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All signs point to TikTok shutting down in the United States on Sunday due to the ban that’s set to go into effect after the platform failed to find a new owner. Many users have flocked to a popular Chinese app positioned as a viable alternative, which has also led to a rise in the number of Americans using Duolingo to learn Mandarin.
Last April, Joe Biden signed a bill that passed with bipartisan support in the House and Senate requiring ByteDance, the Beijing-based company best known for operating TikTok, to divest its operations in the United States in order to avoid the nationwide ban set to go into effect on January 19, 2025.
The measure, which stemmed from national security concerns linked to the Chinese government’s potential to harness the data of American users for potentially nefarious purposes, unsurprisingly sparked a drawn-out legal battle where TikTok attempted to use the First Amendment to champion its case.
However, on Friday, the Supreme Court upheld the law, which means TikTok needs to find a new owner by Sunday to avoid going dark once the ban officially goes into effect.
That’s obviously a less-than-ideal development for the many, many people who’ve made TikTok their social media platform of choice in recent years, and plenty of them have been flocking to alternatives including Lemon8 and Xiaohongshu, the second of which is another Chinese app known as “RedNote.”
RedNote’s default language is Mandarin due to the fact the vast majority of its users reside in China, and most Americans who find themselves scrolling through it are going to be pretty lost due to the amount of content spoken and written in that particular language.
However, it would appear a significant number of so-called TikTok refugees are using another app in an attempt to bridge the gap, as Duolingo noted the number of users interested in learning Mandarin is up 216% from the same time last year while sharing a graph that shows a spike that began around the same time the RedNote migration started to build steam.
Learning Mandarin out of spite? You’re not alone.
We’ve seen a ~216% growth in new Chinese (Mandarin) learners in the US compared to this time last year. https://t.co/9hzwBxfTgD pic.twitter.com/qWM9f5oFYA
— Duolingo (@duolingo) January 15, 2025
We live in some truly fascinating times.