"I've heard that, recently, I've been on the [TikTok] 'For You' page, so I thought I would get on here myself." Within nine hours, the eight-second video accumulated 7 million views, 1.7 million likes, and 67,300 comments. Mere days after becoming the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, Kamala Harris made her own personal account on the controversial social media app.
Harris' actions underline how TikTok has become a crucial platform for those with a message. Yet news of the U.S. government's effort to ban the social media app has been hard to ignore. Legislators fear TikTok provides the Chinese government access to user data, and on April 24, President Joe Biden signed a bill that would ban the app in the U.S. should TikTok's China-based owner, ByteDance, fail to sell its stake by Jan. 19, 2025.
TikTok started as three separate apps, which eventually merged in 2018. In its early days, the app gave users a way to make short lip-sync videos, but it soon became a platform where music artists could launch songs and become viral success stories. The app reached new heights of popularity during the COVID-19 pandemic and has since become a go-to platform for marketers to reach younger audiences.
It has also become a lifeline for many creators who have parlayed their personalities and interests into careers. "I know people have a negative connotation to influencers, and I totally understand that, but there's some of us [who] kind of fell into this by mistake, and this is our job now," Lauren-Ashley Beck told NPR. With more than 530,000 followers, Beck has dubbed herself the Queen of Stream. Money from the app has helped her pay down student loans and even buy a Ford Bronco—before the signed ban, that is.
A TikTok ban would negatively disrupt the creator economy, abruptly ending the careers of creators who profit from posting on the app. While emerging TikTokers have expressed concern, stars like Charli D'Amelio and Zach King, whose fame has expanded past the app, have maintained an open mind. "There always will be that hot new app, and we'll be a part of it if we can. Because it's great to be where the current conversations are happening," King, who experimented with both YouTube and Vine before joining TikTok, told Newsweek.
Before the ban goes into effect, Collabstr looked into the app's current most-followed accounts by analyzing TikTok following data on Social Blade to rank the users with the most influence based on their following size as of mid-July 2024. Note that ranking constantly changes, reflecting the fast pace of social media. Public descriptions of creators' nationalities and residences were used to focus the list on U.S.-based users, which, of course, excludes the app's current most-followed user, Senegalese Italian creator Khaby Lame. Many of these accounts will probably be familiar names even outside the platform, but the highest-ranking ones continue to be users who have honed their style in the wilds of social media.
