In
TikTok’s Final Hours, a Mix of Silliness and Sadness
Users in the
United States react to a nationwide ban of the app.
Madison
Malone Kircher
By Madison
Malone Kircher
Jan. 18,
2025
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/18/style/tiktok-ban-final-hours.html
On Saturday,
TikTok users in the United States scrolled through the app in its final hours
after the Supreme Court on Friday upheld a law that required ByteDance,
TikTok’s Chinese parent company, to sell the app by Sunday or otherwise face a
ban.
The mood
among users as the hours ticked down was relatively somber, at least by
TikTok’s typically unserious standards.
Alix Earle,
a content creator with 7.2 million followers who rose to fame on the app in
2022, posted tearful videos mourning the platform.
“I feel like
I’m going Through heartbreak,” Ms. Earle wrote in one video. “This platform is
more than an app or a job to me. I have so many Memories on here. I have posted
every day for the past 6 years of my life. I’ve shared my friends, family,
relationships, personal struggles, secrets.”
Ms. Earle
added that she had been “in denial” about the ban. She wasn’t the only one.
In the days
leading up to the Supreme Court’s ruling, the tone on the app was jokey and
even optimistic as many users did not believe that TikTok, a platform with 170
million users in the United States, would actually be banned. The app stopped
working in the U.S. on Saturday night, around 90 minutes before the law was to
take effect at midnight.
Some users
earlier in the day posted satirical videos bidding farewell to their supposed
Chinese spies, a play on a long-running TikTok joke that all American users are
assigned agents of the Chinese government to spy on them through the app.
Others offered instructions on how to use a virtual private network in hopes of
circumventing the ban.
On Friday,
the Supreme Court unanimously upheld the law that effectively bans TikTok in
the United States. After the ruling, emotions on the app began to shift. While
some users were still laughing, others started posting more earnestly.
“There’s so
much nostalgia and so much memory there,” Marc D’Amelio said of the app in an
interview this week. In 2020, his daughter Charli D’Amelio became the most
followed TikTok user in the world for posting videos of her dancing in her
house, reaching 100 million followers. This week, she reposted several of her
old dance videos and followers left comments lamenting the end of an era.
“Finishing
how we started,” many commenters wrote on Ms. D’Amelio’s videos, a nod to her
status as one of the platform’s earliest breakout stars.
Other users
posted farewell addresses, thanking fans and viewers and mentioning other
social media platforms where they would still be available, like Instagram and
YouTube. (For some, that included a Chinese video platform called RedNote that
had become popular in recent days.)
Even through
the sadness, TikTok’s trademark humor was present.
Markell
Washington, a 27-year-old content creator in Los Angeles, hosted a mock funeral
for the app in his home with a group of friends. He turned his coffee table
into a makeshift casket, cutting an oversize TikTok logo out of poster board
and placing it inside. He purchased 50 red roses from a grocery store and lit
candles to set the scene. The group dressed in all black along with Mr.
Washington, who gave a eulogy for the app.
But the loss
of TikTok is no joke, Mr. Washington said. Before finding success on the app,
he worked at a Subway sandwich shop. The app provided him “financial freedom,”
he said. Since Friday’s ruling, the vibes on the app have become “super genuine
and emotional,” he said, referencing Ms. Earle’s tearful videos.
“It has hit
me, but it doesn’t seem real because it has been such an impactful thing in my
life,” Mr. Washington said. “It’s like losing a relative.”
Madison
Malone Kircher is a Times reporter covering internet culture. More about
Madison Malone Kircher
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