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For online personality Erika Thompson, TikTok is the most powerful social media platform for educating her 11 million followers about her life’s passion: bees.
Losing the platform in the US – made more likely after the Supreme Court upheld a ban that is set to take effect next week – would be “significant” financially for Ms Thompson, a beekeeper in Texas, but it also represents a loss of an educational tool. .
“There are a lot of other people on the platform providing educational content or informational content,” she told the BBC. “That’s the biggest loss and that’s what we need to focus on, beyond the financial aspect, it’s the loss that we’ll definitely feel as a community — the people who use TikTok.”
About 170 million Americans use the app and website. Unless China-based parent company ByteDance sells the platform or intervention comes from the executive branch, the platform is set to disappear in the United States on Sunday.
The social media giant’s fate was left in the hands of the US Supreme Court after Democratic and Republican lawmakers voted to ban the video-sharing app last year, over concerns about its links to the Chinese government and concerns about the app being a video-sharing tool. National security risk.
TikTok has repeatedly stated that it does not share information with Beijing.
But users and content creators say the social media platform has grown into a staple of the community — and has helped ordinary users grab the spotlight with millions of followers. It has quickly become a favorite social media outlet for some and a major source of revenue for others.
Now they worry what will happen if the ban is not stopped.
Creators who make a living from social media apps told the BBC that TikTok is the superior platform.
That was true for Ms. Thompson, whose first TikTok video garnered more than 50 million views in the first 24 hours after it was posted.
“I haven’t had the same success on other platforms,” she said. “I could post the exact same video on Instagram, for example, and not even come close to sharing.”
Ross Smith, who shares funny videos with his 98-year-old grandmother to more than 24 million followers on TikTok, described it as one of the few platforms where it’s easy to become a content creator.
“You can find success overnight,” he said on TikTok.
Smith told the BBC that other platforms trying to replicate the short swipe format found on TikTok have yet to achieve success. Mrs. Thompson agreed.
“I rarely hear about people going viral on Instagram, or someone creating a big buzz on Instagram, but these are words you hear a lot on TikTok,” Thompson said.
Cody James, a fashion celebrity with tens of thousands of followers on TikTok, told the BBC that audiences do not necessarily move from one platform to another.
James told the BBC: “I know someone who has hundreds of thousands of TikTok followers and maybe only ten thousand on Instagram.”
Many content creators live off the income they earn from TikTok.
Some told the BBC that their lives would change in an extraordinary way without the platform.
Nicole Bloomgarden, a fashion designer and artist, told the BBC that when brands and companies want advertising content from a creator, they want those creators to post on TikTok.
“Indirectly, TikTok has been the majority of my income because all the brands want to promote their stuff on the app,” Bloomgarden said.
It’s not statistically clear whether the most lucrative source of income for content creators is TikTok, but many have told the BBC that it makes up a significant portion of their revenue.
2022 survey from the creator-focused startup Linktreefound that about 12% of full-time creators earn more than $50,000 annually from their social media platforms.
About 46% said they earned less than $1,000, the poll of 9,500 people found.
This is not the first time a major social media platform has disappeared.
In 2017, Vine — a platform where users could share videos up to six seconds long — was shut down.
For the creatives at the time, it was a shock.
Q Park, a content creator with 37.7 million followers on TikTok, was one of those people.
He spent years building a following on Vine — the only platform he used at the time — and when it disappeared, he said, “I felt like my whole business had stopped.”
But in some ways, it was good for him, too. It forced him to learn how to create different content for different audiences.
“This experience showed me that if you believe in your ability to create content, you will be able to build a following elsewhere,” Park told the BBC.
As the ban approached, some creators began flocking to another Chinese platform, rednote – A TikTok competitor popular with young people in China, Taiwan and other Mandarin-speaking populations.
RedNote was the most downloaded app on the Apple App Store in the US earlier this week.
While some creators are diversifying where they post in hopes of growing audiences elsewhere, others are hoping the ban doesn’t come to fruition.
“TikTok is a beast,” Park said. “Part of me thinks it might be too big to fail.”
“It will be revived somehow. It’s a very big economy now.”
Additional reporting by Grace Dean and Natalie Jimenez.
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2025-01-18 00:06:00
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