GEN Z REVOLT
TikTok users react to U.S.’ potential ban on Chinese company.
Since Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told Fox News on July 6 that the United States was considering banning TikTok over national security concerns, a sentiment echoed by President Donald Trump in an interview last week, TikTok users have been scrambling.
Some have engaged in open revolt, retaliating by posting negative reviews of Trump’s 2020 campaign app. The app received more than 700 negative reviews Wednesday and only 26 positive ones, according to data from the analytics firm Sensor Tower. It currently has a one-star rating.
“For Gen Z and millennials, TikTok is our clubhouse, and Trump threatened it,” Yori Blacc, a 19-year-old TikTok user in California, told Time in an interview about the app ratings. “If you’re going to mess with us, we will mess with you.”
Suspicion of TikTok, which is owned by Chinese company ByteDance, has come from the private sector, too. Amazon asked its employees to delete TikTok from any phone that can “access company email,” according to a memo obtained by The New York Times. Several Amazon employees expressed disappointment at the request on Twitter. (Hours later, the company backtracked and said the email had been sent in error.)
Beneath the users’ frustration, though, there is anxiety.
For many young people, TikTok has been an outlet for creative expression and human connection, especially throughout months of distance learning and social isolation.
“If TikTok did shut down, it would be like losing a bunch of really close friends I made, losing all the progress and work I did to get a big following,” said Ashleigh Hunniford, 17, who has more than 400,000 followers on the app.
There are also those for whom TikTok is their livelihood. “It has put food on our table,” said Hootie Hurley, 21, who has more than 1.1 million followers on the app. He said that a TikTok ban would be particularly devastating right now.
Influencers who watched the fall of Vine, another popular short-form video app, in 2016 learned the importance of diversifying one’s audience across platforms. But even for TikTok’s biggest stars, moving an audience from one platform to another is a huge undertaking.
“I have 7 million followers on TikTok, but it doesn’t translate to every platform,” said Nick Austin, 20. “I only have 3 million on Instagram and 500,000 on YouTube. No matter what, it’s going to be hard to transfer all the people I have on TikTok.”
In addition to giving young people a place to meet and entertain each other, TikTok has also been a platform for political and social justice issues.
“I think this will drastically affect political commentary among teenagers,” Hunniford said. “TikTok is an outlet for a lot of protest and activism and people talking about their political beliefs. Banning that would not carry well among people my age.”
While the Trump administration’s statements have upended the TikTok community, they have been a boon for other apps. Byte, a short-form video app created by one of the Vine founders, Dom Hoffman, briefly shot to the top of the app store after news of the potential TikTok ban. Influencer Elijah Daniel encouraged his followers to download the app Thursday.
Many Byte users posted welcome videos to TikTokers on the app Thursday in which they gave new users a lay of the land.
“The Byte community is being swamped with TikTokers coming in,” said Kyle Harris, 29, an avid Byte user. “A lot of TikTokers have been coming in very confused about how to use it. People expect it to be a TikTok clone, but it’s not at all. It’s not a TikTok competitor and it’s not supposed to be.”