Abstract

This study investigates the paradoxical migration of U.S. TikTok users to RedNote, another Chinese owned platform, following U.S. nationwide TikTok ban over national security and data privacy concerns. Existing privacy research, grounded in rational-choice assumptions, cannot explain TikTok users’ risky privacy choice of RedNote migration. Through a mixed method design, we analyzed privacy narratives on TikTok and RedNote alongside 6915 banrelated comments. Through abductive theorizing within the Needs-Affordance-Features (NAF) framework, we identify four privacy personas that reveal distinct reasoning processes behind risky privacy choices. We conceptualize safety as a psychological need that is fulfilled by data privacy affordance on social media. We suggest four propositions for four privacy personas that illustrate how individuals’ prioritize or impede on certain psychological needs would either enhance or block their need for safety and their value on data privacy affordance.

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