An Obituary for TikTok
With a TikTok ban going in effect on January 19, millions of Americans will lose access to one of the most transformative social platforms of our lifetime. During its short 6.5 year life, TikTok forever changed culture, business, politics, and the entire internet landscape. It gave tens of millions of people a voice and the ability to effect change for the first time. No other social platform has come close to its reach and impact in such a short time.
When the short-form video app Musical.ly rebranded and relaunched as TikTok in the summer of 2018 after being acquired by the Chinese tech conglomerate Bytedance, it wasn’t immediately clear what role the app would play in the social landscape. Musical.ly, while among the most popular social apps for young people at the time, primarily attracted teenagers making lip syncing videos to share with friends. Instagram and YouTube were dominant and the social media landscape felt stagnant.
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Bytedance began pouring millions into marketing TikTok to a broader U.S. user base throughout 2019, and the app caught on quickly. The first trend to take hold on TikTok happened the week it transformed over to Musical.ly. Known as “Bad Boy Weekend,” the trend featured men transforming themselves from good to “bad boys” set to the tune of the song “Good Girls Bad Guys” by Falling In Reverse. A movement (brief), and a platform (major), was born.
Unlike every other social media app that has come before it, TikTok is not a social platform built on followers. Instead of relying on users to follow people on the platform, the app delivers content through an algorithmically curated “For You” page. You don’t need a single follower for your video to go viral on TikTok, nor do you need to follow anyone to receive a steady stream of content tailored to you.
This small change upended the tech landscape. It allowed any user, regardless of their social clout or level of fame, to reach millions at the click of the button. It democratized content creation by letting those without a platform reach millions in a near instant. While apps like Instagram and YouTube were bloated with legacy influencers, TikTok’s algorithm began surfacing new talent at a breakneck pace. The app soon became a star factory, launching the careers of hundreds of top Gen Z influencers across dozens of genres.
TikTok’s focus on algorithmic discovery rather than a following feed sent Silicon Valley CEOs scrambling. Its highly addictive system of delivering content prompted Meta, YouTube, and Snapchat to roll out features that aimed to clone TikTok within their platforms. None, however, have succeeded.
The power of TikTok’s algorithm could be seen most clearly by late 2019, with the rise of Charli D’Amelio and the Hype House, a collective of Gen Z TikTok stars who all lived together in a mansion in Los Angeles. D’Amelio, the breakout star of the group, was a teenager in Connecticut whose dance videos went viral. The Hype House was just one of a slew of TikTok content houses that cropped up in cities like L.A. and Atlanta. There was the Sway House, a house full of Gen Z male TikTok stars and the Collab Crib, an all-Black content house in Atlanta.
TikTok’s unique “duet” and “stitch” functionalities, where users can riff off each other’s content and react and reply to each other’s videos, also made the platform a hub for discourse. By 2020, the app was playing a major role in politics as it emerged as a powerful political arena for Gen Z. It served as a lifeline for millions during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, allowing people stuck at home to communicate with and entertain each other. It also provided an economic engine, allowing countless Americans to launch small businesses and careers as content creators while the outside world was shut down.
Discussions of a ban owing to TikTok’s Chinese ownership started during the first Trump presidency, though many believed that the real reason for the ban was that politically engaged young people began trolling the president with stunts like spamming fake RSVPs to a rally in Tulsa. India banned TikTok in June of that year. Later, in the fall of 2020, a coalition of hundreds of top Gen Z content creators came together under the name TikTok For Biden, successfully pushing thousands of young people to vote. The app became a hub for climate activism, labor organizing, and fights for racial justice.
By the end of 2020, TikTok had amassed about 100 million monthly active users in the U.S. and was revolutionizing creative industries. It transformed music, art, fashion, culture and beauty. It changed the very language we use, introducing new words and phrases to the lexicon like cheugy and algospeak.
Artists and record labels recognized the platform’s potential to propel songs to viral, chart-topping success. TikTok’s integration of music into user-generated content exposed the public to artists the traditional music industry may have never discovered. The app launched the careers of musicians like Lil Nas X, Olivia Rodrigo, Bella Poarch and Doja Cat.
TikTok also became a hub for fashion and beauty trends, birthing endless niche aesthetics like cottagecore, dark academia and coastal cowgirl (they are what they sound like). It became the primary place for an entire generation to learn about makeup and personal style. The platform’s visual focus and algorithmic recommendation system allowed trends to spread faster than ever before, influencing consumer behavior and even impacting fashion industry and retail decisions. Before long, stores were touting viral TikTok products in stores. The Stanley Tumblr, a drinking mug from a 110-year-old company, became a breakout hit thanks to TikTok videos boosting the product.
