On TikTok, Resignation and Frustration After Potential Ban of App

As Congress voted Tuesday night on legislation that could ban TikTok, Americans were posting their real-time reactions on the embattled video-sharing app.

The Senate passed a revised TikTok bill, tied to a package to provide aid for Israel and Ukraine, with a 79-18 vote, and President Biden signed it into law Wednesday. It will force TikTok’s Chinese owner, ByteDance, to sell the app to an American entity within 12 months or face a ban in the United States. The House passed the bill on Saturday with a 360-to-58 vote.

Here’s what lawmakers who oppose the law, content creators and users said.

Lawmakers

Representative Ro Khanna, a California Democrat representing Silicon Valley, had been a vocal opponent of the bill. He shared his opposition through videos posted on TikTok before and after the House vote. Mr. Khanna has been outspoken against a sweeping ban on TikTok, and has met with people who create content for TikTok to understand their concerns.

“I voted no today on the bill to ban TikTok because it hurts the free speech of creators, activists, organizers, and small business owners who rely on the app to have their voices heard,” Mr. Khanna said in a statement following the House’s vote. He added his support for a new law that would give users more control of their data.

Representative Jamaal Bowman, a New York Democrat, was another opponent of the bill and previously said that banning TikTok meant silencing the voices of young people. In a two-and-a-half-minute video on Saturday, he called for comprehensive social media reform instead of singling out TikTok.

“The House is showing a complete disconnect between what we are doing in the House of Representatives and what’s happening in the real world with young people,” Mr. Bowman said in the video.

Users

Rebekah Ciolli, 35, a stay-at-home mother of three in Indiana, signed up for a TikTok account early last year.

Before that, she had hoped for a ban because, she said, she did not “need another social media app that is consuming your life.” But now, she spends a few hours on the app every day, looking up content like at-home learning and family-friendly recipes and finding like-minded users. To her, losing TikTok would mean losing a community.

“There’s all these moms across the world that I’m friends with, even though I’ve never truly met them in person,” Ms. Ciolli said in an interview. “I will definitely be sad to lose that.”

Content Creators

Ariana Afshar, also known as @arianajasmine— on TikTok, usually creates content about political news. After the House passed the TikTok legislation, she filmed herself in front of a screenshot of CNN’s coverage of the bill to explain the vote, adding that “this is only going to hurt the trust that people have with the government.”

Because most of her audience is Gen Z and young millennials, Ms. Afshar worried that passing such a bill would dissuade young people from voting in this year’s election. “The younger generation is already pretty mad at this administration,” she said in an interview. “The ripple effect is going to be much larger than what lawmakers are calculating right now.”

To many content creators, TikTok is a lifeline. They built their businesses on TikTok, and the app is how their customers got to know them. The uncertainty surrounding TikTok is making many of them worry about their livelihood.

“It’s affecting everything, even down to our financial planning,” said Nadya Okamoto, who is a founder of August, which sells sustainable menstrual products, and is known for her content on menstrual health. “We have been able to grow organically. And what’s scary is that as small business owners, we don’t know what that looks like moving forward.”

Ms. Okamoto spearheaded an open letter to President Biden to oppose the passing of the bill. The letter, last updated on Monday, has 47 signatures from TikTok creators.

V Spehar, who runs the news aggregation and analysis account @UnderTheDeskNews on TikTok, posted 10 videos over the past week about the legislation. On Friday, Mx. Spehar told their over three million followers about the upcoming vote, calling it a way where the government misuses “the levers of power that they hold to pass a legislation that is deeply unpopular with the American public.”

One day after the vote, in a video dubbed with the song “Omigod You Guys” from the “Legally Blond” musical, Mx. Spehar filmed themselves shaking their head to the text, “Trying to get people to care about politics after Congress voted to ban TikTok.”

“The consequence is not that TikTok gets banned,” Mx. Spehar said in an interview. “It’s that the American public loses faith even more in the institute of the government than they already have.”