After a US law temporarily forced Americans to find a new home for their short-video habit, TikTok clone Likee saw a surge in usage.

In a historic development, Chinese-owned social media platform TikTok has become the center of a bipartisan bill to ban the app nationwide in the name of national security. Xiao Qiang, a research scientist at the UC Berkeley School of Information and a prominent scholar in the study of state censorship,

As self-described " TikTok refugees" pour onto the Chinese social media app RedNote, also known as Xiaohongshu, some foreign netizens are already running up against the country's extensive censorship apparatus. Newsweek reached out to Xiaohongshu with a request for comment via a general contact email address.

TikTok has fought the ban, most recently before the Supreme Court. Free-speech advocates contend that the ban would violate First Amendment rights. But the justices sided with the government on January 17,

TikTok will become impossible to access via an American internet connection. It probably will remain possible to access from an American location, though. The rub is a virtual private network, which sets up an encrypted tunnel for internet browsing and can run it through practically any country.

The decision came a week after the justices heard a First Amendment challenge to a law aimed at the wildly popular short-form video platform used by 170 million Americans that the government fears could be influenced by China.

The app had more than 170 million monthly users in the U.S. The black-out is the result of a law forcing the service offline unless it sheds its ties to ByteDance, its China-based parent company.

TikTok's services are restored in the U.S. after President-elect Donald Trump pledged to sign an executive order to save it. It's been a wild 24 hours to say the least — starting with TikTok preemptively shutting down the app for users from 10:30pm on January 18.

With the U.S. ban on TikTok looming, many Americans are opting for another Chinese app known as RedNote. It could be short-lived.

TikTok has said the ban was "conceived and pushed through based upon inaccurate, flawed, and hypothetical information, resulting in outright censorship ... and Google at the time.

As TikTok users flock to RedNote, there are several considerations, including the privacy of your data. Here’s what you need to know.

TikTok isn’t the villain here. It’s a symptom of a much larger issue: the lack of clear, enforceable rules for data privacy and security. Instead of banning the app, the government should focus on fixing the system.