a loose archive of ugly feelings, we close with a reflection on moments of tearful excess sprinkled across this digital migration movement. To be fair, most crying videos celebrate the nature of heartfelt exchange, whether through the Letters to Lihua trend or confirmations of transregional bonds following TikTok’s service restoration on January 19. Yet, amidst these joyful tears, one video stands out. Originally posted on January 15 on TikTok by @abbysijing, later deleted and reposted elsewhere, this video attests to the ambivalent affects that weigh on diasporic subjects in particular. For, in times like these, diasporic users are not only tasked with sharing information and providing cultural translations across the two media platforms. Many also desperately hold on to a previous version of RedNote that very much served as their lifeline to the Chinese-speaking world, to a specific feeling of home, even as the RedNote algorithm curates its own iteration of what “home” is for each user. The dysphoria experienced by these subjects amidst RedNote’s ongoing transformation thus exerts unique pressure on the disjunctures that are shaping the current moment of our “global village.”

@abbysijing opens her video by sharing a piece of speculative information to her primarily U.S. based audience: RedNote may be rolling out an update in Greater China to separate out foreign IPs, with discussions underway to migrate foreign users to another server.[4]  Although we already see that her face is red from crying, she rolls her eyes, signaling that she knows that the situation is not horribly dire, and that there will be easy ways to override this move of separation. She thus senses a lame excessiveness of her feelings. Yet, as she continues, tears still pool. “This is gonna kill the app for Chinese Americans who actually use it to connect with Chinese content […] it’s a way for me to feel—”  @abbysijing chokes on her tears and leaves the sentence unfinished. Indeed, the peak of ugly feelings may as well be the ugly cry, especially when tears feel so intense that they jam any attempts at appropriate, rational speech.

Fig. 6: Snippets from @slainangel’s repost of @abbysijing’s video on TikTok.

As we have previously detailed, RedNote attracts a sizable diasporic userbase. What has for many felt like an unprecedented moment of mass digital exodus, then, is for others an iteration woven into rather familiar patterns of physical migration and dwelling in-between various online and offline spaces. These entangled patterns are not unique just to the app. Rather, digital migration has been a reality for diasporic populations especially in the age of electronic media. For decades, overseas and diasporic Chinese have had to jump through various hoops in order to tele-port to the Mainland Chinese media scene, whether it be through purchasing Great Wall satellite TV packages or tinkering with VPNs to override more recent geo-blocking measures for apps such as iQiyi, Douyin, and QQ Music.

Within such media historical contexts, @abbysijing’s tears encapsulate the layered crises of suspended agency. For one, the potential RedNote server split remains a speculation, as both users and state/commercial actors continuously navigate constant policy changes, propaganda battles, and cross-platform politics. This state of indetermination reveals trans-border Chinese digital media as a liquid environment where plural, fluid forces, in the words of Zigmunt Bauman (1999), are able to “pass around some obstacles, dissolve others, and bore or soak their way through others still.” Yet, even more crucially, the emotional outpour of @abbysijing is a testament to the toll of obstructed diasporic agency in a time of both algorithmic governance and transgressive play. @abbysijing’s tears illustrate how invested users can be in the digital spaces they have built “brick-by-brick,” an investment all the more complicated and intense for those whose senses of belonging are already located in-between physical territories and virtual spaces of media, intermeshed with processes of departure and migration. With the influx of TikTok refugee content, what becomes of the digital feeds that diasporic RedNote users have meticulously constructed? How might the recent disturbances to their curated algorithms transform how they relate to and imagine “home”? 

Indeed, the ugly feelings we sketch out ultimately compel serious consideration of what it means to inhabit algorithmic platforms and to conceptualize them as multi-layered spaces of homing, which at once has everything and nothing to do with corresponding national territories and digital infrastructures of control. As we learn from the fleeting situations of this trans-continental platform migration, to truly home the algorithm is to dwell in its ambivalent mechanisms of displacement and re-anchoring and to nonetheless hold onto the affective power of belonging. Our vision of home and digital co-existence is to be continuously contested and redefined, always in the making.

 

Lilian Kong is a PhD Candidate in Cinema & Media Studies and East Asian Languages & Civilizations at the University of Chicago.

Shiqi Lin is a Klarman Postdoctoral Fellow in Asian Studies at Cornell University.

Notes

[1] For example, when responding to Chinese users’ awe for this influx of TikTok refugees, one American user wrote on RedNote and won over 4700 likes and 170 replies within hours on January 14: “The government is trying to say that China is taking our data and that’s why TikTok is getting banned. Americans are trying to say ‘We trust China with our data more than we trust the USA with our data’ and we picked this because we wanted to directly give China our data. 🙂 hope this helps!”

[2] A few days after the arrival of TikTok refugees, people from across the world, such as Russians, Italians, Iraqis, and Colombians, also swarmed to RedNote out of curiosity and diversified the language environment of the app. By the time when we are writing this article, Chinese and English remain as the two most visible languages in the app. 

[3] For example, when welcoming TikTok refugees, long-time users of RedNote produced various guides translating equivalent vernacularsbetween English-speaking and Chinese-speaking social media platforms.

[4] Her statement fueled most English-language speculation across online articles and forum threads about the future of RedNote’s IP servers. In other words, the ugly feelings of a diasporic RedNote user quickly informed a non-Chinese population of potential platform-level decisions that would affect all users.

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