With #LearnOnTikTok, millions of users came to rely on TikTok as an unconventional educational tool. Educators and experts used the platform to share their knowledge on various subjects, from science and history to financial literacy. The hashtag #LearnOnTikTok garnered billions of views and forever altered how information is consumed and shared.
TikTok’s impact could be felt across the food and publishing industries. FoodTok introduced new foods and at home chefs into the public consciousness. Suddenly, people were consuming TikTok-viral recipes like baked feta pasta and cucumber salads. Meanwhile, #BookTok shot previously undiscovered literature to mass success, so much so that book chain Barnes & Noble launched a whole display table in their retail stores highlighting books popular on TikTok. The app destigmatized mental health issues and helped millions gain access to healthcare information that lead to diagnoses.
TikTok provided marginalized communities a place to bond and organize. It became a primary social platform where LGBTQ people, disabled people and other marginalized groups could share knowledge.
By 2023, TikTok was playing a major role in our economy. Thousands of retailers came to rely on TikTok shop to reach customers, and by the following year TikTok was just as much of an ecommerce platform as a social network. TikTok claims it contributed $24.2 billion to the GDP in 2023, and supported some 224,000 American jobs, according to Oxford Economics, a research firm.
Trump, who had previously sought to ban the platform, flip flopped in 2024 and came out in support of it as pro-Trump influencers on the app helped boost his messaging during the election.
Despite many Democrats, including Joe Biden, by then seeking to ban the app, Biden himself joined the platform in February 2024, becoming the first U.S. president to have a presence on TikTok. When Kamala Harris became the nominee in the summer of 2024, TikTok played a crucial role early on in her campaign by boosting Brat summer memes. TikTok music duo @casadimusic created viral remixes of politicians quotes, amassing millions of views on clips featuring remixes of comments like JD Vance’s “I’m a never Trump guy.”
TikTok solidified itself as a melting pot of creativity, where communication transcended borders and cultures. American users were able to bond with people on the ground in places like Ukraine and Gaza. But as more young people began to use the app to challenge prevailing U.S. government narratives about Israel and Gaza, more members of Congress sought to ban it.
Lawmakers, special interest groups and competitors like Meta began a concerted campaign against the platform, boosting fake non-existent TikTok challenges, which sent concerned parents into a tailspin. They claimed that the app was “brainwashing” young people to turn against the United States and its foreign policy. Never mind that young people’s attitudes on foreign policy and domestic issues had been shifting for years before the app existed. With little evidence of wrongdoing, lawmakers leaned on concerns about China potentially gaining access to U.S. user data, even as they failed to pass any sort of broader data privacy reform.
In April 2024, Joe Biden signed a law that called for Bytedance to either sell the platform (a near impossibility given the way the bill was structured) or face a ban on January 19, marking the end of what many Americans saw as access to a truly open and global internet.
Many creators and users held out hope that the Supreme Court would fail to uphold the ban. They launched campaigns and protested on the steps of the court, begging the judges to overturn the law. However, the ruling issued on Friday was a unanimous 9-0 decision to uphold the ban. In its opinion, the Supreme Court affirmed that although TikTok offers “a distinctive and expansive outlet for expression, means of engagement, and source of community,” Congress was ultimately within its rights to pass the law.
TikTok CEO Shou Chew responded to the ruling saying that the company has been, “fighting to protect the constitutional right of free speech for the more than 170 million Americans who use our platform every day to connect, create, discover and achieve their dreams.” He then thanked incoming President Trump for his “commitment to work with us to find a solution that keeps TikTok available in the United States.”
The impact of the ban will certainly be far reaching and will alter the online landscape for years to come, as competitors seek to grab its user base — even though in recent days many of those very users have mocked and trolled those who passed the ban, including by joining actual Chinese social media platforms like RedNote. Unlike TikTok, which is based in the U.S. and Singapore and does not operate in China, RedNote is based in China and houses U.S. users in China (TikTok’s user data is stored outside of China).
TikTok’s absence in the U.S. is set to leave a void in the digital landscape that no other platform seems poised or able to fill. A generation of content creators may lose their livelihoods, many small businesses say they will go out of business. TikTok’s communities will scatter and become dispersed across myriad smaller apps and many will disappear altogether.
In that case, TikTok’s ultimate legacy was giving a voice to millions online, including those who felt previously voiceless. Love it or hate it, It changed the social fabric of the internet, and once it’s gone, it will be harder for anyone without an established platform to reach people and be heard.
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