It has been a rollercoaster ride of a week for users of video-sharing platform TikTok. Is it banned? Does it have a future in the US? Will Elon Musk buy it and potentially ruin another social media platform? Will anyone in the US take responsibility for the whole mess?
The answer to all these questions can be summed up in two words: Who knows.
Here is what we do know. Legally, app stores in the US cannot carry TikTok, at the risk of falling foul of the law that prevents ownership of certain apps by companies controlled by countries tagged as “foreign adversaries”. The law has not only been passed by Congress, but upheld by the US Supreme Court. Trump’s executive order is a reprieve, not a solution.
In an unnecessarily dramatic move, TikTok chose on Sunday to take itself offline for US users, announcing its departure in a pop-up notification on the app. It was a short-lived flounce. Not even a day had passed before TikTok was back, although Apple and Google have not yet reinstated the app in their respective stores.
But did the US need to ban TikTok? Or could it have waited out the inevitable decline in its popularity as the next big thing came along?
TikTok has had a good run. The company largely benefited from the Covid-19 pandemic, when TikTok dances became a form of entertainment and challenges – ranging from the mildly interesting to the terminally stupid – were a distraction from the day-to-day drudge of homeschooling, remote working and the general feeling that this would never end.
It could have gone the way of other pandemic breakouts. Clubhouse, if you have forgotten, was an audio platform that was like a Spaces on X, but with people you wanted to talk to, and most of the time it actually worked. There was a brief flirtation with Houseparty too, a videochat app that didn’t make it out of the pandemic. Epic Games, which bought the app in 2019, shuttered it for good in 2021.
But let’s be honest: people are fickle, especially when it comes to social media. TikTok may be capturing the youth audience this year, but who knows what is just around the corner. If something better comes along, the audience will shift, just as it has done before, and with it the money.
Remember MySpace? It was in the early days of social media, but it was soon overtaken by Facebook, which has stubbornly refused to go away. The latter may still have more than 2 billion active users, but it appears to be stuck in place, with an ageing user base and little to appeal to a younger demographic.
This is where Instagram came in, quickly bought by Facebook. Meanwhile, Snapchat was also nipping at Facebook’s heels and was once touted as a Facebook killer. It still has millions of active daily users, but it won’t be displacing the corporate Meta machine any time soon.
Given the effort being put into “saving” TikTok, you would think the US accounted for the majority of the company’s active users, or the bulk of its revenue. That is not the case for either metric. There are about 170 million US-based users out of 1.9 billion monthly active users globally, and the US accounted for $8 billion of TikTok’s annual revenue of more than $63 billion. It’s not insignificant, but it isn’t exactly a make-or-break moment for TikTok’s future either.
The platform is far more important to the millions of creators and small businesses in the US who now rely on TikTok to make money and reach their audience. There is nothing out there that has the same engagement as TikTok does with its audience, at least according to its users. The algorithm that drives people to content is the secret sauce here, and much of the concern around TikTok has been stoking fears that the algorithm can be manipulated to push certain narratives.
When Trump initially came out against the TikTok ban last year, one of his key points was that ceasing the service in the US would benefit Meta, who he then considered an “enemy of the people”. In the absence of TikTok, he assumed users would flock to Instagram and its Reels platform.
But as the ban inched closer, users instead seemed to be turning to Xiaohongshu, also known as RedNote. Ironically, the app is also Chinese-owned, with everything from the default privacy policy page to much of the content in Chinese. But that didn’t appear to deter users.
We have seen this before with X. Since Elon Musk took over, announcing his entry into the building with the daddest of all dad jokes (“let that sink in”), there has been a steady drift away from the platform.
Some moved to Mastodon, another open platform with various communities, each with their own rules. Others went to Bluesky, provided they could nab an invite. And then there was Threads, which offered the most hope initially that it could recreate the community people had built up on Twitter with the least effort possible.
We may smirk about the drama of staging of mock funerals for TikTok, or play down the upset of creators who may yet find themselves cut off from their source of income. But this entire situation is an argument in favour of open social media systems such as the AT protocol that underpins Bluesky. In theory, you could take your social media following with you regardless of what app you were using. Don’t like the policy at Bluesky? You could simply change to another that supports AT protocol and your followers could still find you.
Then you wouldn’t have to find an answer to the question: what would we do without TikTok? We’d live. And eventually move on to the next big thing.
