Ban or no ban, the app’s best days are behind it.
In 2019, I had full-blown app fatigue. My scrolling time was dominated by Instagram and Twitter, my idle hours by YouTube, and on top of that I was still checking Facebook, Snapchat, and whatever buzzy platform my friends were touting that week. (Remember Lasso? Anyone?) There was no room for any more, I told the publicist sitting across from me in a conference room in Anaheim, California. But she was insistent that, as a journalist writing about internet culture, I needed to start paying more attention to the app I knew only peripherally as a place for tween lip-synching and dancing. TikTok, she said, would soon be for everyone.
All of that is now under threat. Today, the House of Representatives overwhelmingly voted to force TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, to divest from the app or face a ban in the United States. (ByteDance was founded by Chinese entrepreneurs, and some American lawmakers are worried it has ties to the Chinese government, which the company denies.) If it passes the Senate—still a big if—President Joe Biden has said he would sign the bill into law, potentially removing one of the most visited social-media apps in the country. But Americans may miss it less than they think.
Sure, TikTok has cultivated a culture and community that no other platform has come close to replicating. There’s a speed to how TikTok facilitates conversations and trends, and its algorithm is unnervingly good at picking up on a user’s interests and showing them what they want to see. You could use the app for just five minutes and come away with a new song to listen to, a new recipe to try for dinner, and a new piece of kitchenware already being packed up and shipped to you.
