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âIt took the air out of meâ: How TikTok creators reacted to the chaotic one-night ban
TikTok is back online in the US after a last-minute promise from President-elect Trump. But TikTok creators now fear he will lean on the app to serve his own interests, Io Dodds reports
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James Rose was still livestreaming to her TikTok followers on Saturday night when the app suddenly shut down ahead of schedule.
"It kind of felt like I was a violin player on the deck of the Titanic," the 29-year-old actress and TikTok creator, who uses she/they pronouns, tells The Independent. "A lot of us were on live, because we were like: 'we're going down with this ship'."
Some users had donned ostentatious mourning garb to attend TikTok's "funeral." Others were still frantically downloading their favourite videos, or their own data. One prominent influencer posted a teary farewell message, saying: "I feel like Iâm going through heartbreak...I cried myself to sleep last night."
Then, at 10:38pm Eastern Time on Saturday night â more than an hour before the US law banning TikTok actually came into force â Rose's live stream cut out. In its place was a pop-up citing the new law and expressing hope that Donald Trump would find a solution.
For Rose and many other TikTok creators, it was an emotional gut punch, wiping out years of work finding a voice, cultivating an audience, and learning how to monetize it.
Now, confusingly, TikTok is back â at least for the time being. After Trump promised to grant the app's Chinese owners more time to find a U.S. buyer, TikTok said on Sunday morning that it had been given the "necessary clarity" to begin restoring service to its 170m U.S. users.
But with the app's fate now resting on the caprice of a famously mercurial president â who may not even have the legal authority to save it â creators fear that there is still an axe hanging over their heads.
"Okay, we're still here. But for how long?" says Joel Bervell, a 29-year-old recently graduated medical doctor in Portland, Oregon, who uses TikTok to debunk medical myths and educate users about racial disparities in healthcare.
"At any point, the Trump administration can take away what they seem to have given in their good graces, and I worry that they're going to use it as bargaining chip for whatever thing he wants it to do."
âI completely owe my success today to TikTokâ
"Sorry, TikTok isn't available right now," read the pop-up shown to users on Saturday night. "A law banning TikTok has been enacted in the U.S. Unfortunately, that means you can't use TikTok for now.
"We are fortunate that President Trump has indicated that he will work with us on a solution to reinstate TikTok once he takes office. Please stay tuned!"
Shari Dyonne, a 26-year-old full-time lifestyle influencer in Atlanta, Georgia had been expecting the message. But seeing it actually happen was something else.
"It almost took all the air out of me for a second," she tells The Independent. "Looking at my account that I've been building for two and a half years now, and seeing that I can't access it and I can't connect with my audience â I don't even think I can put words to it."
Sincerely Awa, a 27-year-old TikTok creator and activist based in Brooklyn, New York, was working at a wedding on Saturday night when she saw the pop-up during a break. Sheâd expected the company to make some deal behind the scenes to satisfy U.S. politicians, and hadnât believed the ban would actually happen. âI was in disbelief,â she says.
According to research commissioned by TikTok, an estimated 39 per cent of American small businesses consider the app "critical" to their livelihoods. As well as advertising and shopping, the app generates income for online influencers through brand endorsements and the Creator Rewards Program, which directly shares ad revenue with some video makers.
"I completely owe my success today to TikTok," says Dyonne. "it's kind of everything to me."
Full-time infleuncer Shari Dyonne, 26, says she âcompletelyâ owes her success to TikTok. ( Shari Dyonne via Kensington Grey )Both Rose and Dyonne say they would survive a TikTok ban. Rose makes most of their money from acting and writing, whereas Dyonne has diversified her social media presence enough to make it a disruption but not a disaster.
But that is not the case for everyone. "I have a lot of creative friends who do it full time, where TikTok is literally 100 per cent of their income," says Bervell, who relied on the app to help pay for his student loans, textbooks, and living expenses while studying for his medical degree.
Maybe Burke, a 32-year-old gender inclusion consultant in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, says she doesnât make much money from TikTok directly. But nearly all of her clients in the past year have come from people who saw her videos there, and in the short term sheâs worried sheâd lose a lot of business.
âI've gotten clients through LinkedIn and Instagram as well... but nothing grows like Tik Tok grows,â she says. âYou can grow crazy numbers from one video doing well. TikTok is the stock market; Instagram is like a high-yield savings account.â
Indeed, Rose argues that TikTok's unusual structure and its powerful algorithm made it uniquely friendly to people from marginalized backgrounds to break out and go viral even without spending years building up a following.
