The timing is a bit strange.
As it stands at the time of publication, TikTok will be forced to shut down in America if it is not sold by 19 January, the day before the inauguration of President Donald Trump.
Trump has had a change of heart and has now said he supports TikTok’s operation. Now the ban was passed by Congress and signed into law by Joe Biden, which means it won’t be as easy as an executive order. The Supreme Court might also nullify the ban.
Basically, it’s not clear what will happen. Let’s set that aside for a moment and reflect on how the change will reverberate beyond America’s borders and back here to ByteDance’s home region.
ByteDance is the Chinese parent company of both TikTok and Douyin, a roughly analogous application that runs and operates inside Mainland China. While both apps feature short-form video powerfully by and endless, algorithm-powered For You pages, what is on there is quite different.
Simply put, very little information from Douyin spreads over to TikTok and vice versa. Finding out what was on the app was such a novelty that when “Chinese Street Fashion” video edits went viral three years ago, it was considered very, very noticeable.
This is the impact of Douyin and TikTok operating in their own walled gardens. And I suspect TikTok’s walled garden will get a bit higher once material from America is removed.
The United States accounts for more than 16% of TikTok usage, more than three times the total of any other single nation. That is hundreds of millions of visitors with the average user spending more than 30 minutes each month on the app.
The ban would instantly remove those users. It would also throw out thousands of creators, who would stop producing content or move to rivals such as Instagram Reels or YouTube Shorts.
For corporate creators, it will mean that your geographic reach will become even more dependent on a platform. Now there’s a chance that content that appears and is created in one place can drive usage elsewhere. My feed is full of content from far beyond by Singapore home base.
Now, those opportunities are shrinking. Marketing teams will need to decide whether it’s worth it to manage and support additional platforms, or they will start to narrow the topics of their outreach.
This may see slightly academic to people working in a B2B environment focused on finance and technology. Are people really making decisions based on their TikTok feed? I would argue that the answer is more complicated than it may seem. Consumer video platforms help spread news articles from traditional new sources. They create and push how the mainstream media covers events (see the hysteria around the alleged assassin of the health executive in the United States).
Without that presence in our media ecosystem, we will probably see a greater shift towards the region. Homegrown apps and the greater Chinese language information ecosystem through places such as WeChat will be even more important.
For further insights, I would suggest we look further at India, which has already banned TikTok for the last two years. Instagram Reels is very popular there, tracking ahead of some locally grown services. It means that the Instagram algorithm, which aggressively deprioritizes political media and controversial content, now has far more sway over the country. We’ll have to see if there’s a similar impact here.
Even if there’s an eleventh-hour reversal, I suspect that the de-coupling between media information environments will continue. It means that people who want to have an international perspective will need to be more intentional in their media consumption habits. And also might open up opportunities for smart brands to do some information arbitrage.
Jon Schubin runs Cognito’s internal marketing and is a director focused on content
