What already happened when Russia decided to attack Ukraine and, by launching missiles on Donbass, also shut down some Western-style social networks, Instagram above all, could happen. Young Russian influencers, with millions of followers and now subjugated by certainly non-native luxury brands, suddenly found themselves unemployed and poor.
A brutal switch changed their fate. Only to then discover that TikTok could be a very valid alternative. Should Western TikTokers who risk losing their platform and jobs also have to “recycle” themselves? The hypothesis is not abstract, after the bill arrived on US President Joe Biden’s desk last Wednesday to require TikTok to separate from its Chinese parent company or face a nationwide ban. And Biden, keeping his promise, signed the bill.
TikTok for sale?
ByteDance now has nine months to sell TikTok. The deadline will not be peremptory, should the ‘birth’ become complicated. Biden will in fact be able to extend it by 90 days, but only once. TikTok will be able to get around the ban with a sale or choose the court route. What seems more likely is that Americans may want to start imagining a connected world without TikTok. After all, pressure to ban TikTok or take the platform away from its owner has existed for years. The first to announce a ban was Trump, in the summer of 2020. But then he took 4 years and one re-election to say that banning TikTok would be a serious mistake and Trump announced his intention to ban the app in 2020. summer of 2020, although Trump now says he thinks banning TikTok is a bad idea and that young Americans should rebel against Biden.
And so the app with 170 million users in the US already suffered a partial ban last March. The House approved the bill, the Senate rejected it. In fact, Congress gave ByteDance six months to sell TikTok. The extended deadline, thanks also to the connection with a 95 billion dollar agreement in favor of Ukraine and Israel, of the new version of the law may have contributed to influencing some members of the Senate to vote for the ban.
TikTok CEO Shou Chew said the app isn’t “going anywhere” and that the company believes courts will ultimately rule that the ban is unconstitutional, violating the First Amendment. The U.S. government would have to provide robust arguments to demonstrate that a ban is necessary to protect the nation’s security and privacy. In fact, there is a ruling by a federal judge who removed the ban from the state of Montana precisely because he found the violation of the First Amendment. There is an appeal and we will have to wait for the second instance judgement.
So what to do, sell? THEThe Chinese government has already said yes would oppose a forced sale of TikTok.
Political fronts pushing for a ban cite national security concerns over Chinese ownership of the app. In particular, they mentioned the possibility of the Chinese government accessing American users’ data and using the app to spread propaganda or influence foreign elections. Argument that is dismantled by the possibility forthe Chinese government to access much of the same data simply by purchasing it from a data broker.
A matter of national security
Then there is the most pregnant topic at the moment, namely the accusation that TikTok was brainwashing young Americans with anti-Israeli content in the early days of the war between Israel and Hamas. That narrative seemed to reignite many fears about TikTok’s power as a propaganda tool.
All-video social media is arguably the most influential online platform in the United States and will not be easily replaced. If TikTok were to disappear, other platforms will try to fill the void that will be created on the web. The main suspects are Goolge and Meta, as the Washington Post writes. Meta has already adapted many of TikTok’s features via Reels, and Google’s YouTube has its own video shorts format, but neither has the cultural clout that TikTok has right now.
How TikTok achieved the ‘American Dream’
Many larger creators—those with resources, managers, and a huge following—will be able to move to another platform if they haven’t already. Everyone else may see things change more dramatically. The strength of the Chinese social network lies in the power of its feed: it is able to recommend videos of ‘small caliber’ accounts, which means that you don’t need to have millions of followers to win others and above all you don’t need to have professionally created content to have success.
The constant threat of a ban, however, has generated another effect to the advantage of other platforms, YouTube above all. Users began to experiment with additional services from other apps, gradually reducing the content on TikTok and other platforms began to adapt their formats to those of TikTok.