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The graveyard of social media platforms past: MySpace, Vine, Friendster and now, maybe, TikTok, at least in the United States.

This morning, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a decision allowing a ban of TikTok, the popular app for sharing short-form videos, to go into effect across the country. Lawmakers passed the bill in 2024 after raising concerns about TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, which is based in China.

Casey Fiesler was among the content creators anxiously awaiting the decision. She studies technology ethics and policy as an associate professor in Department of Information Science at CU ��«����Ƶ. She’s also @professorcasey on TikTok where she shares videos on AI and social media with her more than 100,000 followers.

Fiesler noted that apps like TikTok come with a lot of risks. But she said that millions of people around the world have also turned to TikTok to find community—and maybe even learn something.

“Someone could be scrolling through cat videos or dance videos, and then, suddenly, there’s me explaining how algorithms work,” Fiesler said. “To me, that’s magical.”

As the possible ban looms, Fiesler weighs in on what will happen to TikTok’s online communities—and whether they can rebuild those connections on another app.

Casey Fiesler

@professorcasey talks the future of TikTok in a Jan. 16 post.

What is happening with TikTok?

There is a possibility that TikTok will be banned in the United States in just a few days, which is pretty wild. In this country, completely banning a social media platform is not something that has happened before.

But it's also unclear exactly what happens should TikTok become officially banned in the United States. It means that app stores would not be permitted to carry it, so, eventually, we wouldn't be able to get updates on the app, which might make it unusable. It also could mean that third party service providers wouldn’t be allowed to service TikTok—things like PayPal. But it’s unclear exactly what this would look like.

What makes TikTok different from other video-sharing apps?

One thing that feels very special about TikTok is that the recommendation algorithm that determines what you see next in your scroll tends to show people what they want to see. Now, this can be good and bad because you don't always know what kinds of signals you're giving the system. Have you been doomscrolling? More of the same, please.

This algorithm is also creating communities. It can help you find a community that you didn't even necessarily know you needed.

What kinds of communities?

What I found first on TikTok were a lot of other academics and professors who were interested in public education and science communication, and that's been a fun community for me. But I’ve also been lurking on BookTok—I love seeing all of the book content. I also find myself in the middle of a social justice activist community on TikTok.

People are worried about losing these communities. You can try to reconstitute a community on a different platform, but it's not going to be exactly the same.

Do you think people will try to do that—rebuild on another app?

It’s very easy to say, ‘Instagram Reels is just like TikTok. Why don't you just go there?’ But it's not just about the functionality of the app. It's also the fact that you can't bring your community and your audience with you. You have to rebuild from scratch. For some people, particularly those who have built large platforms, this represents a huge amount of work over many, many years.

Recently, a lot of TikTok users have been flocking to the app RedNote, which is also owned by a Chinese company. Is that a viable alternative to TikTok?

It seems unlikely to me that this can be a lasting thing, in part because of the regulatory issues in both China and the United States. I also think that part of what’s happening is that people are trying to make a point.

Some commentators have pointed out that many U.S. lawmakers don’t seem to know what they’re banning—that technology literacy is fairly low in Congress. Do you agree?

It’s clear that policymakers might not have an understanding of how TikTok is similar to, or sometimes different than, other social media platforms. Many of the critiques that have been very justifiably hurled at TikTok apply equally to X, Instagram or basically any social media platform.

One of the frustrating things about watching this law move forward is that some of the things that are at the basis of this law—data privacy, for example—are incredibly important. It's frustrating, therefore, to see the ban of an entire platform rather than see lawmakers enact data privacy laws.

What can we learn from this saga?

One of the things that's frustrating to me when policymakers talk about the risks and harms of TikTok is that they don't seem to be weighing those risks and harms against the benefits of the platform and against the risks and harms of the platform going away. Tiktok is really important to a lot of people—for community, social support, income. It’s incredibly important for small businesses, and these are concrete, tangible harms that will happen if the app goes away.

All social media is good for us and bad for us at the same time. What we have to do is think about how to get more of the good and less of the bad without throwing the baby out with the bath water.