The long saga of the potential TikTok ban is nearing its end. TikTok’s fate in the United States might very well be decided by the Supreme Court on January 10th. With it being anyone’s guess what might happen, we sat down with social media specialist Kameron Bottoms to get his insights.
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Can you start by briefly recapping where we're at with the latest developments related to TikTok?
So, TikTok is currently on pace to be banned by the US government. There was a bill passed sometime last year basically forcing them to divest the company to an American company or basically get ByteDance, which is TikTok's ownership group, to relinquish their supposed ties to the Chinese government. Now as of today (December 19th) they are appealing to the Supreme Court—it could go either way on whether or not the ban is upheld or they are allowed to continue.
Their current defense is a free speech defense, which is an interesting take. Because, of course, it is still a private company, and it's a social media app. It's just kind of unprecedented with what we think of as free speech. And of course, it was an election year. So we're going into a new administration. There's some political aspects to potentially allowing them to stay. There’s good and bad—I see both sides as a whole of banning TikTok.
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Speaking of the new administration, I know that originally Trump said he supported the ban, then more recently said he was now opposed to a ban. If the Supreme Court upholds the ban, is there anything the Trump administration can do to reverse this?
I'm not sure. I don't know with the bill that was passed if there's a move for Trump to make. I guess in theory, the way the bill was written is that it's not necessarily directly TikTok that will be banned. It's more that the government does have the ability to say to companies that are predominantly owned by foreign entities, or that the government deems as enemies or threats to democracy, that they can force them to do this divestment. Based on the wording of the bill, there probably is a way for them to say TikTok no longer falls under what we would consider a foreign threat. So there is potential that even if everything is upheld, that Tiktok itself still isn't banned if there's some kind of determination that they're no longer seen as a threat.
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So what's your best guess today, with everything going on? What's your best guess that you think might happen with TikTok?
I do think it's a very fluid situation right now. Up until this week, I was pretty sure it was going to get banned. I am now thinking it's probably not, just with how our country works, the politics, and especially with a new administration coming in and everything flopping. Granted, the bill was supported by both sides originally, that’s how it was passed.
Step one is the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court has had many opinions and many dissents in both directions. The Supreme Court swings conservative, but I don't know if this is necessarily a conservative versus liberal issue because I think most people generally can look at TikTok and see why people can see the bad side of it, right? How that algorithm is so powerful, and how it can echo chamber you, and just the way that you can get trapped into it. Even if it's subconscious, you could end up being trained and trapped into that algorithm because of how well it learns you. And that's a very powerful thing. I do think it scares people. Because if it is used in the wrong way—I personally can see that as a bad thing. Because of that, I don't know how the Supreme Court is going to take it, especially with the free speech debate. There’s a lot of news that circulates on Tiktok. There's also a lot of fake stuff that circulates on Tiktok. And then there's just a general content creation piece of it—is having a medium that's a private company owned by a foreign entity a free speech argument?
So as we sit today, I think it's probably safe, but things can—with one single tweet—things could change.
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Let's just assume for a second that the ban is upheld. Obviously, short-form video is not going anywhere. If the ban happens, who do you think would be best positioned to fill that gap?
At this point, I'm still surprised Meta hasn't spun Reels off into its own separate app. Because the big thing about TikTok—and Meta knows this—is the UI of TikTok. It's not just the algorithm. It's that fully integrated, full-screen experience where you don't see other stuff. When you're on Meta scrolling through Reels, unless you end up in the Reels section itself, if you're just scrolling naturally through your feed and Facebook, you're going to see posts that are pictures. You're going to see videos. If you're on Instagram, it works the same way. If you do get into the Reels experience, you do get that same kind of thing, but you have to get there first. It's not just natively how the app works. Meta probably has the largest advantage if they were to spin it off separately.
If they're still stubborn and try to keep it contained within Facebook and Instagram, I think it's not really going to grow any off of a TikTok ban. One of the things TikTok talks about itself is that a large percentage of TikTok users aren't elsewhere—they're specifically TikTok users. I don't think those people are going to rush to Meta to fill that void. I think they're going to look for something new.
I could see them potentially running to YouTube, but YouTube Shorts hasn't taken off as much either. YouTube shorts have more or less become a tool for established YouTube creators to put out bite-size versions of their content. The younger audience that's on YouTube watches shorts. There's a TikTok vibe to it a little bit, but I think that they have an uphill battle as well. The struggle is that whatever was to come up, there would need to be an entire experience built around it and not just tacked on.
I honestly think what would have to happen is that it would just need to be something new. I think that's what made TikTok so exciting. After they rebranded from Musical.ly, it felt like this new thing. That aspect of it being something you have never heard of before is what helped drive its growth.
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This may all be nothing, who knows, but what are you and the digital team doing to prepare for the possibility of TikTok getting banned? Is there anything you need to do now? What are the kinds of things you see doing, even on January 20th, if it does go into effect?
Again, the key point is that short form as a whole isn't going anywhere. It's very alive and well on Meta, on YouTube, on Pinterest even. In general, people as a whole are gonna still crave short-form content. It's become king. There's been somewhat of a little pushback to long-form, but even then it's not like long-form, you know, over 30 minutes. It's long-form as in over a minute. But short form is still the predominant amount of content that's put out now. It's really just gonna come down to where to put it.
We have to prepare clients for it. This is a thing that could happen, you know, advertising spend that we do on Tiktok will have to get redirected and we have to figure out where it makes the most sense for our clients.
Mainly it's going to be just a push back to Meta, I think, or exploring more with YouTube. I haven't said their name enough, but Pinterest does have short-form video capabilities, and there does seem to be a growing interest in it on that platform. So that's also a potential option.
But a lot of it is just us staying up to date and educated on it so that we can inform clients. Honestly, most of our clients have not asked questions about it, which is surprising. There are some considerations. TikTok shops are a huge component for some of our clients. How do you replicate that? There are interesting things that we just have to be prepared for in case the cord gets literally ripped out on January 20th. It's just gonna be interesting.
