Reimagining Belonging on rednote: Cross-Cultural Social Media Migration and Media Dependency

Abstract

In early 2025, a wave of American users migrated to the Chinese platform rednote, creating a highly visible and politically charged case of cross-cultural digital movement. Drawing on semi-structured qualitative interviews with 29 American rednote users, this study integrates Media System Dependency Theory and Cross-Cultural Adaptation Theory to examine how participants made sense of the move, reorganized their media-related goals, and adjusted to a culturally unfamiliar platform environment. The findings indicate that, in this case, migration was shaped not only by fatigue with mainstream social media but also by political dissent, peer momentum, and longer-standing curiosity about Chinese culture. Participants’ continued engagement on rednote was supported by translation tools, platform affordances, and host receptivity, which lowered communicative barriers and fostered early feelings of connection. At the same time, their adaptation remained uneven and effortful, shaped by mistranslation, uncertainty, asymmetrical visibility, and concerns about authenticity and precarity. The study argues that media dependency reorganization and cross-cultural adaptation became intertwined in this case, producing a form of conditional belonging rather than settled integration. More broadly, the article extends research on social media migration by showing how platform disruption across cultural boundaries can turn migration into a process of communicative adjustment, cultural sense-making, and negotiated participation.