As the fate of widely popular short-form video app TikTok hangs in the balance this week, creators, users and social media experts lament the cultural and economic losses U.S. users could experience if the app is banned this weekend.
“So many people are actually using it to make a living,” said Oliver Haimson, an assistant professor of information at the University of Michigan. “People are using it for entertainment, obviously, but also for community and social support and finding information about any number of things.”
The United States Supreme Court has been reviewing the arguments over a law President Joe Biden signed last April, which says that the app poses security concerns, because TikTok’s Chinese owner, ByteDance, is subject to Chinese national security laws that can compel companies to hand over users’ data at any time.
At the time of its signing, the law garnered wide bipartisan support. It said ByteDance must sell TikTok to a non-Chinese owner by Jan. 19, or it will be banned from app stores in the United States.
On Friday, U.S. Supreme Court justices questioned why they should intervene with the law, saying if divested, TikTok is free to pursue the best algorithm for its platform in the United States. TikTok’s lawyers argued that the law’s aim is to censor free speech, and that shutting it down in the U.S. would impact “one of the largest speech platforms in America,” for its roughly 170 million American users.
The creator economy
But for many creators on TikTok, the issue is not just one of free speech, but also one that affects their livelihood.
Callie Goodwin, a creator from Columbia, South Carolina, flew to Washington D.C. last week to advocate with other TikTokers for overturning the law. Goodwin works a full-time job in marketing and social media, but has also amassed nearly 250,000 followers across two TikTok accounts. She launched pre-stamped greeting card business, Sparks of Joy Co, in the thick of the pandemic in 2020. One TikTok post urging people to shop from her small business instead of big box stores blew up overnight.
“It completely changed the game for me and my business,” Goodwin said. “People really rallied around my business and really loved the fact that we were bringing back the art of handwritten cards, and especially in a season of loneliness.”
Goodwin had been posting about her small business on Meta’s platforms Facebook and Instagram, but it garnered little attention for her. When she started sharing about her products on TikTok and using its e-commerce feature TikTok Shop, her sales boomed. In one nine-day span last year, Sparks of Joy Co netted $30,000 in sales, and Goodwin hired 16 part-time employees. Currently, about 98% of her total sales come from TikTok Shop or from customers discovering her on the app.
For Goodwin, TikTok’s algorithm is what makes the platform special. The discoverability feature drives users toward content it thinks they will like, often pushing small businesses like hers to people who wouldn’t have discovered it otherwise.
TikTok also has a different structure for monetizing videos than other platforms, and its Creator Fund begins paying U.S. enrollees for eyes on their videos after they’ve reached 10,000 followers. Goodwin not only makes money from selling her products, but also on views on her videos for the small business account, and one she made to document her health journey, The Lose it Log.
Goodwin is one of an estimated 27 million creators in the U.S. that make some of their income from social media, according to a 2023 study. Of those, 44%, or around 11.6 million people, said they do social media as their full-time job.
Goodwin says she does post on other platforms, but she doesn’t “get paid a dime” on Meta accounts, even for videos that get millions of views. And brand partnerships, where companies pay creators to review or feature a product, are heavily influenced by followership and engagement numbers, which thrive on TikTok.
“And so you take away TikTok, and we’ve lost all ability to make money when it comes to the content we’re making, the views,” she said. “And some of my friends that do make their full income on TikTok have left their full-time jobs. They are bracing and prepping.”
On Tuesday, United States Senators Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.), Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), Cory Booker (D-N.J.) and House Rep. Ro Khanna (CA-17) introduced the Extend the TikTok Deadline Act, which aims at delaying the Jan. 19 deadline. Markey said on the Senate floor Monday that the ban was “rushed through without sufficient consideration of the profound consequences it would have on the 170 million Americans who use the platform.”
“Today, TikTok is a space where users share critical resources during emergencies such as the Los Angeles wildfires, earn money to cover groceries and medical care, and build community in challenging times,” he said.
Online communities + vibe
That access to information and connection to those across the country and world is an invaluable part of TikTok, Haimson said. His research focuses on marginalized communities, especially those who identify as a part of the LGBTQ+ community.
The TikTok algorithm has allowed users to find queer TikTok creators who share about their life experiences and identities, and it often helps others learn more about themselves without ever meeting in person, Haimson said. That is how he defines community, he said.
Haimson has previously researched Chinese messaging, social media and payment app WeChat, which President Donald Trump proposed to ban in his first term. The ban was then dropped by President Biden in 2021.
“It’s an entire infrastructure that people use for payment, for work, for community, for support, all of these things. And I think we can kind of think about TikTok as being similar,” Haimson said.
