The platform has come to dominate online culture, but in the face of a US ban and pressure from the Trump administration, no one seems to be defending it. How do you fight for – and against – a shadow?
For a brief period on 18 January, TikTok went dark in the United States. This was in keeping with the ‘Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act’, a law requiring the divestiture of the app’s Chinese parent company, ByteDance. Service was rapidly restored, accompanied by a sycophantic pop-up shown to all users that gives credit to the incoming US president. Many wondered, had ByteDance choreographed the outage to flatter his ego? Now Donald Trump, who first put banning TikTok on the agenda five years ago, promises to bully-broker a deal that would ‘save’ TikTok, while suspending the effects of the law for the app’s backend service providers; those based in the US would otherwise be subject to steep financial penalties.
The rationale for this increasingly unpopular ban remains somewhat a mystery. The announced reasons – to protect the 170 million Americans who use it from foreign spying and influence operations – are transparently ridiculous, given the federal government’s longstanding indifference to similar abuses enabled by domestic and other tech companies and data brokers. So instead we have speculation: is the ban a form of economic protectionism for US social media companies, or perhaps a ruse to compel TikTok’s sale to one of its American rivals? Or is the ban meant to punish TikTok for permitting pro-Palestinian views to circulate, or to silence its preponderance of leftist voices? A recent Pew study, cited by journalist Taylor Lorenz in this impassioned defence of TikTok’s ‘creator economy’, found that TikTok was the only major platform where ‘news influencers who explicitly identify as right-leaning do not outnumber those who publicly express a left-leaning political ideology’.
Given that it’s not clear what it’s for or who even supports it anymore, the ban has failed to trigger a cohesive protest movement to prevent it. It’s hard to commit much energy to fighting a shadow. Some TikTok users joked and complained – in TikTok posts, as if there were nothing else to do but go down with a ship they crew but don’t control. All the hours users have put in on the app producing and consuming its content, they grimly realized, have given them no say in its governance or future. And though it hasn’t gone so far as Meta in flaunting its refusal to protect users vulnerable to hate speech and other attacks, TikTok’s content moderation practices are hardly transparent. It’s hard to commit energy to fighting for a shadow too.
In any case, it’s not as though there is some dearth of content to consume in TikTok’s stead. In a recent New York Times column, tech commentator Kevin Roose wondered ‘why an app that transformed American culture so completely will have so few mourners’. TikTok, he suggested, offers its users ‘passive entertainment’ rather than the social connection promised by earlier platforms and induced a ‘cognitive surrender’ that left some of them trapped and addicted to their feeds. TikTok dispensed with the notion that platforms are for self-expression and staying connected with friends and family, and instead circulated only the content that kept people watching, regardless of its original context.
But since every other social media platform has copied TikTok’s strategy in foregrounding short videos and aggressive algorithmic recommendation, no one should be worried about having to go cold turkey. While TikTok’s disappearance will be hard on the influencers who specifically built followings there, consumers can just slide over to whatever provider gains traction next and assume that its promotional mechanisms can conjure another crop of more or less interchangeable creators out of the vast pool of aspirants. ByteDance spent nearly $1 billion to build TikTok’s user base in the US, a strategy that takes only cash to replicate.
In fact, the idea that TikTok ‘transformed American culture’ is largely premised on how dependent other entertainment industries had become on its advertising power (think of BookTok, or the fashion trends and pop songs that have gone viral on the platform). Because TikTok is entirely oriented toward identifying and intensifying viewers’ desires, barraging them with content that purportedly reveals their true interests, it’s ideally suited to marketing, as everything appears mainly as a signifier of identity. This helps turn products into participatory trends and the app’s most popular creators into inveterate self-promoters, exemplars of the consumerist logic at work. Anything appearing in anyone’s feed must be understood as already trending, regardless of its actual popularity, allowing users to be suffused with an atmosphere of apparent cultural relevance. They are constantly under the impression that they are a few swipes away from the center of it all and yet somehow never quite get there.
By virtue of how the app’s algorithms work, watching a video is no different than buying a product, and no different from an ad conversion. The divide between ads and content is dissolved; every piece of content serves mainly as an advertisement for itself, and advertising emerges as the purest kind of content. But that approach too is easy to duplicate: how hard is it to imagine a platform where marketing is the only programming? Just turn on the Home Shopping Network. As tech journalist Ryan Broderick pointed out in a recent newsletter, TikTok is best understood not as social media but as ‘social shopping’, more akin to Amazon than Instagram. The point of it is not to create and disseminate culture but to reduce culture to commerce.
If the TikTok ban holds, it may clear space for a different platform to emerge among Americans, whether that be another Chinese app like Red Note (not to mention explicit retail apps like Temu or Shein), or some domestic alternative. But its rise won’t stem from the collective need to replace a lost cultural incubator; it will come from the pleasure people take in believing everything they see is a trend and hoping they can buy their way in.
Rob Horning is a New York-based writer on art and technology. He is the former editor of Real Life
