Good morning! Chrystia Freeland is running to be Canada's next prime minister, Mark Zuckerberg reportedly blamed Sheryl Sandberg for a Meta inclusivity initiative, and Miranda Qu's Xiaohongshu app takes off with American users due to the TikTok ban.
- Social media refuge. To say the rollout of the U.S.’s TikTok ban has been a mess would be an understatement. After years of back and forth in Washington, the Chinese-owned video sharing app officially went dark here Saturday night. But President Donald Trump, being sworn into office for the second time today, has promised he would not enforce the ban—a move that seems legally dubious at best—and the company said Sunday it was "in the process" of restoring service to U.S. users. How it will all shake out is anything but clear.
What is certain is that the ban will have detrimental financial effects on influencers, U.S.-based employees, small businesses, and others across the country, not to mention TikTok parent company ByteDance Ltd. But it has also had plenty of indirect beneficiaries, including one of Asia’s Most Powerful Women, Miranda Qu, currently No. 60 on Fortune’s ranking.
In 2013, Qu and partner Charlwin Mao founded the Chinese social media app Xiaohongshu, an amalgamation of sorts of Instagram, Pinterest, X, and Tripadvisor. It now has a user base of over 300 million people—skewing young, female, and Chinese—and is valued at around $17 to $20 billion. In 2024, it was on track to double profits to more than $1 billion, and is backed by the likes of Alibaba.
A week ago, few people in the U.S. were aware of the app, which American users call "RedNote." But now, it has become one of the top-downloaded apps in the country as something of a protest against the TikTok ban, with some American users claiming to be there as "TikTok refugees."
Qu, 40, is currently president of and owns an estimated 10% stake in the private company; Forbes estimates she has a net worth of around $1.3 billion. She grew up in Wuhan, China, and studied journalism at Beijing Foreign Studies University before working in marketing, as Fortune’s Nicholas Gordon reported in October 2024.
Like the TikTok ban itself, whether the American "refugees" will stick with RedNote is unclear. The app is primarily used by people who speak Mandarin; many of the features do not currently have English translations. And it’s not a one-to-one replacement for TikTok, though both feature influencers selling products to millions of users. Plus, if the ban really isn’t enforced, Americans could be back on TikTok with no need for refuge. Conversely, RedNote itself could be banned under the same law.
Alicia Adamczyk
alicia.adamczyk@fortune.com
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