TikTok creators have been left waiting anxiously while awaiting a decision on the potential platform ban and its impact on their livelihoods.
Creators and small businesses are anxiously waiting to find out whether TikTok will be banned in the United States this month.
The fate of the short-form video app will be decided by the US Supreme Court after Congress passed a law last year requiring TikTok’s Chinese-based parent company ByteDance to divest from the app or face a ban.
The case is about whether that law violates the First Amendment of the US Constitution, which guarantees free speech.
The US government, which sees the platform as a national security risk, says it does not.
TikTok has said the “Constitution is on our side” and that a ban would “silence 170 million Americans’ voices”.
Creators say potential ban is ‘hard to accept’
If the government prevails as it did in a lower court, TikTok says it would shut down its US platform by January 19, leaving creators scrambling to redefine their futures.
“A lot of my other creative friends, we’re all like freaking out. But I’m staying calm,” said Gillian Johnson, who benefited financially from TikTok’s live feature and rewards programme, which helped creators generate higher revenue potential by posting high-quality original content.
The 22-year-old filmmaker and recent college graduate uses her TikTok earnings to help fund her equipment for projects such as camera lens and editing software for her short films “Gambit” and “Awaken! My Neighbour”.
Johnson said the idea of TikTok going away is “hard to accept”.
Many creators have taken to TikTok to voice their frustrations, grappling with the possibility that the platform they’ve invested so much in could soon disappear.
Online communities risk being disrupted, and the economic fallout could especially be devastating for those who have left full-time jobs to build careers and incomes around their content.
For some, the uncertainty has led them to question whether to continue creating content at all, according to Johnson, who says she knows creators who have been thinking about quitting.
But Nicola Bartoli, the vice president of sales at The Influencer Marketing Factory, said the creators she has interreacted with have not been too worried since news about a potential TikTok ban has come up repeatedly over the years and then died down.
“I believe a good chunk think it is not going to happen,” said Bartoli, whose agency works to pair influencers and brands.
How quickly could the decision come?
It’s unclear how quickly the Supreme Court will issue a decision. But the court could act swiftly to block the law from going into effect if at least five of the nine justices deem it unconstitutional.
President-elect Donald Trump, for his part, has already asked the justices to put a pause on the ban so he could weigh in after he takes office.
In a brief written by his pick for solicitor general, Trump called the First Amendment implications of a TikTok ban “sweeping and troubling” and said he wants a “negotiated resolution” to the issue, something the Biden administration had pursued to no avail.
Yet during his first term, Trump tried to ban the platform through executive order.
While waiting for the dust to settle in Washington, some creators are exploring alternative ways to promote themselves or their businesses.
Despite fears about the fate of TikTok, industry analysts note creators are generally avoiding making any big changes, like abandoning the platform, until something actually happens.
If the Supreme Court does not delay the ban, as Trump is asking them to do, app stores and internet service providers would be required to stop providing service to TikTok by January 19.
That means anyone who doesn’t have TikTok on their phone would be unable to download it. TikTok users would continue to have access, but the prohibitions, which will prevent them from updating the app, will eventually make the app “unworkable,” the Justice Department has said.
TikTok said in court documents that it estimates a one-month shutdown would cause the platform to lose approximately a third of its daily users in the US.
The company argues a shutdown, even if temporary, will cause it irreparable harm, a legal bar used by judges to determine whether to put the brakes on a law facing a challenge. In under three weeks, Americans will know if the Supreme Court agrees.
