“I’m, like, shaking — I’m so mad, I’m so anxious, because TikTok changed my life,” Katie Wolf, a 38-year-old book editor in Charleston, South Carolina, said in a video she posted Friday. She finds 80% of her clients through the app, she said, and does not know what she would do without it.
“It’s about to get stupid,” Alex Pearlman, a 40-year-old comedian in Philadelphia, said in another video. “We don’t know what’s going to stay monetised, we don’t know how the TikTok Shops are going to keep working,” he said, adding expletives for emphasis. He continued: “We’ve got 44 days until this app goes.”
“It’s for real this time, guys,” Nicole Brennan, a 26-year-old artist and content creator in New York City, said in a video she shared with her 450,000 followers. Holding a bagel and looking a bit like she was in shock, she urged her audience to follow her on Instagram and Bluesky.
To its more than 170 million users in the United States, TikTok is a source of news, entertainment and income — a cultural juggernaut that wields influence over practically every facet of American life. The outcry Friday illuminated the gap between Washington politics and the broader American public, as many of TikTok’s users seemed to have only just begun to grasp that the app could be on its last legs in this country.
The most common response to Wolf’s video was one of disbelief, she said in an interview: “To be honest, I feel like most people just didn’t think it was going to happen.”
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TikTok, which is owned by the Chinese company ByteDance, has been facing threats of a ban across two presidential administrations, but it has never been this perilously close to the edge. A panel of three judges in the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit denied TikTok’s petition to overturn a new law that requires ByteDance to sell the app to a non-Chinese company by January 19 or face a ban in the United States, based on national security concerns. While TikTok argued that the law unfairly singled out the company and that a ban would infringe on the free speech rights of American users, the judges said that the law was “carefully crafted to deal with only control by a foreign adversary,” and that it did not run afoul of the First Amendment. The ruling acknowledged that Americans would “lose access to an outlet for expression, a source of community and even a means of income,” but that Congress weighed those risks against national security concerns.
Daniel Daks, the CEO of Palette Media, an agency that represents more than 230 social media stars, said his firm had been trying to impress upon creators that there was a serious threat the app would disappear. While TikTok’s future is uncertain, he said the firm is advising clients to build their audiences on other platforms, and even to put the brakes on making big personal financial decisions.
“We have certain creators looking to buy houses right now, and we’re telling them to hold off until they see what happens to TikTok,” Daks said.
Many TikTok stars say that while they hope that the app finds a way to survive in the U.S. — through a hoped-for Supreme Court ruling or a Hail Mary from the incoming Trump administration — they have been amassing followers on other apps just in case.
Steve Natto, a 27-year-old sneaker content creator in Philadelphia, said he posts regularly on eight social media platforms: TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Pinterest, X, Facebook, Snapchat and Threads. But after years of effort, his audiences on those apps all remain smaller than his followership on TikTok.
“There’s just so many viewers and eyes on TikTok that I wouldn’t want it to go away,” he said.
Pearlman, the comedian and podcaster, has 2.7 million followers on TikTok, but he said that he was also gathering followers on Bluesky, a platform that has positioned itself as an alternative to X, and that he picked up 1,000 YouTube subscribers and 3,000 Instagram followers Friday.
Still, he worried about how he would fare without TikTok’s powerful algorithm, which sends videos to users’ personalized feeds based on their interests. Despite continuous effort, American technology companies like Meta and Google have not been able to replicate its potency, even as they have poured money into their own versions of short-form video apps.
“If TikTok as an app doesn’t exist, then what is going to be my content driver — like what is going to hold up the arch?” Pearlman said. “Because of TikTok, I was able to have a baby, stay at home with my son for the first year of his life and travel and do a standup tour across the country.”
Brennan said TikTok’s algorithm had been uniquely effective at getting her bag, sticker, and earring designs in front of people who might like them — and make purchases. She estimated that more than half of her income came through TikTok, through a combination of sales, sponsored content and TikTok’s monetization program.
“There’s millions of small businesses that rely on TikTok for their marketing, for reaching out to clients, for finding new clients and customers,” she said. “I never had an app before TikTok that made it so easy to find my audience.”
Aaron Parnas, a lawyer and part-time creator who posts about the news to his 1.2 million TikTok followers, said the government did not seem to recognize TikTok’s economic value. He built a following on the app by producing videos about news in his spare time, he said, adding that, to him, TikTok was a unique platform for short-form video journalism.
“People in the creator economy are very worried about next steps because I don’t think there’s any other app that allows anyone to go viral at any moment,” he said.
A scroll through the app Friday revealed an uncanny split screen, with some creators panicking about the dire effects of a potential ban on their livelihoods, and others sharing Snoopy videos and quesadilla recipes as if nothing had changed.
“For me, it’s business as usual,” said Nate Ranallo, 46, a bovine podiatrist in West Salem, Wisconsin, who is better known as Nate the Hoof Guy, the name of the account where he demonstrates how to trim cow hooves to his 2.3 million followers.
He thinks it would be a mistake for the U.S. government to ban TikTok, given that American social media platforms also harvest data from their users. The app has allowed him to demonstrate his craft to people around the world who might otherwise have never learned the proper way to scrape mud from the hooves of a cow in Wisconsin.
Though Ranallo said he was not surprised by the federal judges’ decision Friday, he is not yet convinced that his time on TikTok is drawing to a close.
“I’m still not too worried about it right now,” he said. “I think there’s a long way to go yet before it’s banned.”
