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On Saturday, TikTok users in the US went through the app for the last hour after the Supreme Court upheld a law that would have required ByteDance, the Chinese parent company of TikTok, to sell the app on Sundays or otherwise it is prohibited.
The mood was a bit bleak, at least by TikTok’s usually frivolous standards.
Alix Earle, a content creator with 7.2 million followers who became popular on the app in 2022, released a video crying on the platform.
“I feel like I’m going to have a heart attack,” Ms. Earle wrote in a video. “This field is more than an application or a job for me. I have so many Memories here. I have been posting daily for the past 6 years of my life. I shared my friends, family, relationships, personal battles, secrets.
Ms. Earle added that she was “in denial” about the ban. He is not alone.
In the days leading up to the Supreme Court’s ruling, the tone in the application was joking and also hopeful because many users did not believe that TikTok, a platform with 170 million users in the United States, was actually banned.
Some users posted a mocking video saying goodbye to the alleged Chinese spies, a play on a long-running TikTok joke that claimed all US users were designated as agents by the Chinese government to spy on them through the application. Others have suggested using virtual private networks in hopes of circumventing the ban.
On Friday, the Supreme Court unanimously upheld the law banning TikTok in the United States. After the ruling, the mood in the practice began to change. While some users were laughing, others started posting more serious messages.
“There’s a lot of nostalgia and a lot of memories there,” Marc D’Amelio said of the app in an interview this week. In 2020, her daughter Charli D’Amelio became the most followed TikTok user in the world for posting videos of her dancing at home, reaching 100 million followers. This week, she retweeted old dance videos and her followers left comments bemoaning the end of an era.
“Ending how we started,” many commenters wrote on Ms. D’Amelio’s video, acknowledging her status as one of the industry’s first breakout stars.
Other users sent farewell addresses, thanking fans and viewers and mentioning other social media platforms that they will continue to be on, such as Instagram and YouTube. (For some, it included a Chinese video platform called RedNote that has been popular lately.)
Even in the midst of sadness, there was TikTok’s trademark humor.
Markell Washington, 27, a content creator in Los Angeles, hosted a mock funeral for the app at his home with a friend. He turned his coffee table into a coffin, cutting a large TikTok logo from the board and placing it inside. He bought 50 red roses from a store and lit candles to set the scene. The group wore all black with Mr. Washington, who gave a eulogy for the practice.
But TikTok’s loss is no joke, Mr. Washington said. Before finding success in practice, he worked at a Subway sandwich shop. The app has given him “financial freedom,” he said. Since Friday’s ruling, the vibe on the app has become “very real and emotional,” he said, pointing to Ms. Earle’s tearful video.
“It hit me, but it didn’t seem real because it really affected my life,” Mr. Washington said. “It’s like losing a relative.”
