Will the popular social media site TikTok be banned in America in as little as six months? Photo by  Solen Feyissa/Creative Commons

Social Media

BU TikTok Creators, Students Sound Off on the App’s Possible Ban

Privacy concerns, brain rot, and financial reasons for wanting to keep—or drop—the highly addictive social media platform

Boston University junior Sophia Caffrey returned from spring break to find “everyone”—her word—on campus talking about TikTok. No, not the latest trend of getting roasted by commenters trying to guess how old you are, but instead, how the hugely popular social media site could be banned in America in as little as six months. 

On March 13, the US House of Representatives passed a bipartisan bill that would force TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, to sell the social media app or face a ban on all US devices. The rationale behind the measure is security concerns such as the possibility that the Chinese-owned company can access American user data through TikTok and that it helps to spread pro-China propaganda. Now, the decision shifts to the US Senate. (President Biden has said that if it reaches his desk, he would sign it.)

Caffrey (Questrom’25) is significantly invested in the matter as she is a TikTok influencer (@scaff17) with over 60,000 followers. Her account took off three years ago when she made funny videos aimed at Boston-area college freshmen and has since expanded to more general lifestyle and day-in-the-life content.

Caffrey believes Congress’ privacy concerns about the app are overblown. Facebook and Snapchat have already mined people’s data, she says, but those apps aren’t facing the same scrutiny. (The big difference is that these are American tech companies, subject to US regulations.) “My generation hasn’t known data privacy—we were born in a very digital age and forced to sign away a lot, just given how we immerse ourselves in this technology,” says Caffrey, who also works as an intern for BU’s social media team. 

Senator Mark Warner (D-Va.) disagrees. He chairs the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and is leading the push for the ban along with Senator Marco Rubio (R-Fla.). In a March 19 interview with NPR’s All Things Considered, Warner said the problem lies in the fact that TikTok is owned by a Chinese-controlled company. “And based on Chinese law, that company has no option other than to respond to the needs of the Communist Party of China,” he said. “That takes primacy over return to shareholders or to customers.”

Last month, a poll by the Associated Press and NORC Center for Public Affairs Research found a three-way opinion split on banning the app, with 31 percent of US adults agreeing with a ban, 35 percent disagreeing with a ban, and the remainder saying they didn’t care either way. However, among those who use TikTok daily, 73 percent of respondents say they definitely do not support the ban.

Staffing his club’s table in the George Sherman Union this week, Walter McClanahan (Questrom’27) shared his unhappiness about the potential ban. “TikTok helped me get into BU because my FYP [For You Page] showed admissions people sharing tips,” he says. “It’s very fun. It would be hard to see something crucial to my life go away.”

A recent study by Oxford Economics explains the financial impact the ban stands to have: more than seven million American businesses market or sell their products through TikTok. Last year, TikTok drove $14.7 billion in revenue for small-business owners and contributed $24.2 billion to US gross domestic product. TikTok supports at least 224,000 American jobs. 

Take recent grad Irene Kim (COM’23), who runs a personal page (@ireneykim) with 494,000 followers and a joint food account page with her best friend; she estimates she’s made around $30,000 from her TikTok accounts within the past year. She hasn’t quit her day job, though—she also works full-time running a company’s official TikTok account. 

“If TikTok were to get banned, I would basically be out of a job,” Kim says. “I also really enjoy content creating, so I would also have to put a stop to one of my hobbies as well.” 

Kim says that if TikTok were banned, she would shift her efforts to Instagram. “Hopefully, it doesn’t have to come to that,” she says. 

Instagram’s algorithm, however, isn’t as friendly to creators. Much has been written about TikTok’s infamous algorithm, which provides users with a constant feed of short-form video clips. It can make someone viral overnight, whether they’re sharing a funny story or a cute pet. “There’s not really any other app that can do that; some might say Instagram and YouTube, but honestly, it takes a lot to build platforms on there,” Caffrey says.

But “the reason why people delete TikTok at my age isn’t because of fear of data privacy, it’s because they use it so much that it’s interfering with their lives,” she says. “That’s how addictive an app it is.” Critics say it can “stimulate behavioral addictions,” lead to poor academic performance, and harm users’ mental health. 

That’s why Junchu Wu (CAS’24) doesn’t use it. “It’s too distracting and it makes people insecure,” she says. “But I’m shocked about the ban. I didn’t think it would pass in the House. What will a ban do—the government has so much info already. It seems like a strategic [political] move on their part, rather than in people’s best interests.”

Kiril Yakusevych (CAS’24) agrees with the ban, he says, because it allows the government to pressure foreign social media companies not to harvest data from American citizens. Yakusevych has heard fellow students wondering why a similar ban isn’t happening to other social media companies, and he has some thoughts. 

“It’s because they’re domestic companies,” he says. “It’s better if the data is harvested by American companies than non-American companies because at least there’s some control over it that might be affected by legislation.” He acknowledges that he’s an occasional TikTok user and says that sometimes the app can be helpful and educational. But, he says, “it can also lead to what we kids call ‘brain rot.’” 

Between her two accounts, Katie Ferreri (@giraffeswhip and @ktlamborghini) has more than 170,000 combined followers, which definitely helped as she wrote a paper last semester for her sociology class on the conflict that is arising between China and the United States over TikTok’s algorithm. 

“TikTok isn’t doing anything new [in terms of privacy concerns], so having this as our government’s main claim doesn’t make sense,” says Ferreri (CAS’24). She is both scared and mad about TikTok possibly coming to an end, she says. “It’s helped me pay for groceries, and it’s been a creative outlet. It’s concerning that it would be taken away.”