What TikTok creators lose if the app is banned

Credit – Illustration by TIME

OOn Wednesday, President Joe Biden signed a bill that would force TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, to sell the app to a buyer in the United States within nine months or face a nationwide ban. The ban, which passed the House of Representatives on March 13 and the Senate on Wednesday, was folded into a bill that would provide billions of dollars in aid to Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan.

“The path to my desk was a difficult one. It should have been easier, and it should have been there sooner,” Biden said after signing the bill. “But in the end we did what America always does; we moved towards the moment.”

In response, ByteDance uploaded a message to Toutiao, a Chinese social media platform, saying the company “has no plans to sell,” and TikTok released a statement about X. “This unconstitutional law is a TikTok ban, and we will fight it in court,” the statement read. “We believe that the facts and the law are clearly on our side, and that we will ultimately prevail.” The statement noted that the ban would “devastate seven million businesses and silence 170 million Americans.”

Since TikTok gained popularity in the US in 2020, it has become a platform where creators of all kinds can quickly build a following and support businesses through the app’s revenue sharing programs, monetizing live streams and offering brand deals to go, paid partnerships and promotions. Beyond creating space for a non-traditional career path – according to a 2023 Morning consultation According to the report, 57% of Gen Z would be content creators if given the chance. TikTok is and remains a place where people can build a community. If the app is banned in the US, TikTok creators say they worry about losing more than just a revenue stream. The app has been a crucial resource for people to come together to share information, educate others on a wide range of topics, develop their business and brand identities, and fundraise and organize like-minded individuals around various humanitarian issues.

While TikTok’s path remains unclear, the app’s creators are either laughing their way through a potential ban or trying not to worry too much about something they have no control over. TIME spoke with a few TikTokers, who have used their platforms in different ways, to discuss what they fear losing and how they plan to move forward.

Small businesses will feel the impact of a TikTok ban

TikTok has been integral to the reach of many small businesses in the US. According to a March 2024 report from Oxford Economics, which surveyed 1,050 small business owners and 7,500 TikTok users to find out how they “interact with the app and leverage its economic and social opportunities.” offers”, more than seven million companies use TikTok to promote their products. More than half of survey respondents said TikTok has helped them reach new audiences they otherwise wouldn’t have been able to tap into, while 45% of respondents said a “meaningful part of the success and/or growth of their business is directly attributable to their TikTok marketing efforts.”

Nadya Okamoto, a TikTok creator with more than four million followers and co-founder of the lifestyle care brand August, says TikTok has been able to help her business “unlock so much growth.” This is because ads on platforms like Instagram and Facebook are oversaturated and expensive to run, while TikTok allowed her company to promote her products organically. “Platforms like TikTok that are very focused on organic brand awareness create overnight virality and give anyone the opportunity to build a following to help small businesses,” she says. “TikTok has been especially important when it comes to community building. I’ve found so much community with other Asian creators, other queer creators, and other female founders, and I think it’s because short video allows people to do a little more storytelling.

TikTok is an integral space where marginalized communities can organize

TikTok has more than 170 million users in the US and the platform enables rapid community building. “With TikTok you can start something almost immediately and you have support. I think this scares a lot of our political class because we use it to stand up for ourselves against them,” said Imani Barbarin, a disability rights activist with more than 696,000 followers on TikTok. “Without TikTok, that community building and advocacy work would be lost.”

Because of TikTok’s ability to make even the most innocent videos go viral, the app has become a place for different perspectives and lives to be shared, allowing users to interact with people they might not otherwise encounter. For Barbarin and her community of young activists, TikTok offers an online space in a physical world where it feels like “everyone has forgotten us.” Younger disability advocates on the platform are growing up and sharing their experiences in real time.

“We are learning more about each other and how to navigate systems that were built without us in mind or at the very least isolate us from society,” Barbarin says. “The reality is that the more we see each other, the more we connect, the more we work together to create a future where we can all live sustainably. That scares a lot of people in power because they make money off our desperation and our interconnectedness.”

TikTok also offers several opportunities to raise and earn money. In November 2023, 28-year-old AR creator Jourdan Johnson raised $14,000 in 10 days with her viral “Filter For Good,” an effect in which the creators traced a watermelon along a squiggly line and collected seeds.

The filter monetized qualified views through TikTok’s Effect Creator Rewards program. It could only be used once a day and it started making money after being used more than 200,000 times. The effect became popular almost immediately, and Johnson quickly reached the maximum amount the filter could generate through the program in less than two weeks. Johnson, who donated to Doctors Without Borders and bought eSIMs to help the people of Gaza, says it was one small way she could use her skills to provide relief. “We’ve seen how people can organize for different causes and issues that they are passionate about and believe in,” she says. “It just so happens that the issue now is about the actual platform we are on.”

Grassroots organizers have also found success on TikTok, forming a new generation of activists. Gen Z for Change, which has been on the app since October 2020, organizes young voters and focuses on issues ranging from climate justice, gun safety, worker and economic rights, and rights for marginalized communities. The group’s TikTok following has grown to more than 1.8 million since launching in 2020, as they continue to educate followers on political issues affecting Generation Z.

“The Gen Z for Change audience has grown with the page itself,” said Anthony Guevara, head of engagement and Gen-Z Por El Cambio coordinator. The latter is an initiative aimed at Latino Gen Z and provides resources such as combating misinformation and educating young Latinos on issues like early voting and higher education. “People who have been following the page since 2020 have seen the progress the page has made and still needs to make.”

He says this kind of growth wouldn’t really happen on a platform like X or Instagram, as multiple polls have shown that Generation Z uses TikTok as their main source of news.

However, the Gen Z for Change team still relies on other social platforms like Instagram to spread the word about various initiatives. The coalition recently launched a tool that sends daily emails to representatives using Apple Shortcuts, calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. After downloading the tool on Shortcuts, users are prompted to enter their congressional district and emails are automatically sent daily to representatives who have not signed the ceasefire resolution in the House of Representatives. The tool has been used about 10 million times, meaning between 25 and 30 million emails have been sent to reps, said Sofia Ongele, director of strategy at Gen Z for Change.

But without TikTok, they risk losing a digital space for community and connecting with like-minded individuals around the world. The United States gives ByteDance a minimum of nine months to sell to a buyer in the United States. If not, the app will be banned. It’s unclear exactly how that will happen, but a total ban on TikTok is proving difficult as the US government faces many challenges enforcing it. There will be legal battles, problems with antitrust enforcers, and public divisions. If the ban goes ahead, the app won’t disappear from people’s phones, but it will disappear from the app store. This means that the platform would not be able to update the app, nor keep it up to date, and it would slowly become unusable. Lawmakers on both sides have cited national security concerns as the biggest reason for supporting the ban.

But Ongele says this ban feels like “a performative connection to a larger problem, which is the lack of regulation on social media.” She continues, “I don’t think banning an app that many people have used to raise money for each other, raise awareness about various issues, and hold people accountable after incidents of police brutality is even remotely can be argued as an action taken to meet the greater needs of the people.”

Write to Moises Mendez II at moises.mendez@time.com.