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In TikTok’s Final Hours, a Mix of Silliness and Sadness
Users in the United States react to a nationwide ban of the app.
Members of the dance group Studio1 performing for videos to be used on social media, including TikTok, in Times Square this week. Credit… Adam Gray/Getty Images Jan. 18, 2025
On Saturday, TikTok users in the United States scrolled through the app in its final hours after the Supreme Court on Friday upheld a law that required ByteDance, TikTok’s Chinese parent company, to sell the app by Sunday or otherwise face a ban.
The mood among users as the hours ticked down was relatively somber, at least by TikTok’s typically unserious standards.
Alix Earle, a content creator with 7.2 million followers who rose to fame on the app in 2022, posted tearful videos mourning the platform.
“I feel like I’m going Through heartbreak,” Ms. Earle wrote in one video. “This platform is more than an app or a job to me. I have so many Memories on here. I have posted every day for the past 6 years of my life. I’ve shared my friends, family, relationships, personal struggles, secrets.”
Ms. Earle added that she had been “in denial” about the ban. She wasn’t the only one.
In the days leading up to the Supreme Court’s ruling, the tone on the app was jokey and even optimistic as many users did not believe that TikTok, a platform with 170 million users in the United States, would actually be banned. The app stopped working in the U.S. on Saturday night, around 90 minutes before the law was to take effect at midnight.
Some users earlier in the day posted satirical videos bidding farewell to their supposed Chinese spies, a play on a long-running TikTok joke that all American users are assigned agents of the Chinese government to spy on them through the app. Others offered instructions on how to use a virtual private network in hopes of circumventing the ban.
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