For online sensation Erika Thompson, TikTok is the most powerful social media platform that educates her 11 million followers about her lifelong passion: bees.
The loss of the US platform – made more likely after the Supreme Court upheld a ban due to take effect next week – will be “significant” financially for Ms Thompson, the Texas beekeeper, but it is also the loss of an educational asset.
“There are a lot of other people on the platform who offer educational or informative content,” she told the BBC. “That’s the biggest loss and that’s what needs to be focused on, apart from the financial aspect, it’s a loss that we as a society – the people who use TikTok – will certainly feel.”
About 170 million Americans use the app and website. Unless its China-based parent company ByteDance sells the platform or there is an executive intervention, the platform is set to cease operations in the US on Sunday.
The fate of the social media giant has been left in the hands of the US Supreme Court after both Democratic and Republican lawmakers voted to ban the video-sharing app last year, amid concerns about its ties to the Chinese government and concerns that the app is a 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 to become a fixture in society — and helped regular users capture the limelight with millions of followers. It quickly became a favorite social medium for some, and a key source of income for others.
Now they worry about what will happen if the ban is not stopped.
Top platform
Creators who make a living from social networking apps have told the BBC that TikTok is a superior platform.
That was true for Ms. Thomspon, whose first TikTok video received more than 50 million views in the first 24 hours after it was posted.
“I haven’t experienced the same success on other platforms,” she said. “I can post the exact same video on Instagram, for example, and get nowhere near the engagement.”
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 creator.
On TikTok, he said, “you can find success overnight.”
Other platforms trying to replicate the short-form scrolling format seen on TikTok have yet to succeed, Mr. Smith for the BBC. Mrs. Thompson agreed.
“I rarely hear that people have gone viral on Instagram or that someone is an Instagram sensation, but those are words you hear a lot on TikTok,” Ms Thompson said.
Codey James, a fashion influencer with tens of thousands of followers on TikTok, told the BBC that audiences don’t necessarily switch from one platform to another.
“I know someone who has hundreds of thousands of followers on TikTok and maybe only ten thousand followers on Instagram,” James told the BBC.
Significant financial loss
Many content creators survive on the income they earn on TikTok.
Some told the BBC that their lives would change immeasurably without the platform.
When brands and companies want advertising content from creators, they want those creators to post on TikTok, fashion designer and artist Nicole Bloomgarden told the BBC.
“Indirectly, TikTok has been the majority of my income because all brands want their stuff promoted on the app,” Ms Bloomgarden said.
It is not statistically clear whether TikTok is the most lucrative source of income for creators, but many told the BBC that it makes up a significant portion of their income.
A 2022 survey by a maker-focused start-up Linktreefound that about 12% of full-time creators make more than $50,000 a year from their social media platforms.
About 46% said they earned less than $1,000, the survey of 9,500 people found.
What about alternative applications?
This isn’t the first time a major social media platform has gone missing.
In 2017, Vine – a platform where users could share videos up to six seconds long – shut down.
It was a shock for the creators at the time.
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 was using at the time – and when it disappeared, he said it “felt like my whole business was shutting down”.
But in a way, it was good for him too. This forced him to learn how to create different content for different audiences.
“That experience showed me that if you believe in your ability to create content, you will build a following elsewhere,” said Mr. Park for the BBC.
As the ban approaches, some creators have started flocking to another Chinese platform, RedNote – A TikTok competitor popular among young people in China, Taiwan and other Mandarin-speaking populations.
RedNote was the most downloaded app on Apple’s US App Store earlier this week.
While some creators are diversifying where they post in hopes of growing audiences elsewhere, others are hoping the ban won’t come to pass.
“TikTok is a beast,” Park said. “Part of me thinks it might be too big to fail.”
– Somehow it will revive, the economy is too big now.
Additional reporting by Grace Dean and Nathalie Jimenez.
