If the bill passes the Senate and becomes law, “I will lose my biggest platform as a content creator, stripped from me with no recompense or compensation,” she said.
She added, “I find it incredibly frustrating that our own politicians continue to make these baseless claims of needing TikTok to be banned without providing any proof to the reason of why. They have shown that they do not know how the app works at all, over and over again.”
While proponents of the bill insisted during the debate that it doesn’t ban TikTok, few creators or advocates accepted that assurance at face value.
Nora Benavidez, a civil rights and free speech attorney and senior counsel at Free Press, a nonpartisan organization focused on protecting civil liberties, said the requirement that TikTok’s owner, the Chinese tech giant ByteDance, divest itself of the app in 180 days of its becoming law or see TikTok barred from app stores and web hosts in the United States, effectively is a ban.
“It’s unrealistic that TikTok’s parent company would be able to sell the app within the U.S. within six months, which is the time period the government mandates under this bill,” said Benavidez, “Faced with that likely scenario, the penalties they’d face in the case of such an event would result in TikTok being banned.”
Creators and opponents of the measure called the legislation a threat to their livelihoods and said it would have devastating economic impact. A study issued Wednesday by Oxford Economics, a financial consultancy, said TikTok drove $14.7 billion in small business owners’ revenue in 2023 and contributed $24.2 billion to U.S. gross domestic product last year. It found that TikTok supports at least 224,000 jobs in the United States, with the app’s greatest economic impact seen in California, Texas, Florida, New York and Illinois.
“Any ban on TikTok is not just banning the freedom of expression, you’re literally causing huge harm to our national economy,” Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.), who voted against the measure, told a rally of opponents Tuesday. “Small business owners across the country use TikTok to move our economy forward. Some of these creators and these business owners solely depend on TikTok for their revenue and their job. To rush a process forward that could ban their form of work, particularly young people in this country, is misguided.”
Garcia added that the app was also an important way for people to connect.
“As an openly gay person, it’s a place where I get so much gay information and where gay creators come to share news,” Garcia said. “TikTok is a space for representation and banning TikTok also means taking away a voice and a platform for people of color and queer creators that have made TikTok their home.”
One creator who attended Tuesday’s rally, Gigi Gonzales, a 34-year-old financial educator in Chicago, said that a TikTok ban would destroy her financially. “It would get rid of my biggest source of revenue,” she said.
She also said shutting down the app would cut off access to crucial information. Gonzales uses the app to provide information on financial literacy, especially to other Latin women. Prior to TikTok she was trying to reach people through webinars, which few if anyone would attend. Now she reaches millions.
TikTok has become a massive educational hub in recent years. Through it’s #LearnOnTikTok initiative, the company has partnered with over 800 public figures, publishers, educational institutions, and subject matter experts to bring more high quality educational material to the app. TikTok also gives grants to educators and nonprofits who produce educational content.
“Both sides of the aisle know that TikTok is a crucial tool that many, particularly young people, use for education, advocacy and organizing,” said Annie Wu Henry, a digital strategist and content creator. “It’s incredibly clear too that many of these politicians don’t fully understand what the app is that they are trying to ban or even why they are trying to ban it.”
Tiffany Yu, a 35-year-old disability advocate in Los Angeles, said the potential banning of the app would be especially harmful to disabled people for whom it has been a lifeline during the isolation of the ongoing covid-19 pandemic, which is keeping public spaces off limits for many.
“TikTok has been able to help us find each other,” Yu said. “Losing TikTok would remove us from that social fabric.”
And since many disabled people still can’t safely return to work in person, TikTok is also an economic lifeline. “Our unemployment rates are twice that of our non-disabled peers,” she said. “So a lot of us turn to creative entrepreneurship to generate income. We’ve come onto the platform and we’ve figured out a way to leapfrog ourselves out of poverty and be able to thrive and finally survive in a society that hasn’t supported us for a long time.”
Many creators also expressed concern about the implications of cutting off a major communications tool that tens of millions of Americans use.
“This strips millions of Americans of their rights of freedom of speech and it’s really not okay,” said Carly Goddard, a content creator who also is a plaintiff in the case against the state of Montana’s TikTok ban. “On TikTok you see … what is going on in our world. There is more to worry about in our world than banning an app. That should be the focus.”
