The panic over the banning of TikTok in the US has increased the use and download of many alternative social media apps, including Texas-based Clapper, owned by China. RedNoteand Likee, a little known platform from Singapore with an AI-powered video feed similar to TikTok’s, according to new market research.

The people of TikTok is not accessible in the US for about 14 hours late Saturday into Sunday after a federal law aimed at curbing alleged Chinese influence on the app went into effect and triggered an unprecedented incident of internet censorship in a country that provides free expression. About 63 percent of US teenagers and a third of US adults use TikTok, according to Pew Research Center.

Among the places some of them turned to was Likee, a TikTok clone launched by the profitable Singaporean tech company Joyy in 2017. Likee had about 33.9 million monthly users as of November, most of them overseas. in the US. But on Saturday, Likee got 143 percent more downloads and 37 percent more usage in the US than the day before, according to Sensor Towerwhich estimates the numbers by collecting data from a sample of devices. The trend continued through Sunday, when Likee usage was up 11 percent from a day earlier.

Estimates from Apptopia, another company that studies the app industry, show that for months, Likee recorded fewer than 10,000 downloads per day in the US before jumping to nearly 167,000 on Sunday and about 286,000 on Monday. Apptopia also estimates similar explosions for TikTok competitors Clapper and Flip.

On Tuesday, shares of Likee’s parent company, Joyy, closed up about 3 percent, beating the average gain among its Nasdaq peers. Joyy not Likee’s financials are broken out, but it and its sister apps collectively generated about $73 million in sales in the third quarter of last year from advertising and user purchases. Likee did not respond to a request for comment.

Other less frequent apps, including Clapper and Snap’s Snapchat, gained more interest over the weekend to the tune of double-digit gains in user activity. TikTok’s biggest rivals, Meta’s Instagram and Facebook, saw more modest single-digit boosts. YouTube and X, on the other hand, experienced little change in usage.

RedNote, another Chinese app that Americans have flocked to in protest in the days before the ban, added 80 percent more users on Sunday than the previous day, according to Sensor Tower. In the first two days of the rush earlier in the week, more than 700,000 new users joined RedNote, Reuters reported. Known as Xiaohongshu in Chinese, it ranked in recent days as the most downloaded free app in the US Google and Apple app stores.

TikTok is back online in the US on Sunday after president-elect Donald Trump promised to grant a temporary repeal of the new law when he took office the next day. The law, signed by former President Biden last year, effectively banned TikTok by threatening to fine web hosting providers and app stores that work with its parent company, Chinese tech giant ByteDance. unless it removes its ownership of TikTok. Users returned to TikTok in droves on Sunday, with daily active users up 17 percent on Saturday, Sensor Tower data showed.

On Monday, Trump issued an executive order Giving 75 more days to solve the problem on TikTok. But the legality of his decree remains in question, and TikTok is still not available in US app stores. But when users search for TikTok, they are greeted with a list of alternatives—Likee, Clapper, and others among them.