TikTok users are trying to make the best of an increasingly dire situation as they face the shutdown of an app that has shaped their lives over the past few years ahead of the January 19 ban going into effect.
Newsweek has reached out to the Trump transition team by email on Saturday afternoon for comment about the impending ban.
Why It Matters
TikTok started out as the lip-syncing app Music.ly before Chinese-based ByteDance acquired it in 2017 and merged it with their TikTok brand, intended as an overseas alternative to its wildly popular app Douyin.
The app grew to over 1 billion monthly active users globally, with between 150 to 170 million in the United States alone. TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew has regularly touted that over 7 million businesses rely on the platform to survive.
However, American politicians raised concerns about the app’s potential for manipulation of users and data by the Chinese government, leading to the passage of the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act. The Supreme Court on Friday upheld the ban as valid even as President Joe Biden indicated he won’t enforce the ban and President-elect Donald Trump has regularly said he will look at options to avoid the ban.
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TikTok Users and the Five Stages of Grief
The reactions across what may possibly serve as the final week of the app’s operations in the U.S. have shown every one of the five stages of grief, and on the final day before the shutdown, acceptance is setting in.
The past week has proven a surreal one for TikTok’s users and creators, many of whom are struggling to understand how this proved to be the one issue that could unite Democrats and Republicans.
Denial
The Supreme Court listened to arguments about the TikTok ban last week, and users on the app by and large seemed unconvinced that the ban would actually pass. Media outlets reported the ban as likely to remain in place, but many pointed to the arguments about First Amendment protections as a saving grace.
Representative Ro Khanna, a California Democrat, and Senator Ed Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat, tried to advance a bill that would extend the deadline for TikTok to try and find a buyer or address the federal government’s concerns about privacy.
Senator Rand Paul, a Kentucky Republican, discussed a number of these efforts on Friday when he told reporters that TikTok had even offered to allow American-based tech company Oracle house American user data domestically and have an American board that would oversee operations.
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Anger
As the ban increasingly became a likely reality for users, they turned to vent their anger at the federal government and elected officials—particularly those like Senator Cory Booker, a New Jersey Democrat who voted for the ban while remaining active on the app.
User Bella Vandala, whose TikTok handle is @bella_vandala and has over 400,000 followers, vented her frustration in a video reposted on X, formerly Twitter, by Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Georgia Republican, who added that she agreed with Vandala “on many of these issues and by the way, I voted NO to the TikTok ban.”
“If TikTok being banned doesn’t radicalize you as a U.S citizen, you are intentionally missing the point, because it’s not about TikTok,” Vandala said. “It’s the fact that Republicans and Democrats across all branches can expeditiously and unanimously pull together like never before and probably never again to streamline legislation banning a social media app while completely ignoring everything important to us.”
She continued: “They can’t pull together to make my kids don’t get shot while they go to school, to fix the economy, to mandate livable wages, to kick hedge funds out of single-family homes, so I can afford my f***ing mortgage again. They’re doing f*** all about homeowner’s insurance stealing billions of dollars from Americans and then leaving them for dead while their homes wash away in a flood or burn down in a fire. But their top priority is banning social media. That’s where the effort goes.”
This resulted in the now-famous migration to the Chinese app Xiaohongshu, known in English as RedNote. Users argued that if the concern was about data, then they would simply hand over their data directly to the Chinese government (as it were), in a way calling the U.S. government’s bluff.
Those who went to RedNote experienced a cultural exchange and shock at what they saw, relating back to those still on TikTok who had not made the jump, often reposting videos back to TikTok. Most prominently, discussions about the cost-of-living dominated, with many taken aback by the apparently cheap rent and cost of good quality groceries in China.
This sparked some debate, as more skeptical users noted that Americans on RedNote are seeing a highly curated and regulated view of Chinese life, and some of those who have experience of trying to caution that not everything Americans were seeing was the reality of what was going on in China. That discussion continues into the dying moments of the app’s operation.
Bargaining
The most interesting turn potentially over the past week has seen users turn to Trump as a potential savior of the app after he initiated the concerns about TikTok in 2020 and tried to ban the app in the final months of his first administration.
“I won youth by 34 points. And there are those who say TikTok has something to do with it,” Trump said at a press conference in Mar-a-Lago after his November election victory.
He also told CNBC last year: “Frankly, there are a lot of people on TikTok that love it… There are a lot of young kids on TikTok who will go crazy without it. There are a lot of users, a lot of good, and there’s a lot of bad with TikTok.”
Trump posted a graphic of his engagement on TikTok earlier this year, revealing that he received 36 billion views on the site in 2024, and wrote: “Why would I want to get rid of TikTok?”
Users had started to accept that the app will go dark on Sunday, but many have wondered if it’ll merely be a pause rather than the full end. After all, Chew will reportedly show up to Trump’s inauguration after meeting with him recently at Mar-a-Lago.
