On Wednesday morning, the Republican-led House of Representatives voted to ban TikTok on American soil if parent company ByteDance Ltd. refuses to sell its stake in the popular social media app. ByteDance is allegedly beholden to China’s Communist Party, which lawmakers believe makes the app a national security threat.
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If the Senate approves the ban and the company doesn’t play ball, you can kiss TikTok goodbye stateside. But it’s not just that you’ll no longer be able to watch Megan Thee Stallion dance videos during your bathroom stall “break” at work — a ban could have meaningful implications for many Black creators, large and miniature, whose living hinges on TikTok’s continued stateside existence.
To be clear, Black folks run TikTok: we as viewers and creators have played a significant role in the company’s road to its $60 billion valuation in the U.S. alone. There are more than 100 million U.S. users on the app, and Black folks’ food and beauty tutorials, dance videos and incisive takes on the world’s goings on are the engine that keep the app purring for the rest of the world.
The single biggest TikTok creator is Senegalese man Khaby Lame, who has 161.4 million followers. Lame is an Italian citizen, so the U.S ban wouldn’t impact his ability to create content. But who knows how many of that 160 million consist of U.S. followers?
Lame is on a different level than most creators — with a net worth zeroing in on $20 million thanks in part to an insane viewer count and the requisite endorsements – so figure a TikTok user with a fraction of his followers can still make a respectable living.
Take Keith Lee, one of the most followed food influencers on TikTok. Even with 16 million followers — fewer than 10 percent of Lame’s — the app made the Las Vegas-based former MMA fighter a millionaire, which he shares by way of huge payments to many of the Black-owned restaurants he supports and, quite literally, helps keep open.
But there are creators with even smaller follower numbers, like Chicago-based Lisa “Corporate Erin” Beasley, who has 384,000 followers but more than enough eyes on her videos to make it into TikTok’s Creativity Program, which allegedly carves off as much as a dollar per 1,000 views for its creators.
The potential of losing out on such lucrative opportunities is disheartening, especially considering how Black content creators have historically been treated at TikTok: the swagger-jacking, Columbusing and downright theft of our material from non-Black users who profited from it resulted in a Black user strike in 2021. There have even been whistles blown on the racism against Black employees at the corporate level of the social media giant.
Indeed, many have keen opinions regarding whether Black creators should create “our own thing” to avoid maltreatment by the large social media boys – talk that got deafening a couple years ago when The Muskrat purchased Twitter and turned into a Nazi mosquito breeding field.
Unfortunately, you don’t just build a social media platform with TikTok’s more than 1.6 billion global users overnight – Black Twitter took years to coalesce. TikTok is the current wave that we have to ride, so losing it over issues of national security would be a tragedy for the blessed few who have found a way to make a living from it.