Joel Bervell, a 29-year-old medical doctor in Portland, Oregon, uses TikTok to debunk medical myths, but is sceptical about the appâs future. (Joel Bervell via Kensington Grey)Rival apps such as Instagram build your news feed around who you choose to follow, meaning that fame tends to build gradually upon fame. TikTok, by contrast, does not require you to follow anyone, instead relying on a famously unpredictable algorithm that can pluck any video from obscurity and shove it in front of millions of people.
"So many of us have the opportunities, the resources, the income streams, the platforms that we do because of folks that decided to support us on this app, and because of how unique that algorithm was," says Rose.
"People saying 'oh, you just need to diversify' fundamentally misunderstand why TikTok was uniquely valuable."
From âChinese propagandaâ to pro-Trump?
In a post from his own social network Truth Social on Sunday morning, Donald Trump vowed to issue an executive order granting the app a temporary reprieve as soon as he takes office on Monday.
"Iâm asking companies not to let TikTok stay dark!" he said, promising "no liability" for TikTok's service providers and advocating for the U.S. government itself to take a 50 per cent stake in the app. Within hours, TikTok was accessible in the US once again.
It's not clear how Trump can legally spare the app, except by simply refusing to enforce a law that was passed by both houses of Congress and approved by the Supreme Court. Republicans in Congress pushed back against his statement, saying he had "no legal basis" to offer TikTok an extension.
Nevertheless, TikTok has taken to praising Trump in its public statements in an apparent effort to butter him up. Its CEO Shou Chew was even invited to Trump's inauguration, suggesting there is desire on both sides to figure out a deal.
The chaotic situation gives creators little certainty that TikTok will stay open, or at least stay the same. "No, of course I don't feel confident in that," says Rose. "I feel like it will bend and sway to the whims of people's political agendas and it will continue to be used as a pawn to enact political warfare against the working class."
Indeed, Dyonne and Bervell worry that TikTok might change its algorithms or moderation rules to appease Donald Trump, similar to the transformation of X (formerly Twitter) under Elon Musk or the recent conservative-friendly reforms at Facebook and Instagram.
That could tilt the social media ecosystem even further towards the political right. A recent study by the Pew Research Center found that TikTok was the only big online platform where more news influencers identify as left-leaning than conservative.
"You could argue that my platform, which talks about healthcare and how it affects people of colour, is 'DEI'," says Bervell. "So if the Trump administration starts telling social media to restrict those conversations, what does that mean for someone like myself?
"Is TikTok now going to be putting out a view of the administration that isn't totally accurate, or that is propaganda? Will this become an arm of the government that is now used to get specific ideas across?
"No one knows the answer, but those are all fears that creators I've talked to are feeling."
James Rose, 29, was livestreaming their farewell to the app when it suddenly went dark on Saturday night. (James Rose )Similarly, Burke says sheâs scared that a Trump-friendly TikTok will censor LGBT+ voices more than before, after years of being âone of the better platformsâ for queer creators to voice their beliefs.
âI believe that itâs going to turn into very conservative, very right-wing type of messages, and itâs going to be very controlled and censored,â says Awa. âItâs about to get really weird and crazy on the app.â
That would be ironic, given that one major rationale for the TikTok ban was the fear that it could be used as a covert channel of Chinese propaganda. But perhaps no more ironic than Trump presenting himself as the saviour of TikTok when he was the one who kickstarted U.S. attempts to ban it in 2020.
Both Dyonne and Rose expressed frustration at the U.S. political establishment for pushing this ban, saying it grates that a Congress unwilling to stop school shootings or codify a national right to abortion can nevertheless ban a popular social media app with bipartisan support.
Yet while Rose doesn't think Trump will get much credit from young Americans for swooping in to âsaveâ the app, others arenât so sure.
"I one thousand per cent think it's going to play that way," says Dyonne. "Even if he does save the app, my support would not go to him. [But] my fear is that people will immediately start flocking to him... forgetting who he is and what he's done because they're so happy about this app."
Burke agrees: âI do think itâs going to work on people. Itâs theatrics, itâs political theatre, and I think what we learned in this last election is that more and more people are buying tickets for the show.â
