To many, news of a possible TikTok ban in the United States sounds rather like a crack of doom. Even those of us outside of the US, whether fond of the app or not, can appreciate the drama of such a move when we consider TikTok’s influence over contemporary society and culture. The consequences, positive or negative, would be far-reaching; the crater left behind would be a large one.
In reality, the ‘ban’ is a touch more complicated: on March 13th, the US House of Representatives passed a bill (by a convincing majority, with 352 representatives voting in favour, and only 65 voting against) which would force TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, to divest its shares in the platform—failure to do so within six months would then result in the app being banned. The bill has yet to go through the Senate, however, President Biden has confirmed he would sign the bill should it reach his desk.
The bill is ostensibly driven by security concerns surrounding ByteDance, a China-based company, supposedly being a ‘tool’ of the Chinese Communist Party; during his questioning of TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew in February, Republican Senator Tom Cotton insisted that TikTok is gathering data on users on behalf of the Chinese government. Indeed, concerns regarding TikTok’s collection and use of user data are neither new, nor limited to America—while no blanket ban of TikTok is currently on the cards in the UK, in March 2023 the app was banned from all UK government devices.
It’s estimated that TikTok has well over a billion users worldwide, of which around 170 million are US users. Practically every corner of modern culture—whether it be news, politics, art or lifestyle content—can and has been condensed into a fifteen-second to three-minute video. The publishing industry, for instance, has seen the way books are consumed and advertised profoundly altered by TikTok, where the hashtag #BookTok has over 200 billion views (think of the ‘As Seen on #BookTok’ tables in many bookshops nowadays). For up-and-coming music artists, promoting their music through the platform is now more or less non-negotiable, with every budding musician on TikTok claiming to have written the ‘song of the summer’; similarly, TikTok has reconfigured the fashion industry by becoming the space where the majority of trends and styles are generated and participated in. Did you have a ‘tomato-girl summer’? Are you an ‘eclectic grandpa’?
Since it seems to have become the place where a sizeable amount of our popular culture is produced, a TikTok ban in the US would have significant economic implications—not least for the thousands of influencers whose livelihoods are tied to the platform. But the perhaps more sinister consequences are brought to light when we consider that TikTok has, for better or for worse, become a central source of news for many Americans. A 2023 study by Pew Research found the share of adults regularly getting their news from TikTok quadrupling between 2020 and 2023, while a third of 18-to-29-year-olds says they regularly get their news from TikTok.
Though it’s arguably a flawed platform for performing such a function—potential circulation of misinformation aside, a 30-second video is hardly the optimal format by which to deliver a nuanced news story—the fact is that the news does reach people through TikTok. Therefore, the prospect of the US government banning a site on which many people rely for their reception of information surrounding current affairs—even as Biden’s 2024 presidential campaign utilises the app—ought to worry all of us. The precedent it sets surrounding freedom of expression and the flow of information is a dangerous one.
From a personal perspective, deleting TikTok has admittedly had incredibly positive effects on my mental wellbeing. Few of us who have used the app for any length of time would deny its capacity to feel like a sinkhole, into which an alarming amount of hours in our day seem to disappear in the blink of an eye, or that the short-form style of its content had reduced our attention spans almost to the point of oblivion. However, these detrimental effects are not the motivation behind—nor would they be grounds for—the potential ban. Though TikTok’s flaws and dangers may be extensive, its presence is surely the lesser of two evils when compared to a situation wherein governments are capable of simply banning platforms as integral to the dissemination of news and culture as TikTok has come to be.
Whatever happens, the threat of TikTok’s sudden disappearance in the US serves to highlight the rapidity with which it has cemented its relevance in our society; the repercussions of such a decision would inevitably reach our side of the pond, where far from being the end of the matter, the fate of TikTok in the US would likely mark only the beginning of a conversation surrounding governments’ abilities to shape and suppress our public spaces in the age of social media.