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.

If there was any doubt, AI mania was on full display at Google Cloud Next in Las Vegas this week, but history shows us that when humans start getting manic about things, it doesn’t always work out great.

Lately, I’ve seen a few commentators bringing up the horrible story of the radium girls to try to make this point. Have you ever heard of them? They were factory workers of the 1920s hired to paint watch faces with newfangled luminous paint containing deadly radium.

The camel hair paintbrushes the workers used lost their shape after a few brush strokes so they were encouraged to reshape the brushes by licking the tips. Many of the workers also used the paint as lipstick or nail polish, because why not?

This did not go well for anybody involved. Many radium girls experienced dental issues, lost teeth, and suffered oral lesions and ulcers. Others developed anaemia and necrosis of the jaw. Some experienced disruption to their menstrual cycles or were even rendered sterile.

At least 50 women died prematurely as a result.

This wasn’t the only misuse of radium. In a short-lived mania for the radioactive metal – first discovered by Marie and Pierre Curie in 1898 – humans also put it in toothpaste, hair cream, and a medicinal tonic drink called Radithor. Doctors even used it to try to treat cancer.

AI is manifestly not a radioactive element but there are clear parallels between its widespread application and the reckless use of radium a century ago. And I believe there is a warning here for us, or a lesson if we care to hear it; we need to figure AI out before we do something really dumb.