The "protectionism" you cite is due to crash regulation and emissions standards.

This is unadulterated cope.

America has 40% more traffic fatalities per km driven than the European Union and has less stringent emissions standards (especially for the Hilux's category, which is actually why giant SUVs became so popular over the years).

The US government doesn't even bother with these spurious pretexts anymore. They openly admit that they want to coddle local automakers to ensure that the government has a supply chain of transportation vehicles in wartime. It's quite literally socialism for the entire American auto sector.

This in itself would not be so bad. After all Korea and Japan supported their auto industry.

But the American car companies are just completely unwilling to make cars that the rest of the world wants to buy.

> coddle local automakers

Are you only including automakers headquartered in the US, or are you also including automakers who have a bunch of factories in the US?

Irrelevant - they still don't meet our standards.

Corporate taxes specifically were quite high by European standards until 2027 and are not relatively that low today either

To directly answer the question, Rednote is not generally used outside China, and the point about these apps being representative of "global" social media apps is false.

Xiaohongshu is used by a lot of huaqiao outside of China. It has a sizeable overseas userbase, but it also has 300M total users.

To their point, almost exclusively Chinese overseas until the recent memeing.

RedNote was #1 on the App Store download list for a couple of days.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/chinese-app-rednote-hits-1-i...

So was this app at one point in time: https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/9/21058399/david-dobrik-disp...

It's called Dispo. You probably haven't heard of it because it became almost irrelevant a few weeks after launch. #1 on the app store doesn't mean a whole lot.

RedNote is a bit different: it has been wildly popular in China for a number of years, and the Chinese community has been using it overseas already.

It may not retain all the new users, but it is not going to become irrelevant.

I agree. But I'm just saying that #1 on the app store doesn't preclude something from being a fad and my guess is that in 1 month's time, no one is going to be talking about RedNote outside of Chinese communities.

That’s an extremely recent development caused by the TT shutdown looming.

How many of those downloads originated in China? Genuine question, I read the article and it doesn't say. Apple's App Store is available in China, and China's population alone could be skewing those numbers.

App store top apps are per-region. And China one likely even running on completely different infrastructure because CCP.

Yes it's called a meme and it won't last.

It received some popularity among TikTok refugees from the US and subsequently also from around the world by users who got curios about what the fuzz was all about.