Casey Fiesler, an associate professor in the University of Colorado Boulder’s College of Media, Communications and Information, makes educational TikTok content related to technology ethics and policy under the username ProfessorCasey. She aims to make these topics more accessible, and reach people beyond academia on topics like artificial intelligence. Fiesler said TikTok’s algorithm has led her to “a few really nice communities” of other creators, academics, scientists and educators.
“TikTok’s recommender system also has a real knack for pushing my content to people who are interested in it,” Fiesler said. “Which is great both because it gets to the right people and because it gets to less of the wrong people.”
In addition to doing a better job connecting her with creators and viewers she wants to know, her comment section is “a lot more pleasant” on TikTok than other places, she said. She does currently post on Instagram, and thinks she’ll move her content there if TikTok is no longer an option. But she’s wary of this week’s announced changes to Meta’s content rules, which include getting rid of its third-party fact checking program and allowing more kinds of free speech on topics “frequently subject to political debate.”
“It is hard to say how viable an option that platform will be moving forward,” she said.
TikTok’s arrival to the social landscape had “major impacts” to how platforms serve up users’ content, said Paige Knapp, Los Angeles-based founder and CEO of social media agency Kylee Social LLC. Even the smartest versions of previous social platforms were based around users actively following people or things that they liked, and showing them more of that content, Knapp said.
With TikTok, “for the very first time, a user could download the app, sign up and never follow an account, ever, and still have a highly curated ‘For You Page,’” Knapp said. “The average user was getting content from spaces that they may have not ventured previously, but the algorithm was saying, hey, based on your signals — the data signals you send us — we think you want to, you know, see these other things too.”
Knapp said TikTok has provided young people a way to tap into cultural moments and world events unlike ever before. While many millennials may have watched news coverage or read about the Arab Spring in the early 2010s, today’s young generations can watch world events, like the war in Gaza, playing out in real time on video.
“You sort of have a lens into other people’s worlds, whether that’s a creator, or an average person sharing their perspective on something, or a view into what’s happening in Palestine,” Knapp said. “And I think that’s a part of why there’s a big uproar about losing it for a number of reasons.”
What happens next?
There’s a chance that the Supreme Court could rule to not uphold the ban this week, or rule that there should be more time for ByteDance to consider divesting TikTok.
If the ban does go into effect on Jan 19., TikTok is planning to shut off its app for U.S. users that day, The Information reported Wednesday. A source told the outlet that users in the U.S. will encounter a pop-up message about the ban if they open the app.
Some users might try to look for work-arounds, like using a virtual private network, or VPN, set to a location outside the U.S. to continue using the app, Haimson said. But for those worried about security, these options may make it worse. If you can’t update your app or have accurate location settings, the security patches included in software updates won’t be applied to your account, and you may be vulnerable.
“But I don’t think people are going to give it up easily,” Haimson said.
Other social media sites may experience widespread “platform migration,” Fiesler said. People have been moving from one online platform to another for decades, she said — think about the rise and fall in popularity of MySpace or Tumblr in the early and mid-2000s.
Usually that migration is done by choice, Fiesler said, like users leaving X, formerly known as Twitter. The day after the 2024 election, X experienced the most deactivations since Elon Musk took ownership in 2022, and rival platform Bluesky reported 1 million new users the same week. But if TikTok is banned, there will probably be a period of users testing other apps for substitutions.
“What often happens instead is fragmentation, where people land on a lot of different platforms,” Fiesler said. “I think that is likely what would happen if TikTok users have to find a new home — they will find a lot of new homes.”
In the last few days, Chinese social media app Xiaohongshu, or RedNote, became the No. 1 downloaded free app in Apple’s U.S. app store, and Lemon8, which is also owned by ByteDance, also saw an increase of downloads. Meta’s Reels, or Youtube’s Shorts offer users a similar way to post short-form content, though TikTok users say its comment structure, discoverability and algorithm are quite different.
If TikTok shuts down in the U.S. on Sunday, it may take a while for people to fill the voids of entertainment, information, economic opportunity and connection left in TikTok’s wake, Knapp said. She said she feels no other app matches the welcoming feeling, camaraderie and tone of TikTok.
“It kind of reminds me of the ambience at a restaurant,” Knapp said. “You can recreate the menu, as it were, for Tiktok — the idea of a discoverable algorithm that you know serves recommended content. But if that ambiance is not right, then users are not going to spend a ton of time there.”
The potential loss of TikTok is one Knapp said she feels personally, and she knows her creator clients and the companies that spend money on sponsored content and brand partnerships will feel, too. The impact will certainly also be felt by regular, everyday people who found new hobbies, learned new skills and had their minds opened to ideas and concepts they wouldn’t have otherwise considered, Knapp said.
“[TikTok] gave rise to these really unique perspectives,” Knapp said. “And just a diverse roster of folks who ended up capturing voice and kind of being able to not just … entertain and things, but also really make an impact with the following that they cultivated.”
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