The Criminal Investigation Bureau (CIB) of Taiwan announced Thursday that access to the Chinese Communist app RedNote will be blocked for at least a year due to a high volume of complaints about online shopping scams.
CIB said it has investigated over 1,700 fraud complaints from RedNote over the past year, with a total value of $7.9 million in U.S. dollars.
According to the Taiwanese Interior Ministry, which gave the order on Thursday for Internet service providers (ISPs) to block access to RedNote, the Chinese app also fails to meet Taiwanese cybersecurity standards. The ministry noted that thousands of other apps have been blocked for failing to meet these standards, most of them operated by overseas companies.
Deputy Interior Minister Ma Shih-yuan said blocking access to RedNote for a year was necessary to allow time for fraud investigations to be completed, and for the victims to seek compensation. He also expressed some frustration with RedNote’s owner, Xingyin Information Technology of Shanghai, for not responding to Taiwanese legal filings.
RedNote, known as Xiaohongshu in Chinese, is a social media platform that resembles TikTok and Instagram. The Chinese name translates to “Little Red Book,” which is also the name of mass-murdering Chinese Communist Party founder Mao Zedong’s manifesto, but Xingyin wisely decided to tweak the English-language name to minimize those connotations.
When the U.S. considered a ban on TikTok in January 2025, many of that platform’s American users ostentatiously signed up with RedNote. Almost three million Americans created RedNote accounts in a single day, only to be discomfited by the overwhelming volume of Chinese Communist propaganda transmitted through the platform. RedNote is considerably less subtle about such things than TikTok.
RedNote has also become even more notorious than TikTok for harvesting data on its users, which is one of the Taiwanese cybersecurity regulations RedNote was blocked for violating.
RedNote remains popular worldwide, with hundreds of millions of users around the globe, and over three million in Taiwan.
The Hong Kong Free Press (HKFP) noted on Thursday that RedNote has “fallen foul of Chinese regulators” as well, mainly the Cyberspace Administration of China, which doled out “warnings and strict punishment” to “responsible individuals” at RedNote in September because they allowed too many posts “hyping celebrities’ personal dynamics and trivial matters and other negative content.”
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