On Jan. 19, 2025, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill sophomore and Tik Tok creator Tola Jegede was watching a boxing match with her friends. The group was patiently waiting for it to hit midnight to wish a friend a happy birthday when a collective outcry of panic shattered their calm. “No my Tik Tok, my drafts!” they screamed. This was the day Tik Tok went dark.
Sorry, Tik Tok isn’t available right now. A law banning Tik Tok has been enacted in the U.S. Unfortunately, that means you can’t use Tik Tok for right now.
This message was plastered across the screen of 170 million U.S. Tik Tok users according to CNN. A portion of these users were college student creators like Jegede or itsmetola on Tik Tok.
Tik Tok’s sudden shutdown came after Congress passed a law upheld by the Supreme Court banning the app due to national security concerns. Because Byte Dance, the Chinese company that owns Tik Tok, did not sell the app to an American buyer by Jan. 19, per the law, the app was removed from Google and Apple app stores.
The next day, newly sworn-in President Donald Trump signed an executive order granting Byte Dance a 75-day extension to sell Tik Tok to a US buyer.
But for content creators like Jegede, the 18-hour shutdown was more than just an inconvenience. Jegede, who amassed a 12.1K following in about nine months and is known for her hair tutorials and college life content as a STEM major, said Tik Tok helped her make new connections.
“I would say [Tik Tok] also has allowed me to interact with new people. Because people do come up to me and they’re like, ‘oh, I see your Tik Toks.’ I’m like, thanks guys, I’m just a girl!” Jegede said.
Gillian Riley, known as lifewithgill on Tik Tok, is also a student creator at UNC majoring in Hispanic studies and applying for the ethical anatomy major. Within about four months, Riley built an audience of 123.2K followers by creating content about vegan dining as a college student. She said Tik Tok has done the same for her in terms of finding community.
“I have a really great group of friends but when they go home because they’re in state, it’s kind of just me, myself and I. So by making those videos I feel like there is a community still out there that I can chat with,” Riley said.
While community is important to creators like Jegede and Riley, it is not the only thing at stake if the app is permanently banned. Creators also rely on the app for a source of income.
RPM, or revenue per mille, is a metric used to measure the amount of revenue generated for every thousand views on a video. According to Jegede, the amount of money a creator can make directly on Tik Tok through RPM and brand deals secured from recognition on the app, can surpass the earnings made from traditional student employment opportunities.
“I’ve worked side jobs and things like that and they’re great, but just seeing that one video can be worth like two weeks of working at like Chick-fil-A or something is insane to me,” Jegede said.
Because of the financial possibilities with Tik Tok, Riley, who works two jobs on campus as a personal trainer and in a genetics lab, considers Tik Tok a third source of income because it pays so well. However, if the app does go dark permanently, she said, she would likely have to work more hours at her other two jobs to support her law school ambition.
With the uncertainty surrounding Tik Tok’s future, creators are exploring alternative platforms to maintain their community connections and their streams of income. One of these platforms is Instagram.
“I want to say Instagram might be the next best thing because they do still have reels, but the connotation of Instagram is that it’s too serious, especially for content creators,” Jegede said. “There’s a lot of hate on it. So from a content creation standpoint, I am a little nervous to post on Instagram. And then from a viewer standpoint it’s just not as funny.”
Jade Walters, or the ninthsemester on Tik Tok, creates early career content on the app and other platforms. Walters also founded the Ninthsemester, a blog and resource that helps students land internships and other job opportunities. As a former student herself and someone who uses multiple platforms to reach current students, Walters said Tik Tok’s uniqueness is what makes it difficult to replicate on other platforms.
“There aren’t any equivalents to Tik Tok in the social media space. Even though Tik Tok was only gone for like 18 hours, I oddly felt a sense of relief, ’cause I’m like, okay, like I guess I won’t be rotting my brain anymore. I’m going to try something different. But then it’s like, you’re going to miss Tik Tok and what I love the most about Tik Tok is that community,” Walters said.
Meredith Clark, associate professor of political communications at UNC-Chapel Hill and one of the principal investigators for UNC’s Center for Information, Technology and Public Life, said the looming Tik Tok ban speaks to issues outside of community and income, such as First Amendment rights.
According to the New York State Bar Association, the right to freedom of expression, opinion and information includes the right to seek, receive and impart information through all forms of media and without interference. This principle was upheld in similar legal challenges involving Tik Tok. In 2020, U.S. District Court Judge Wendy Beetlestone said banning the app would mean shutting down an app used for expressive activity.
Today, critiques of the ban such as Clark argue that the ban raises similar concerns.
“The thing that digital creators are going to be up against is that if the United States becomes a major shareholder in Tik Tok, whatever the U.S. government doesn’t want out is going to be silenced and in fact, censored on that platform and a ton of creators are gonna find themselves on the wrong side of the law basically,” Clark said.
However, according to Middle Tennessee State University’s Free Speech Center, a nonpartisan organization, the Supreme Court determined the law was less about regulating speech and more about protecting national security. This means the Supreme Court does not consider banning Tik Tok a First Amendment matter.
Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote a brief accepting the government’s reasoning but also pointed out the law’s implication on First Amendment rights.
Sotomayor said there was “no reason to assume without deciding that the Act implicates the First Amendment because our precedent leaves no doubt that it does.”
However, creators like Walters say there are more pressing issues that need attention.
“Honestly, I feel like there’s a lot of other things on the table that’s happening in the U.S. that are way more important than this ban. I think that the fact that the ban even got to as far as it did, really surprised me,” Walters said.
As Tik Tok’s future hangs in the balance, college Tik Tok creators face the possibility of losing community, income and to some, freedom of speech and expression, leaving them in a limbo similar to Tik Tok.
“[Tik Tok] allows you to express yourself in a creative way,” Jegede said. “It allows you to inform others and get informed. So by removing it, it’s just like taking a part of us away.”
