Will RedNote get banned within the US?

I’m not the primary to notice the irony of TikTok customers flooding RedNote this week. The TikTok divest-or-ban rule was speculated to drive People away from a foreign-owned social community that was topic to affect or information harvesting by the Chinese language authorities. As an alternative, it pushed them onto a distinct foreign-owned social community that poses the very same hypothetical dangers — and that could be topic to the very same form of ban.

TikTok faces a ban beneath the Defending People from Overseas Adversary Managed Functions Act, which handed with overwhelming bipartisan assist and was signed final 12 months by President Joe Biden (who’s reportedly experiencing some purchaser’s regret proper now). Whereas it mentions TikTok and its father or mother firm, ByteDance, by identify, it might apply to any firm that meets the next standards:

• It operates an internet site or app with greater than 1 million month-to-month customers and lets these customers make accounts to create and share content material.
• It isn’t a service that primarily lets customers “submit product critiques, enterprise critiques, or journey data and critiques.”
• It’s managed by a international adversary, a definition that covers North Korea, China, Russia, and Iran. “Management” can imply the corporate is headquartered there, a resident of that nation holds not less than a 20 % stake in it, or it’s in any other case “topic to the course or management” of somebody dwelling there.

RedNote reportedly had greater than 300 million month-to-month energetic customers as of 2023, plus a reported 3 million extra US customers who just lately moved over. It’s headquartered in Shanghai, China. It affords a service similar to TikTok.

If an organization meets the authorized standards, the buck passes to the president, who can resolve whether or not to provoke a divest-or-ban process. This requires a collection of steps:

• The president should publicly suggest a willpower that the corporate’s app presents a “vital risk” to US nationwide safety.
• The president should concern a public report back to Congress, laying out the “particular nationwide safety concern concerned and containing a categorised annex,” plus an outline of what property the father or mother firm would want to divest. (Congress doesn’t have to approve this — it simply has to obtain it.)
• The president makes an official willpower not less than 30 days after notifying Congress, and the corporate has 270 days to make a divestiture that satisfies the president’s necessities. Inside the first 90 days, the app’s father or mother firm can problem the regulation within the DC Circuit Court docket of Appeals, like TikTok did.
• If it fails to get a court docket to cease it, the corporate would want to make a “certified divestiture” or face a ban within the US. The 270-day clock retains ticking except a court docket pauses it, and the president can solely lengthen the deadline as much as one other 90 days.
• The app can keep away from a ban if it’s divested from the international adversary’s management. The president should decide, with the assistance of an “interagency course of,” that the sale would outcome within the app now not being managed by a international adversary and that it prevents any form of future operational relationship, like a data-sharing settlement.
• If this doesn’t occur, the regulation forces app retailer operators and web internet hosting providers to stop supporting the app, leading to its efficient shutdown within the US.

The regulation mentions TikTok by identify as a nationwide safety risk, in order that platform is mainly cooked — the divest-or-ban deadline was set in movement as soon as the regulation was signed, bypassing a lot of the method above. The regulation says any subsidiary of ByteDance can also be lined by the regulation, so whereas the corporate and US authorities have not but commented on apps like its social community Lemon8, they’ll seemingly face scrutiny, too. However the president has considerably extra leeway in deciding the destiny of different apps.

The place does RedNote stand, then?

RedNote, so far as publicly out there data signifies, could possibly be pressured to divest or face a ban beneath the Defending People from Overseas Adversary Managed Functions Act. A US official has confirmed that, saying it “seems to be the form of app that the statute would apply to.”

However pragmatically, that is the place we exit the realm of coverage and enter the world of politics. The query isn’t actually how RedNote operates; it’s whether or not RedNote makes President-elect Donald Trump or the Silicon Valley oligarchy mad.

TikTok does pose potential safety dangers, however the strain to ban it was about much more than that. Meta was behind a public marketing campaign calling for scrutiny of TikTok — considered one of its chief rivals — and its ties to China. Members of Congress complained that TikTok was serving an excessive amount of pro-Palestinian content material; there’s no identified proof China was behind this alleged imbalance, so presenting it as a nationwide safety risk appears to be like pretty suspect. Now, conversely, Trump is searching for methods to save TikTok as a result of he thinks it helped his election marketing campaign.

Based mostly on all of this, let’s extrapolate a path for RedNote. Proper now, its American consumer base seems comparatively minuscule; it’s not clear what number of US customers it had earlier than the previous week, however Reuters reviews that it gained about 3 million US customers in in the future this week, in comparison with about 170 million month-to-month US TikTok customers as of final 12 months. The dangers Congress noticed in TikTok — mass information harvesting, covert propaganda — seem to have an effect on a much smaller variety of individuals. The dangers which will truly resolve its destiny are a bit extra sophisticated.

Will RedNote keep a momentum that threatens the egos or companies of MAGA-approved billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk? Will it produce political activism that antagonizes Trump (or a future president)? Will rising US hostility towards China’s authorities manifest in a broad crackdown on Chinese language apps? All these items, whereas troublesome to foretell, wouldn’t bode effectively.

For now, although, have enjoyable studying Mandarin.