TikTok chief government Shou Zi Chew stated a ban would take the platform away from the 170 million People who use it. “Make no mistake, it is a ban — a ban on TikTok and a ban on you and your voice,” he stated, including: “We aren’t going wherever.”
After the Senate vote, some customers scrambled to ask their communities, “What platform are we going to now?”
Others, significantly some with stigmatized pursuits or marginalized identities, expressed deeper anxiousness over the potential lack of close-knit circles constructed by means of TikTok that would show troublesome to rebuild elsewhere.
“We’ve already constructed such a powerful ecosystem on TikTok,” stated Jackie Gonzalez, who has discovered consolation and neighborhood on #DeafTok. “To tear that down and power us to rebuild someplace else can be a setback for positive.”
Sam Reall, 21, was identified with Tourette’s syndrome when he was 6. As he navigated his early years, he tried his finest to cover the relentless tics — the sudden actions and sounds attributable to the situation, for which there isn’t any remedy. Remoted and confused, Reall believed he was “cursed.”
“I didn’t know anybody else had the identical situation and felt very a lot alone,” stated Reall, from Illinois.
That modified in 2021, when he started posting to TikTok in a bid to boost consciousness of the situation, which about 1.4 million folks in america have, in line with the CDC.
What got here subsequent have been “a whole bunch of conversations” between Reall and others like him, plus conversations with their family members and relations. Reall stated he has made “lifelong mates” due to the Tourette’s neighborhood on TikTok, turn out to be extra assured and even stopped hiding his tics. He’s additionally helped others get identified and search medical assist.
“I’ve had folks inform me they have been in a position to higher perceive their situation on account of my content material,” he stated, including that if such a platform existed when he was youthful, it might have “utterly modified” his childhood.
The proposed TikTok ban can be “an enormous step backward for the neighborhood,” Reall stated. Attempting to maneuver it elsewhere simply wouldn’t work, he stated, noting that he typically posts his movies to Instagram, however they don’t attain as many individuals.
Whereas rising up, Jackie Gonzalez did what many deaf or exhausting of listening to folks do in a hearing-centered world: She realized to learn lips. It was “for survival,” the Austin-based enterprise proprietor stated through e mail, “with these round me oblivious to the work I used to be doing so as to join.”
Years later, Gonzalez’s TikTok movies on deafness — together with a sequence through which she lip-reads conversations of celebrities caught on digital camera — have racked up hundreds of thousands of views.
“TikTok has seen this capacity and has acknowledged it in a means I by no means might have dreamed of,” Gonzalez stated. “It feels good.”
On the coronary heart of what customers name “DeafTok” is a world the place being deaf doesn’t imply lacking out. On DeafTok, with the ability to flip off listening to aids on a loud aircraft is a perk. Music will be loved by means of vibrations, and lip-reading is handled not simply as a survival technique however as a expertise.
Elizabeth Harris additionally discovered help on the platform, making American Signal Language covers of well-liked songs and speaking about on a regular basis experiences, like going to the flicks on a date and sporting closed-caption glasses.
Harris, 22, plans to maintain posting her work on different platforms if TikTok is banned, however she stated she doesn’t assume she will re-create the identical type of neighborhood on Instagram “as a result of how somebody engages on TikTok is totally different,” she wrote in an e mail.
She requested followers in a March video about what they plan to do if there’s a ban, saying, “I really feel like we’re collectively and we’re related, and I don’t need to lose that.”
For people who find themselves grieving, TikTok can function a digital diary, one which helps them log the mourning means of these they’ve misplaced — mother and father, siblings, youngsters and pets — and navigate life with out them.
Three-year-old Auria Valdez liked timber and rain and leaping in puddles. She thought of squirrels her mates. In 2018, she died of a uncommon and aggressive type of most cancers.
Within the years since her loss of life, her mom, Gabrielle Valdez, has used TikTok to boost consciousness of childhood most cancers, to search out coping instruments and to attach with others experiencing loss.
“You by no means assume your little one can get most cancers, and also you positively by no means assume they will die,” she stated. “I’m proof that each can occur, so I used my journey to assist others.”
Valdez, 30, stated rising a neighborhood on TikTok was simpler than on different platforms the place she felt she needed to “pay” her “strategy to be heard.” TikTok supplied her with international attain and constructive engagement by means of use of hashtags like #grieftok and #childloss, she stated.
Valdez stated her account helps her and others discuss loss of life “in a world that doesn’t put together us forward of time for it.” With out TikTok as an outlet for her grief, she worries that she is going to “return to holding that every one in.”
Carson Drain, 29, first took to TikTok in 2022, after shedding each her mother and father the earlier yr, only one month aside.
“I might lose a complete neighborhood,” Drain stated Wednesday of the platform’s potential ban, explaining that nobody in her private life had been in a position to relate to her double loss. However she discovered “a gentle neighborhood and help system” on TikTok amongst others who had misplaced mother and father — an essential a part of her therapeutic course of.
“TikTok made me notice that I wasn’t alone in my disappointment, anger and despair.”
Kristie Carnevale, 34, posted her first romance #BookTok video on a solo Christmas Eve in the course of the pandemic and rapidly discovered a spot the place she might brazenly focus on the “spicy books” she’s loved because the “Fifty Shades of Gray” craze. Three years later, the Detroit-based enterprise proprietor generates a lot of her enterprise by means of TikTok. However that first night time speaks to why she caught round.
“It actually spawned out of loneliness and the urge for neighborhood and having somebody to speak to,” Carnevale stated.
For a very long time, the style “was seen as a responsible pleasure” she stated. “You didn’t inform folks you learn romances.”
However over the previous few years, the romance #BookTok neighborhood has flourished, making strides in altering the notion of the style — which Carnevale notes is “a women-led a part of the business,” with books that middle on ladies’s tales and needs.
Tanya Baker, who joined the neighborhood in 2021, stated that whereas there’s nonetheless progress to be made, it “has made so many individuals open and comfy” with studying romance books and “speaking about them with no disgrace.”
On her account, Baker, 28, dives into numerous tropes, recommends books and shares bookish way of life content material. The Southern California-based creator stated the work on TikTok allowed her to stop her 9-to-5 job and has been a supply of lifelong friendships that she credit, partially, to the subject material.
“A few of the subjects which can be mentioned in romance books are deeply private and it brings forth a specific amount of vulnerability,” she stated, “for somebody to brazenly say they liked a ebook and element why.”
Baker stated she is devastated by the information of a possible ban. “I don’t imagine the magic on BookTok will be recreated/duplicated,” she wrote.
When Carnevale thinks a few potential ban, “it breaks my coronary heart,” she stated. She worries for creators like herself who make a residing on the platform, however she additionally fears shedding what she calls “a bit of nook of completely happy in a extremely, actually robust world proper now.”
