What if No One Misses TikTok?
Over the past few weeks, as the Jan. 19 deadline loomed for the forced sale of TikTok by ByteDance, its Chinese parent company, I’ve been struck by how few Americans seem concerned about the prospect that one of the nation’s most popular social media apps will simply disappear.
Sure, there are the people calling themselves “TikTok refugees” and joining Xiaohongshu, a Chinese social media app, as a half-joking protest of the U.S. government’s decision to ban TikTok on national security grounds. (The joke part is: OK, Congress, you want to stop us from using a sketchy Chinese social media app? We’ll download an even sketchier Chinese social media app and use that instead.)
There are the TikTok creators who fear losing their audiences and have been frantically trying to persuade their fans to follow them on Instagram and YouTube, and the e-commerce brands and drop-shippers that are going to have to find other places to sell their stuff.
And there is TikTok itself, which has been fighting to save itself in court, along with a handful of lawmakers, free-speech activists and industry groups that have argued that banning the app would do more harm than good. (On Friday, the Supreme Court unanimously upheld the law banning TikTok if it retained Chinese ownership.)