User @allenownz, who has 3.4 million followers on TikTok, said on Friday in a video: “Trump has said he’s not going to ban TikTok, so, I don’t want to count our chickens before they hatch, but it looks like we’re going to be keeping our [for you page], we’re going to be keeping all our algorithm, we’re gonna still be seeing TikTok shop videos every single day, but we’re still going to have TikTok.”
He added: “I think we’re good to go, but for what you know, said so far, TikTok is not being banned, as it was planned. Hopefully they don’t change their minds on Sunday.”
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Depression
As an app known best for its musical connections, it shouldn’t be surprising that one of the last viral moments the app has generated is a song decrying the fact that politicians seemingly found a way to reconcile differences and prioritize banning the app over other major concerns for American citizens.
Written and performed by the band On Company Time, which has tried to gain traction on TikTok only to do so right as the app is about to go dark, the song, nicknamed the “TikTok Credits Song,” has almost 3,000 reposts that each have hundreds of thousands of likes.
The lyrics lament the various issues in the U.S.—”Heightened racial tensions, the Electoral College rigged elections, the crisis in the East [a reference to the Israel-Gaza crisis], drugs in the food we eat” in addition to global warming, access to health care, “corruption at the top, citizens getting shot”—only to arrive at the conclusion that the “biggest problem’s TikTok” and that “with all that’s going on right now it’s the perfect time for banning TikTok.”
One user, @_mama_bear_4, earlier this week posted that it “f***ing blows” because “thousands and thousands of people are going to be fired if TikTok gets banned and none of us will be able to get unemployment.”
She added: “Even if they make another app like this, we’re all going to have to start over from scratch. It took a lot of time and hard work to build the communities we have. It took a lot of hard work to learn how to monetize the app, and just like that, we’re fired.”
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Acceptance
The last few days have seen acceptance start to settle in for creators and users, with each sharing advice on alternative platforms (besides RedNote) and taking a surprising confessional turn.
Most creators have urged their followers to find them on YouTube or Instagram, where they likely will try to continue their work through the Shorts and Reels feature on each respective platform, as well as those who are trying to build a presence on the X, formerly Twitter, alternative BlueSky, created by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey.
On Saturday, creators started urging each other to save whatever posts they’ve made or any draft posts they started but might not have access to on Sunday when the ban may kick in, at which point TikTok has reportedly advised that the app will simply go dark.
Users have taken the chance to throw out their last thoughts and takes on various issues, believing it to be a safe space if the app is going to disappear. Some compared the tone of the app over the past few days to the famous scene in Titanic in which the string quartet decides to keep playing even as the ship sinks.
Ultimately, many seem to understand that even if the president has said he won’t enforce the ban, it is possible that after midnight on Saturday, they will lose access to a platform that has shaped their lives for the past few years.
This has led to the trend, the “TikTok funeral trend,” in which users eulogize the app.
Therapist Jeff Guenther, @theraphyjeff on TikTok who has 2.8 million followers, posted on Saturday to thank users and say goodbye: “Being seen, valued and validated by random TikTokers in ways yearned for from my family gave me the last bit of strength to set a boundary that has brought me so much relief. I cannot be more thankful for all my sweet and supportive followers. Every little view, every single like, every comment you left on my videos brought so much joy into my life. I have so much gratitude for you.”
What People Are Saying
TikTok told Newsweek in an emailed statement: “The statements issued today by both the Biden White House and the Department of Justice have failed to provide the necessary clarity and assurance to the service providers that are integral to maintaining TikTok’s availability to over 170 million Americans. Unless the Biden Administration immediately provides a definitive statement to satisfy the most critical service providers assuring non-enforcement, unfortunately TikTok will be forced to go dark on January 19.”
Senator Rand Paul told reporters on Friday: “I do believe that banning a social media app like TikTok is a violation of the First Amendment. I haven’t had a chance to read the ruling yet, but very disappointed. One hundred seventy million Americans express themselves on TikTok on a daily basis, and it’s just wrong for the government to ban it. Most of the reasons the government banned it were based on accusations, not proof. They’ve never been tried and found guilty of sharing information with the communist government or any of that.”
Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene wrote on X: “TikTok will be banned after this weekend. I was one of the few who voted NO to the TikTok ban.”
Alex Pearlman, @pearlmania500 and has 2.8 million followers on TikTok, told The Philadelphia Inquirer: “No one involved in this decision, writing this law, or this law’s enforcement understands the schism that just happened between the American people and our country’s ‘tech bro overlords.'”
He added: “With today’s unanimous Supreme Court decision, after overwhelming bipartisan support …and having both presidents over the last eight years at one point or another push for it, our nation’s political leadership has shown that they cannot trust the American people to freely communicate with one another in front of the rest of the world.”
What Happens Next
Kevin O’Leary, the multi-millionaire investor of Shark Tank fame, has offered to buy TikTok for $20 billion cash. During an appearance on Friday’s episode of Fox News’ America’s Newsroom, he revealed the offer, calling it the “obvious solution” to sell the platform “to an American syndicate as per the order.”
However, Trump on Saturday during an interview with NBC News said he is “most likely” going to give TikTok a 90-day extension, which would theoretically give the app enough time to resolve its situation.
