From Silicon Valley to Shenzhen， the incessant hum of algorithm wars reached a crescendo in January 2025 as TikTok's U.S. operations went defunct under congressional decree. This salient moment in digital history saw 120 million American users transform overnight into “content refugees，” their confinement to domestic platforms sparking an intrepid migration to China's Xiaohongshu – a phenomenon The Economist dubs “the Great Firewall's boomerang effect.”
