Online Reporter
NEW YORK. – With an American TikTok ban threatening the app, users and creators reflect on what it did for internet culture – and what their online worlds might look like without it.
It’s possible TikTok made more people famous than any other company in history.
It also sparked controversy in nearly every market it entered.
India banned TikTok in 2020, and the app has been facing the same treatment in the US.
A law that will effectively ban TikTok in the United States was set to go into effect yesterday, after a failed bid to save it in the Supreme Court.
But in TikTok’s final days, the Biden administration said it will defer enforcement of the law to President-elect Donald Trump, who’s also signalled a willingness to save the app – even though both men previously fought for the ban.
The involvement of both an outgoing and incoming US President is an extraordinary signal of just how much is at stake.
The law that bans the social media platform in the US unless its Chinese parent company ByteDance divests from the app was passed by Congress on the grounds of national security.
Lawmakers voiced concerns that data from the app could be collected by the Chinese Communist Party, or that the platform might be used to spread propaganda.
TikTok denies that it would ever allow the Chinese government to collect user data or influence content on the app.
The company tried and failed to defeat the law in court over First Amendment claims.
It leaves TikTok’s fate uncertain in an era when online culture has been defined by the app’s success.
With the guillotine hovering over TikTok’s neck, users are bracing for a cultural void.
For all the criticisms levied at the app, many say TikTok created a system that made them feel nurtured and uniquely empowered.
Some users worry they could lose their home on the internet, one they fear other apps like Instagram and YouTube can’t or won’t replace.
No platform in recent memory has had a story or impact quite like TikTok’s.
The app was at the centre of ferocious political debates. It ruined many nights of sleep with its seductive and sometimes vapid doom scroll.
TikTok increasingly sucked news, entertainment and social life into the vortex of its powerful but fickle algorithm.
But it also fuelled thousands of small businesses – TikTok says more than seven million businesses use TikTok and that it helped to drive US$15bn in revenue for these US businesses in 2023.
TikTok filled billions of idle hours with entertaining, informative content.
It offered opportunities to activists and artists at a moment of increasing uncertainty. In just a few years, TikTok rewrote the playbook for social media companies and changed countless lives.
A third of US adults and the majority of teenagers are on TikTok, and globally, the app has been downloaded nearly five billion times.
According to an analysis by Know Your Meme, more of the internet memes gathered by its encyclopaedia came from TikTok, starting in 2022, than anywhere else.
Without a doubt, TikTok is the hub for online culture.
“I really don’t like the app if I’m being honest,” says Adam Aleksic, a creator based in New York with over half a million followers on TikTok.
“But I also love it at the same time. It’s giving me my living. I would probably be in law school right now if it wasn’t for TikTok”.
It remains to be seen whether or how the US TikTok ban will be implemented.
Officials from the Biden administration – which championed the ban and battled to defend it in the courts just this week – said American’s shouldn’t expect the app to go dark this weekend.
The incoming Trump administration has also said it’s looking for ways to save the app.
But the possibility of TikTok’s demise in the US has led users and creators to contemplate moving to other platforms, whether established ones in the American market like YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels, or newcomers like Red Note, another Chinese social media platform.
But many say it’s unlikely other outlets can recreate what TikTok was.
The TikTok users know today originated in 2018, but it didn’t rise to dominance until quarantines during the Covid-19 pandemic moved life online in the spring of 2020.
The first generation of TikTok stars earned fame by posting from the bedrooms where they spent lock down.
At the same moment, in April 2020, ByteDance released CapCut, an app that offered a free and easy-to-use smartphone interface for editing videos, splicing audio, and creating special effects.
CapCut democratised video editing, allowing more users to experiment with new ideas and post their work on TikTok. ByteDance reaped the rewards of the content users made and the eyeballs they attracted.
“It was a moment of collective effervescence,” says Robert B, an American creator with over a quarter million followers who started making TikTok videos during the 2020 lockdown. – BBC
