Rednote, the Chinese app that got its fifteen minutes of fame during the “TikTok refugee” trend last year, has ambitions to become a global social media giant. As it expands, the company is increasingly taking steps to separate its Chinese and international user bases, WIRED has found.

Rednote recently launched Rednote.com, a new web domain for the international arm of its business, and has been redirecting some users there instead of to its original Chinese domain, Xiaohongshu.com. It also published two separate terms-of-service documents for domestic and foreign users.

Since its founding in 2013, Rednote has grown into one of the largest and buzziest social media platforms in China, with some 300 million monthly active users. It’s now known as the de facto app for young, urban people in China to share lifestyle and travel content. Since the app was unexpectedly thrust into the international spotlight in January 2025 when TikTok was briefly banned in the US, the company has been slowly rolling out a comprehensive globalization strategy. It recently began hiring corporate employees in the US who will open new regional offices, according to the tech publication Rest of World.

What has not been previously reported is that the company is also taking steps to solidify “Rednote” as a separate corporate entity to oversee the app’s international users. The company’s Chinese parent organization, Xiaohongshu, registered Rednote Technology PTE LTD in Singapore in mid-2025, according to public corporate registration databases. The company also claims to use Singapore-based servers to host international user data. Rednote did not respond to WIRED’s requests for comment.

It’s incredibly challenging in the current regulatory and political environment for a Chinese social platform to operate globally without some degree of data separation. Both Beijing and Western governments are closely scrutinizing data security risks and potential instances of content moderation overreach. That’s why ByteDance decided to make TikTok an entirely separate ecosystem from its Chinese counterpart Douyin. Tencent similarly has different rules and censorship mechanisms for WeChat and Weixin, the domestic version of its ubiquitous super app.

So far, the content that international and domestic users are seeing on Rednote appears to still be the same, but some people are concerned the two entities may eventually split in a much more dramatic way.

Who Belongs on Rednote?

Archived versions of Rednote’s legal and privacy policies indicate that the company first created distinct terms of service for domestic and foreign audiences in December 2025, and it made the most recent updates to each of them in late March.

The Chinese and international legal terms are very similar to each other, but there are some noteworthy differences. While Xiaohongshu, the domestic version, asks users under 18 years old “not to use the platform,” Rednote draws the line at 13, reflecting local US regulations. They also have different content moderation guidelines—the Chinese version includes explicit rules around political content (which are commonly mandated by the Chinese government), while the international guidelines forbid “discrimination on the basis of someone’s race, religion, age, gender, disability or sexuality.”

The international version of Rednote’s privacy policy specifies that user data will be collected and stored in Singapore, with the possibility that it may be transferred to and processed in China. Public job listings show the company is currently recruiting for several engineering and content moderation positions based in Singapore.

The terms are vague in one regard: They don’t specify how Rednote determines whether a user falls under the Chinese policy or the international one. In fact, the company appears to have gotten more vague on this point over time. The archived policies from December 2025 stated that anyone who registered for the app before December 8, 2025 would be automatically considered a Chinese user. People who registered with a non-Chinese phone number after the cut-off date would be treated as coming from abroad. That language was erased from the latest version of the terms published in March.

Some Rednote users have reported that their accounts were automatically converted from the Chinese to the international version of the website recently. One American user, who asked to remain anonymous to avoid being punished by the platform, shared a screenshot with WIRED showing that when he logged into the platform in April, a banner appeared that read “Your account is a rednote account. We have automatically redirected you to rednote.com.”

The user says he registered his account with a Chinese phone number years ago, but suspects his account was converted because of using a non-Chinese IP address. “I have never posted from China. It's always been in the United States. Obviously, in one glance, they can see this is an American posting in English,” he says.

Looming Split

After TikTok sidestepped a US shutdown by selling a majority stake in its American business, most of the “refugees” who had fled to Rednote went back to the video app or to other platforms. Those who stayed often did so because they value reading about and talking directly with Chinese people living in China. They now worry that a corporate split could destroy what had been one of the strongest bridges between the Chinese internet and the wider world.

Jerry Liu, a Vancouver-based TikTok influencer known for sharing funny content about Rednote itself, said in a November video that he was told by staff at the company’s Shanghai office that international users should expect to see less Chinese content and more North American content in the future. “I feel frustrated. I think it’s just gonna be less fun,” he said in the video.

Rednote had tried the TikTok localization playbook before—it launched a slew of regionally focused apps roughly three years ago with names like Uniik, Spark, Catalog, Takib, habU, and S’More that each catered to specific countries outside China, but they failed to catch on. The effort could have been a lesson for the company about the value of its massive Chinese content ecosystem to people in other countries, but as is often the case, regulatory and political considerations appear to have taken priority.

“I don't want to see Americans talking about Coachella. I did that on Instagram, I didn't join Xiaohongshu to see Instagram,” says the American user who was recently redirected to Rednote.

Security Concerns

As Rednote goes global, the company is no doubt looking to Chinese predecessors like WeChat and TikTok for ideas about how to navigate the minefield of content moderation and data privacy. So far, its approach looks to more closely resemble that of WeChat.

For over a decade, WeChat has sorted users based largely on one criterion: whether they used a Chinese or a foreign number to sign up. That has allowed users to cross Tencent’s digital border by unlinking and relinking their WeChat accounts to different mobile numbers.

Jeffrey Knockel, an assistant professor of computer science at Bowdoin College, found that Tencent censors content on WeChat and Weixin differently, even though the two platforms are integrated with one another and users can communicate across them. He says Chinese users are subject to a real-time keyword-matching filter to censor politically sensitive speech, but “if you registered for WeChat using a Canadian or an American phone number, your messages aren't necessarily under that kind of censorship.”

Knockel says WeChat’s blended content moderation approach may have made some people wary about using the app. “Users are generally distrustful of the platform. They don't know if they're being watched and censored,” he says. As Rednote moves in a similar direction, it will be worth watching whether international audiences end up having similar misgivings.

This is an edition of Zeyi Yang and Louise Matsakis’ Made in China newsletter. Read previous newsletters here.