What a TikTok Ban Really Means for Your Social Media Scrolling

TikToker Hannah Hiatt Under Investigation After Video of Her Son Goes Viral

It's been nine months since President Joe Biden signed legislation ordering TikTok's Chinese parent company ByteDance to sell the popular platform or else face a ban in the United States.

The deadline is now days away and the U.S. Supreme Court, hearing oral arguments for and against the ban on Jan. 10, sounded inclined to uphold the law. 

So, thumbs, scroll your last?

Not exactly. Though the word ban signifies that something is verboten, full stop, it's not as if TikTok's 170 million American users will go to their phones at midnight on Jan. 19, when the law is scheduled to go into effect, and the app won't be there anymore.

They'll even be able to endlessly scroll as usual, for now.

But of course not everything is going to be the same, because Congress meant business when it passed a bipartisan bill, those in favor of the ban alleging that TikTok under its current ownership poses a threat to national security.

When does the TikTok ban go into effect?

Barring intervention from the U.S. Supreme Court, the law Biden signed April 24, 2024—the Protecting Americans From Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act—is due to go into effect on Sunday, Jan. 19.

The bill gave TikTok's parent company ByteDance nine months to find a U.S.-approved buyer for the app, or else the platform would be banned in the United States.

Biden also had the power, which he didn't exercise, to ask for a 90-day extension of the deadline should it look as if a deal was imminent. Instead, President-elect Donald Trump filed an amicus brief asking the U.S. Supreme Court to postpone the deadline until after his Jan. 20 inauguration so that his administration could pursue a "political resolution."

Testifying before Congress in March 2023, TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew said the company wanted to work with the U.S. to assuage security concerns.

"I think a lot of risks that are pointed out are hypothetical and theoretical risks," he said. "Still, we have heard important concerns about the potential for unwanted foreign access to U.S. data and potential manipulation of the TikTok U.S. ecosystem. Our approach has never been to dismiss or trivialize any of these concerns. We have addressed them with real action."

Moreover, Chew said, regarding users' personal information, "We are committed to be very transparent with our users about what we collect. I don't believe what we collect is more than most players in the industry."

Chew was an honorary chair of the 2024 Met Gala last May, Vogue editor in chief Anna Wintour recognizing the force TikTok has become in the fashion world, but the app's critics continued to be unimpressed.

Hearing arguments Jan. 10, Supreme Court justices sounded skeptical of the free speech violation angle and more inclined to accept Congress' rationale that the Chinese government has too much potential access to Americans' personal data through TikTok and that users were subjectable to foreign influence through the platform's algorithm.

The law is "not saying TikTok has to stop," Chief Justice John Roberts said during the session. "They're saying China has to stop controlling TikTok."

Will it be illegal to use TikTok?

In a word, no. 

"The law really deliberately avoided saying that it was illegal to have the app on your phone," Georgia Institute of Technology professor Milton Mueller, who filed an amicus brief to the Supreme Court opposing the ban, told Wired. "Their attempt is to say nobody new can download it from the Apple or Google stores, and nobody who has it can update it through those stores. There’s nothing in the law that says, 'TikTok, you must block U.S. users.'"

In the meantime, TikTok users who are hoping this all blows over have been advised to not delete their accounts and to save any unpublished content from their drafts in the app—both so that they don't lose it in case the app stops functioning properly and in case the ban is abolished.

With the deadline fast approaching, however, app stores have seen an uptick in downloads of Lemon8, which has been compared to Pinterest and has sharing and algorithmic functions similar to Instagram and TikTok. But since Lemon8 and TikTok share an owner (you can sign into the former using your TikTok info), it could face the same fate, as the 2024 law states that any ByteDance subsidiary operating in the U.S. could end up banned as well.

Platforms like REDNote and Neptune are also angling for a piece of the scrolling pie. Otherwise, the biggest beneficiaries of a TikTok ban are existing behemoths such as Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, Alphabet, which owns YouTube, and Snap Inc. (aka Snapchat).

While one of the arguments against the ban has been that it'll severely impact the livelihoods of content creators, many TikTokers also have presences on others major platforms like YouTube and Instagram Reels.

Still, lost income is lost income, and according to a 2024 survey by Influencer Marketing Hub, TikTok is the top platform that brands use for influencer marketing. TikTok has said that creators would collectively lose $1.3 billion in the first month of a ban.

Rita Colon, a personal shopper who told NBC News she makes at least $3,000 a month through TikTok, said the platform had allowed her to be an entrepreneur who worked for herself.

"It allowed me the freedom of time," she said. And while she's on other apps, "Instagram will let you go live, but only for an hour."

Has anyone tried to buy TikTok?

Former Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, who served in the first Trump administration, gave a thumbs-up to the sell-or-be-banned bill last year. Calling TikTok "a great business," he said on CNBC in March that he was going to put together a group of investors to buy it.

"This should be owned by U.S. businesses," Mnuchin said. "There’s no way that the Chinese would ever let a U.S. company own something like this in China."

Former Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick also expressed interest, according to the Wall Street Journal, and was looking for potential partners.

Incidentally, ByteDance also said last spring that TikTok was not for sale.

But earlier this month, Shark Tank-famous investor Kevin O'Leary said he was part of a consortium spearheaded by former Dodgers owner Frank McCourt that was putting together a bid to buy the platform for an undisclosed amount.