TikTok’s Supreme Court decision is great for Meta, YouTube, and Snap
Time is up for the Chinese short-form video platform — maybe.
TikTok is counting down to zero, after the Supreme Court voted this morning to uphold a law banning the app. The much-loved short-video platform is slated to be outlawed in the US this Sunday, unless Chinese parent company ByteDance sells it.
That’s potentially good news for American social-media competitors who offer similar products, including Meta’s Instagram, Snap, and Google’s Youtube.
Of course there are some Very Big Asterisks here, namely:
The Biden administration doesn’t plan to implement the ban, instead leaving it up to incoming President Donald Trump.
Trump is considering an executive order that would suspend enforcement of the law for 60 to 90 days, to “save TikTok.”
Even still, ahead of the ban, TikTok creators have been asking TikTok’s 170 million US users to find them on those other sites.
It’s also good for... other Chinese apps. Lifestyle platform Xiaohongshu, known as RedNote, is currently at the top of the App Store, followed by Lemon8, TikTok’s sister app.
On the other end of the stick, of course, is TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, as well as Oracle, which provides cloud-computing services to TikTok.
TikTok, for its part, has said it’s planning on abruptly switching off the app instead of letting those who already have it continue to use it, The Information reported. The idea would be to “bring home the impact of the ban to all TikTok’s users.”
