THE LEAD: The U.S. House of Representatives passed a bipartisan bill on Saturday that would nationally ban TikTok if its Chinese-based parent company did not sell the popular app. The bill gives ByteDance, which owns the app, up to 360 days to sell TikTok to an owner that isn’t tied to China before a ban would kick in. The Senate will likely take up the bill on Tuesday and President Joe Biden has stated he will sign it, if the bill hits his desk. TikTok has stated it will fight this legislation.

 

THE RATIONALE: TikTok has more than 170 million U.S. users and government officials are worried that the Chinese government could access these users’ data via the app and create threats to national security. Both ByteDance and the Chinese government have downplayed these worries, but experts in the fields of international relations and technology have said pretty much any Chinese tech company operates under “a cloud of suspicion.”

 

CATCHING UP: If you are somehow completely unaware of TikTok, or have been kind of doing the “Oh, yeah, TikTok” thing when your kids or grandkids talk about it, here’s what the NY Times calls “The Basic Human Explanation of TikTok.”

 

WHY PEOPLE ARE FREAKING OUT: This is a simple one to explain: Habit and money.

In terms of habit, you have 170 million people in the U.S., spending an average of between 58 minutes per day and 95 minutes a day on this thing, depending on how you slice the data. If you look at any data set, you’ll notice some lighter and heavier users, but the scarier thing is the increase of usage in terms of overall users and overall use. In 2019, users averaged about 27 minutes a day and there were only about 27 million U.S. users.

Cigarettes would have been proud of that kind of habit formation…

And, just like any other addiction, once people get hooked on TikTok, it’s really hard for them to imagine life without it. Users have assailed Congress with TikTok videos that state everything from the U.S. has bigger problems than TikTok, to the idea that this is suppressing free speech. At the core of these and other arguments is basically this statement: Stop messing with the thing I like.

As for money, this thing is a goldmine for ByteDance, which has seen exponential growth in less than five years. Selling it would be financially unwise, especially if it’s forced to do so, as nothing drives down a price like every buyer know you’re over a barrel and HAVE TO sell.

In addition, TikTok influencers have created a marketplace in which they can sell products as well as their own lifestyle brand. Closing the door on the app would essentially strangle their revenue streams, they note. In addition, small businesses have used the app to promote their products and services, stating it allows them a cheap, easy and effective way to reach a wide audience of potential customers.

 

WHY MEDIA PEOPLE SHOULDN’T BE FREAKING OUT: As news journalists, PR professionals and advertising folks, we tend to see a lot of media shifting on a regular basis. If we wanted our lives to be nothing but smooth sailing and stable situations, we’d have taken a job in something less stressful, like defusing land mines. The point is, we’ve seen a lot of changes to the media landscape, let alone the social media landscape, over the course of our careers, so if the ban happens, we’re actually in pretty good shape to deal with it.

One of my students did a great localization story for our reporting class on this issue, and she talked to people who run a Digital Marketing Clinic at UWO about a potential ban. The people there had already expected this and had worked with clients to avoid any messaging interruptions a ban would cause. In addition, the director of the organization gave two really good bits of advice that most of us follow:

1. Diversify your approach to reaching your audience so that one platform can’t hold you hostage.
2. Build up your own platforms and connect with your audience through things you control

I imagine that most other quality organizations and agencies that connect people to audiences through media channels have also approached life in this fashion.

 

DOCTOR OF PAPER HOT TAKE: This situation isn’t likely to end up with a ban because everyone is making too much money for that to happen. If TikTok weren’t so profitable, ByteDance wouldn’t be fighting so hard to keep it. If advertisers and influencers weren’t making a living on this thing, they’d be less worried about it going away. This is going to be like a game of “Chicken” for the next couple months until some sort of compromise is hammered out.  What that is remains to be seen, but nobody kills the golden goose if they’re smart enough to realize it’s got a lot more golden eggs to lay.

Even if TikTok gets banned, life on social media will adapt and progress as it always has. Over the course of multiple textbooks in which I’ve had to incorporate social media trends, I’ve seen the landscape radically change in terms of platform supremacy. Each time I do an update, I save the social media chapter for the very, very end and then pray to St. Jude that nothing insane happens between me sending the chapter and the book hitting the press.

Here’s the perfect example: When I wrote “Dynamics of News Reporting and Writing,” I had to pitch two sample chapters and the folks at Sage told me to make one of them the social media chapter. I protested, arguing that stuff was changing so quickly, it would likely need a massive overhaul before the book would press. They argued that if I didn’t SHOW potential adopters a full social media chapter they wouldn’t believe it was going to be there, and thus show less interested in the book. So, I wrote up what was “cutting-edge stuff” at the time, only to have to fully rewrite the chapter FOUR TIMES between that draft and the final version.

We were ON THE PRESS when Twitter decided to move from 140 characters to 280 characters, sending me into a panicking dervish of phone calls and emails. We ended up having to pull the book back and have me patch holes in the social media chapter to fix that.

Fast forward three years and the number of platforms that were in that first edition that were laughably absent from that second edition included:

• YikYak
• Storify
• Vine
• Periscope
• Ping
• Google Buzz
• Meerkat
• Digg

And that doesn’t include the stuff that changed, like Twitter shifting to more content, Instagram Reels and other such things. Each time I go to revise an edition, I find myself looking at the social media chapter like when I look back at photos of my childhood in which my parents dressed me in the worst the 1970s had to offer: “Holy cow… I totally forgot about that…”

When Twitter became X and then became an Elon-Musk-fever-dream-hellscape, other stuff like BlueSky and Threads emerged in an attempt to fill the void. When Vine died, everyone wondered where we’d get our 10-second videos of fun. TikTok answered that question. As is the case with most of social media, products will continue to enter the arena with a goal of meeting users’ needs in a way that previous products haven’t or have ceased to do.

DISCUSSION STARTER: Of all the arguments people are making about a potential TikTok ban, which one makes the most sense to you? Is it an issue of free speech? Is it a financial concern about lost revenue for content creators? Is it an issue of governmental overreach? Is it the “keep your paws off my stuff” point of view? Or is there something else? (Or, if you favor a ban, why?)