Balancing personal and political with the TikTok ban

When news outlets started reporting that TikTok really was going to get banned on Jan. 19, I decided on a whim to check my iPhone screen time. 

Like many others, I downloaded the video-based social media app in 2019 as it started to gain popularity. It was scrappy then. Smaller content creators made silly throwaway videos for fun. Five years in, it’s a behemoth that generates billions of dollars in revenue. Thousands of influencers make their living on the site, too. 

And I’m addicted. I get on the app close to every single day. Unlike some of my friends, I’ve never taken a substantial break from TikTok. It’s not even fun anymore. I feel bad when I scroll through the endless algorithm. I know it’s a waste of time, but I just can’t seem to quit. 

So when the long-term rumblings of a TikTok ban in the United States started to materialize into reality, it made me think: How much of my life is dedicated to this app, anyway? 

The answer? About one to two hours a day. It might not seem like much, but that means I spend 7-14 hours a week scrolling through videos. Half the time I skip a handful of videos before I find one I want to watch or press and hold to play the clip at 2x speed. 

In reality, the TikTok ban might be exactly what I need. It’s out of my control. Congress passed a law last year giving TikTok nine months to split from its parent company, ByteDance. The owners refused to sell the site and its “secret sauce” algorithm to an American-based company. Now, the Jan. 19 deadline looms, and even as President-elect Donald Trump announces hopes to save it and YouTuber Mr. Beast suggests he may buy it, the end is imminent. 

TikTok is going to be gone in the United States. But is it a good thing? 

If you asked me on a personal level, I would say yes. I don’t think TikTok has been good for me or for the culture at large. Our collective attention spans are shot. The little dopamine hits from opening the app have us addicted. Stopping the scroll will free up hours of my day to do something hopefully better or more productive.

But my joy about a TikTok ban doesn’t mean it’s a good thing. 

The government claims it’s about national security concerns – our data is being harvested by China. It sounds like an alarm that would be a lot more effective if our data wasn’t being harvested by websites and other apps.

We’re already in a worrying climate surrounding social media. The government’s outright banning of a site, particularly one it lacks control over, is even more concerning. Where does it leave the 170 million monthly users in the United States? 

X owner Elon Musk is a high-profile Trump supporter who was hired to run an advisory department on government efficiency. Recently, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the company would halt independent fact-checking and relax anti-LGBTQ+ hate speech. In the following days, the company threw out its diversity initiatives and LGBTQ+-friendly elements in the offices and apps. 

The United States’ most popular social media apps are owned and operated by executives falling in line with the incoming president, allowing for conspiracy theories, hate speech and bots to run rampant across the sites. 

Sites like X have long been the home to political and social discourse. It was a huge tool for my organizing work in the gun violence prevention space. With major CEOs committed to the incoming president, I fear those avenues will disappear.

Without TikTok, that’s what we’re left with. Don’t get me wrong – TikTok’s designed algorithm is just as nefarious. Like many other online algorithms, it can easily push users into radicalized pipelines. But the CEO has not pledged fealty to Donald Trump. 

More than that, what will come of the many users? An industry of influencers has been built off of the app, and peoples’ livelihoods will disappear once TikTok does. Some were able to build alternative platforms, but many are left with no other options for monetizing their work.

The truth is, the majority of my concerns and critiques around TikTok are not unique to the app. And they likely won’t go away with its ban. Misinformation has only gotten worse with the rising popularity of artificial intelligence, and that will continue no matter the source. 

Days ago, as the Los Angeles wildfires raged on, an AI-generated video of the Hollywood sign on fire started to gain traction on TikTok and X. On close inspection, there were three Ls in the sign. But that didn’t matter. Thousands of people still shared and engaged with the video. They were convinced the Hollywood sign burned down.

TikTok going away won’t stop that kind of misinformation. We know social media CEOs won’t either. Where does that leave us? 

Something will inevitably take its place. But it could be something worse. As my friends and I discussed what we would do in the wake of the ban, we came up with different answers. Most of us have little to no interest in joining the Chinese-owned social media app Xiaohongshu that Americans are flocking to. Often called RedNote in the United States, it’s rising to the top of app store charts as users from TikTok search for refuge. 

Most of the people I know are relieved to get off TikTok. We don’t necessarily want to keep up the bad habits on yet another similar site. Some are more cynical, though. They expect that, eventually, they will get on whatever ends up being TikTok’s true successor. 

I hope to resist that urge. In the meantime, I plan to watch more movies and read more books. Consumption with a point. TikTok’s ban is a breaking point for me. It’s a chance to get out of the habit and reevaluate my phone time as a whole. It’s also a worrying sign for the administration ahead. 

Two things can be true: This ban is personally wonderful and politically fearsome. Now we have to wait and see what happens next.