Good grief.
Teary-eyed influencers are mourning the imminent end of TikTok and airing out their frustrations ahead of the ban that is due to go into effect on Sunday and cause the app to stop operating.
“F–k this country,” creator Kelsey Pumel said in a video posted Friday in the aftermath of the Supreme Court ruling that the ban would be upheld.
“Thanks a lot, old farts.”
TikTok, which is used by over 170 million Americans, was given an ultimatum under a divestment bill that was signed into law last year, which threatened to ban the app unless it was sold to a US buyer due to national security concerns its parent company ByteDance. TikTok has denied accusations that claim it poses a threat to national security.
Because the app was not sold, TikTok is expected to go dark in the US on Sunday, much to its users’ dismay.
“Frustrated” content creator Madilynn Cameron argued that the “government has failed us” and called the US a “laughing stock to other countries,” while TikTokker Emily Senn slammed the ban for stripping users of their “income and livelihood,” including her own.
“And to the US government, I’m never forgiving you for this,” Senn, who also works as a singer, said in a video as she cried.
“It’s so unfair — this is so much more than just an app. This is really, truly a sense of community that there is nowhere else on the internet.”
She mourned the hours spent making content and building her online presence, now boasting more than 347,000 followers.
“I worked really, really hard to make it,” she explained. “On top of that, it’s been a source of income for me for going on three years now.”
While she isn’t “rich off of it,” she has grown to “rely” on her monthly payout from the video sharing app, which has “significantly helped” her income. Now, she has new fears about what she will do “financially” without the platform.
Senn is just one of the thousands of creators and small business owners who make part or all of their living on TikTok, which, according to reports from last year, supports an estimated 224,000 jobs and contributed $24.2 billion to the GDP in 2023. Some influencers even ditched their traditional 9-to-5 jobs to pursue a career in content creation.
“Never in history has there been a time as easy as now to within a year make $10,000 a month off of business,” Sarah Perl, a 24-year-old creator and manifest coach known as @hothighpriestess, told Fortune, which reported that Perl made six figures in revenue per year.
With the ban set to go into effect, users flocked to other platforms to supplement.
Some are settling for Instagram Reels or YouTube Shorts, while others are fleeing to RedNote, a Chinese social media app, out of “spite.”
As of Saturday, RedNote, also known as Xiaohongshu, was the top-downloaded free app on the App Store charts — with over 700,000 “TikTok refugees” joining the platform — followed by Lemon8, a TikTok-owned social media site.
President Joe Biden does not plan to enforce the law banning TikTok and instead leaves the app’s fate in the hands of President-elect Donald Trump, who wanted to ban the app in his first term but seems to have had a change of heart.
Trump has expressed opposition to the ban and has reportedly vowed to try to find a political solution so that the app can remain active in the US.
In a TikTok video, the app’s CEO Shou Zi Chew, who is expected to attend the inauguration on Monday, thanked Trump for “his commitment to work with us to find a solution.
In the meantime, it is expected that the app will shutter. Past reports have claimed users will likely be met with a pop-up message when attempting to access the app, but, if the platform does not completely shutter, it will still be accessible on users’ phones but will not be able to receive updates, which will eventually render it unusable.
