TikTok users in the US are experiencing something long familiar to much of the world: a flourishing online social space existentially threatened by politics
Banned apps, nefarious theories, trade wars, voiceless users. The case of TikTok isn't news to most of the world.
New York TimesJohn Herrman
Context & Ripple Effects
TikTok arrived in American life at extraordinary speed: by late 2022, US viewers were spending more time in the video app than in Facebook and Instagram combined [[a:983848]], and it had reshaped Hollywood, music, shopping, news, and youth culture in the process. But as reporting on ByteDance's origins shows, the company was built on intermingled Western and Chinese capital, ideas, and people — precisely the entanglement that made it a target once the US-China rift hardened [[a:986086]].
What changed with this story is that American users are confronting what most of the world has long known: an online community can be erased by politics rather than by product failure. Coverage of young people who found a creative outlet in the app during lockdown shows them bracing for loss and drifting toward YouTube and Byte [[a:955589]], while users with stigmatized interests or marginalized identities describe the harder problem of rebuilding communities that may not survive a move [[a:863875]].
First-order effects
TikTok's US users — especially the young creators who built communities there during lockdown — face immediate displacement, with some preemptively relocating to YouTube and Byte.
Second-order effects
Rival platforms become the beneficiaries of politically displaced communities, competing to absorb TikTok's audience, while policymakers find that any actual ban runs into the app's massive userbase, young-voter politics, and legal challenges that make enforcement hard [[a:838166]].
Third-order effects
If the pattern holds, platform availability stops being a market outcome and becomes a function of interstate relations — users' social worlds persist only at the pleasure of governments, normalizing a split internet where national origin, not user preference, determines which spaces exist where.
The trend: Social platforms are being recast as geopolitical instruments whose survival in a given market depends on state-to-state tensions rather than on users or competition.
“A flourishing online social space existentially threatened by diplomatic and political fights between states and corporations, with little input from those affected by their decisions” @jwherrman captures what internet is like for most people, now US too https://www.nytimes.com/…
For people in the U.S. who spend a lot of time on TikTok, the last few months have been surreal. But they're experiencing for the first time something long familiar to much of the rest of the world. https://www.nytimes.com/...
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