The Supreme Court on Friday upheld a federal ban on the social media app TikTok that could lead to the platform going dark for its 170 million U.S. users on Sunday, pushing these popular American creators to migrate to other platforms including Instagram and YouTube.
Charli D’Amelio.
While different political solutions are under discussion—President-elect Donald Trump has suggested he may try to intervene—the ban may still move into place on Sunday.
TikTok signaled earlier this week that it plans to voluntarily shut down the app in the U.S. in one fell swoop Sunday, barring a last-minute reprieve.
TikTok is expected to allow users and content creators to download personal data and maintain access to their digital footprint before the app goes dark, and there are several ways for users to save their favorite videos before they become inaccessible.
There is no provision in the U.S. law that will force TikTok to delete the account data of its American users which means that if the ban is reversed in the future, accounts could, in theory, be restored.
The ban also does not stand to impact any users or creators outside of the United States, meaning a handful of the app’s most popular accounts, like that of Italian-Senegalese creator Khabane Lame, will stay live and active—though they will lose their American followers.
Get Forbes Breaking News Text Alerts: We’re launching text message alerts so you'll always know the biggest stories shaping the day’s headlines. Text “Alerts” to (201) 335-0739 or sign up here.
Khabane Lame in June 2024.
Lame, (@khaby.lame, 162.4 million followers) who lives in Italy, won’t have his account status impacted by the U.S. ban and he hasn’t directly addressed where he’ll be posting his content for American followers once it goes into effect, but he also runs the Instagram account @khaby00, which has 81.3 million followers, where he currently cross posts all of his content.
D'Amelio (@charlidamelio 155.8 million followers), 20, hasn't posted any videos addressing where she'll be after TikTok goes dark (she already has 42.7 million Instagram followers and 9 million YouTube subscribers), but her father, and manager, Marc D’Amelio, told The Times Thursday that the ban is "un-American.”
Jimmy Donaldson (@mrbeast, 108.5 million followers), who has offered to buy TikTok with the help of several billionaires, got his start on YouTube and has more than three times as many followers—344 million—on that platform;he’s the most-followed YouTube account and holds the No. 1 spot on Forbes’ list of highest paid creators.
Bella Poarch at New York Ready to Wear Fashion Week on Sept. 6, 2024 in New York City.
Poarch (@bellapoarch, 94.2 million followers), a singer and the biggest TikTok creator from the Philippines, hasn’t commented on where she’ll take her content for her U.S. followers, but has 12 million Instagram followers and 7 million YouTube subscribers.
Rae (@addisonre, 88.5 million followers) hasn’t posted on the TikTok app since November but has posted to Instagram, where she has 34.2 million followers, and does have 4.2 million subscribers on YouTube despite only ever having posted 24 videos. .
Mexican content creator Loaiza (@kimberly.loaiza, 83.1 million followers), who got her start on YouTube, now posts sporadically on that platform but still boasts 17.4 million followers, in addition to 38 million on Instagram.
Zach King attends YouTube Brandcast 2024 in New York City.
King (@zachking, 82 million followers), an American, boasts 41.4 million YouTube subscribers, where he posts short-form videos, and posts almost all of his TikTok videos to Instagram, where he has 29.1 million followers.
Lipa (@domelipa, 76.8 million followers), who posts from Mexico and won’t have her account impacted, doesn’t post all of her TikToks to her Instagram account but does have almost 24 million followers and 7.2 million YouTube subscribers.
Johnson (@therock, 76 million followers), a U.S.-based actor, may lose his TikTok account, but he’s wildly more popular on Instagram (394 million followers) and also has a YouTube account.
Turkish creator Burak Özdemir (@cznburak, 74.9 million followers), whose account shouldn’t be impacted by the ban, is almost as popular on Instagram (53.6 million followers) as he is on TikTok and has a significant YouTube following of 17.9 subscribers, though he posts much less frequently to that platform.
Will Smith at the European premiere of "Bad Boys: Ride or Die."
Smith (@willsmith, 74.7 million followers), an American actor, hasn’t posted to TikTok since mid December, has 69.4 million followers on Instagram and posts much of the same content to YouTube, where he has 10.7 million subscribers.
The South Korean boy band (@bts_official_bighit, 71.2 million followers) will still be able to post on TikTok even when American users are gone, but it’s not the group’s most popular social media platform: 79.6 million subscribers follow BTS on YouTube and 75.6 million on Instagram.
Eilish (@billieeilish, 69.9 million followers) hasn’t posted to TikTok since mid December but has posted to Instagram, where she boasts almost twice as many followers (121 million) and she posts her music to YouTube, where she has 54.3 million subscribers.
Jason Derulo on March 12, 2024 in Glasgow, Scotland.
Derulo (@jasonderulo, 65.7 million followers), who became a social media superstar by being savvy on TikTok and is hosting the platform’s second annual Global Live Fest in London this weekend, will have his account go dark when the American ban takes effect but can be found on YouTube (40.4 million subscribers) and Instagram (36.2 million followers).
Indonesian social media personality Salim’s (@williesalim, 64.1 million followers) account is safe from the upcoming ban, and Americans can find him on YouTube (35.9 million followers) and Instagram (13.1 million followers).
To see what TikTok looks like on Sunday. If ByteDance does cut off all American users that day, U.S. users who attempt to open the app won’t see their usual content and will instead be redirected to a website with information about the ban.
Users are flooding to an alternative app called Xiaohongshu, or “Little Red Book,” in English, as the TikTok ban looms. The app, being referred to as RedNote, has been climbing on the Apple app store all week long, and held the top spot there Friday and was No. 1 in the Google Play store as of Wednesday. RedNote, whose name evokes the Chinese Communist Party, is also owned by the Chinese government. It isn't unclear how much content on the app is censored, though a handful of new users have already reported their content as having been flagged for violated guidelines when it mentioned the LGBTQ community. Hundreds of thousands of Americans have migrated to RedNote, according to The New York Times, and its existing users have reportedly taken the opportunity to mock the U.S. government.
President Joe Biden signed a TikTok ban into law in April after increasing concerns from lawmakers about data privacy and its Chinese ties (TikTok has long denied having any links to the Chinese government). Under the law, which was upheld by the Supreme Court Friday after TikTok lost battles in the Court of Appeals, Chinese parent company ByteDance was required to sell its stake in the social media platform to stop it from being banned in the United States. ByteDance hasn’t expressed interest in selling and hasn’t publicly responded to offers from Elon Musk, billionaire Frank McCourt and others. In its legal battle, TikTok and its users have argued the ban infringes on the company’s First Amendment rights.
“If somebody in China knows my whereabouts, or knows that I watch this kind of content, no one’s been able to articulate how that will affect me in any way,” Marc D’Amelio told The Times Thursday. “And if the government is going to protect us from that, are they protecting us from every other platform that could spoon feed us information? If we’re going to do that, let’s do it for all platforms and not just single out TikTok… (It) makes me very concerned that there is a reason that they don’t want the average person to have access to the free speech that TikTok gives.”