Duolingo sees 216% spike in U.S. users learning Chinese amid TikTok ban and move to RedNote

TikTok U.S. users have been learning Chinese on Duolingo in increasing numbers amid their adoption of a Chinese social app called RedNote ahead of the TikTok ban. The U.S. law, scheduled to go into effect on January 19, unless halted by the Supreme Court, will see TikTok removed from U.S. app stores and will stop the app from functioning on users’ devices unless they install a VPN client.

Instead of trying to work around the ban, however, over 700 million TikTok users have shifted over to the social video platform RedNote (aka Xiaohongshu), prompting a surprising cultural exchange between the two countries’ citizens — not to mention quite a few requests for American users to help with Chinese users’ English homework.

Though some TikTok refugees have since struggled with technical problems when signing up for RedNote, and others immediately got booted for community violations, the intent of the move from one Chinese-owned app to another is meant to send a strong signal to the U.S. government and would-be TikTok competitors like Meta that there’s demand for the type of social networking experiences that China creates and U.S. companies have only managed to imitate.

The move is also serving as something of a pulse check as to whether or not U.S. users are worried about Chinese companies collecting their personal data for nefarious use — one of the key factors that led to TikTok’s ban in the first place. (As it turns out, many are not, as this migration shows.)

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