The early traction for Lemon8 hints at the whack-a-mole challenge lawmakers could face in reining in TikTok and other social media platforms. Lemon8 has been downloaded just over one million times in the United States since it became available on US app stores in February, and had around half a million daily active US users last month, according to intelligence platform Apptopia. The US government is once again threatening to ban TikTok. “I like that it’s something simple, it’s nothing too in your face … it’s not overwhelming.” “I’ve seen a lot of bigger content creators that I love on it and promoting it on their Instagram stories, so I thought, ‘okay, it’s my time to hop on this bandwagon,’” said Melanie Cruz, who got her start creating content as a YouTube vlogger in high school around 2018.

“We have to talk about TikTok’s new sister app,” a creator said in one such video. But despite that speculation - and the mounting scrutiny on TikTok and ByteDance - a growing number of US users and influencers are now eagerly touting Lemon8, with its focus on photos and highly curated, informational or “aspirational” content. The similarities in the videos comparing the new service to Instagram and Pinterest, which were posted by both English and Spanish-speaking creators, raised questions about whether people were being paid to promote the new app on TikTok.

Lemon8 is a social media platform launched in the United States earlier this year by TikTok’s Chinese parent company ByteDance amid federal and state efforts to ban or restrict TikTok in the country over national security concerns. They also asked followers to share their Lemon8 usernames in the comments.Īs it turned out, the app wasn’t just a random alternative to TikTok. Multiple creators described the app as being like “if Pinterest and Instagram had a baby, with TikTok’s algorithm.” Some compared it to TikTok circa 2020 and encouraged other influencers to join the app before it grows. In the days after TikTok’s CEO was grilled by Congress for the first time, many TikTok users began posting about an alternative platform called Lemon8, sometimes with eerily similar language.

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