TikTok was one of the most popular apps in India until it was banned in 2020. It’s a lesson that could be learned if the same thing happens in the United States.
Four years ago, India was TikTok’s largest market. The app had a growing base of 200 million users and growing opportunities for creators and influencers.
TikTok seemed unstoppable, until simmering tensions on the border between India and China led to violence.
After the border skirmish that occurred between both countries, on June 29, 2020, the Indian government banned the app. Almost overnight, TikTok disappeared.
But TikTok India accounts and videos remain online, frozen in time, showing the moment when the app had just emerged as a cultural giant.
The precedent could offer a preview of what may happen in the United States.
On April 24, President Joe Biden signed a bill into law that could ultimately ban TikTok in that country, opening a new chapter after years of threats and failed legislation.
The law requires the company that owns TikTok, Bytedance, to sell its stake in the app within the next nine months, with an additional three-month grace period, or face a possible ban in the country.
Bytedance says it has no intention of selling the social media platform and has vowed to challenge the law in court.
Banning a massive social media app is unprecedented in the history of American technology, and the looming court battle comes with an uncertain outcome.
Although India shows what can happen when a major country deletes TikTok from its citizens’ smartphones, it is not the only one to have taken that step.
In November 2023, Nepal announced a ban on TikTok in its territory and Pakistan has implemented various temporary bans since 2020.
An unprecedented exhibition
As the app’s 150 million American users scroll through videos waiting to see what might happen with it, the story of the TikTok ban in India shows that users are adapting quickly, but also that When TikTok dies, much of its culture dies with it.
Sucharita Tyagi, a Mumbai-based film critic, had grown her account to 11,000 followers when TikTok disappeared. Some of her videos accumulated millions of views.
“TikTok was huge. People were gathering all over the country, dancing, doing skits, posting about how they run their farm in their small village in the hills,” says Tyagi.
“There were a huge number of people who suddenly had this exposure that had always been denied to them but was now possible.”
The application was a particular phenomenon due to the opportunities that its algorithm provided to rural users in Indiawho could find an audience through her and even achieve a celebrity status impossible to achieve with others.
“It democratized the reaction to content for the first time,” says Prasanto K Roy, a writer and technology analyst based in New Delhi.
“We started to see a lot of these people from rural areas, very low on the socioeconomic scale, who would never dream of getting followers or making money from it. And TikTok’s discovery algorithm brought it to users who wanted to see it. There was nothing like it in terms of hyperlocal videos,” he adds.
TikTok has a similar cultural importance in the United States, where niche communities flourish and countless small creators and businesses base their livelihoods on the app.
It’s a less common type of success on other social media platforms. Instagram, for example, is generally more geared toward consuming content from accounts with large followers, while TikTok places a greater emphasis on encouraging the average user to post.
Not just TikTok
When TikTok was taken offline in India, the government banned it too 58 other Chinese appsincluding some that are currently gaining popularity in the United States, such as the fashion shopping app Shein.
Over the years, India has banned another hundred Chinese apps, although an Indian version of Shein has reappeared following recent negotiations.
Something like this could happen in the United States. The new law sets a precedent and creates a mechanism for the US government to remove other Chinese apps. The privacy and national security concerns that politicians express about TikTok could have consequences for other companies as well.
And when a popular app is removed, Others may try to fill that spot..
“As soon as TikTok was banned, a multibillion-dollar opportunity opened up,” says Nikhil Pahwa, an Indian technology policy analyst and founder of the news site MediaNama. “Several startups Indian (tech startups) launched or pivoted to fill the gap.”
For months, the Indian tech press has been inundated with news about these Indian social media startups, with names like Chingari, Moj and MX Taka Tak.
Some were successful early on, attracting former TikTok stars to their platforms and securing investment and even government support. This divided the Indian social media market into different sectors as new apps battled for dominance, but the post-TikTok shutdown fever did not last long.
In August 2020, just a few months after the TikTok ban. Instagram launched its short video format, the famous reels. YouTube followed up with Shorts, its own TikTok copycat feature, a month later.
Shortly after the closure of the social network TikTok, Instagram and YouTube were already established in India, and had cornered the field in which new companies competed.
“There was a lot of hype around alternatives to TikTok, but most of them faded in the long run,” says Prateek Waghre, executive director of the Internet Freedom Foundation, an Indian advocacy group. “In the end, probably the one that benefited the most was Instagram.”
It wasn’t long before many of India’s most relevant TikTok creators and their followers moved to the Meta and Google apps, and many found similar success.
For example, Geet, an Indian social media “influencer” who only goes by her first name, rose to full fame on TikTok by teaching “American English” and giving life advice and motivational talks. She had 10 million followers on three different accounts by the time TikTok was banned.
In an interview with the BBC in 2020, Geet shared her concerns about the future of her career. But four years later, she has managed to gather almost five million followers on Instagram and YouTube.
However, users and experts the BBC spoke to say that something was lost in the post-TikTok transition. Instagram and YouTube may have captured traffic from TikTok, but the sensation that TikTok left in India has not returned.
“The creators that TikTok had in its user base were comparatively very diverse,” Pahwa says. “There were farmers, bricklayers and people from small towns uploading videos. You don’t see that as much on YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels. TikTok’s discovery mechanism was very different.”
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If TikTok is banned in the United States, the American social media landscape may follow a similar path as India.
Four years after the ban, Instagram and YouTube have already established themselves as a home for short videos. Even LinkedIn is experimenting with a TikTok-style nonstop video feed.
The app’s competitors have shown that they don’t need to recreate TikTok’s culture to find success.
Hyperlocal and niche content in the United States is likely to disappear, just as it did in India. In fact, the cultural repercussions in the United States would be much more significant.
Nearly a third of Americans ages 18 to 29 get their news from TikTok, according to the Pew Research Center.
The United States has fewer TikTok users than the 200 million India had at its peak, but the Asian nation has a population of 1.4 billion people.
According to published information, TikTok has 170 million users in the United States, more than half of the country’s population.
“When India banned TikTok, the app was not the giant it is now,” says Tyagi. “It has become a cultural revolution in recent years. “I think banning it now in the United States would have a much greater impact.”
Furthermore, China’s response to India’s ban could be different in the US case. In the first scenario, India’s technology industry is practically non-existent in China.
The US technology industry, on the other hand, offers many opportunities for retaliation.
China has already launched a campaign to “eliminate the United States” and replace its technology with domestic alternatives. A ban on TikTok in the United States could accelerate this initiative.
“The TikTok ban was very sudden when it happened,” says Tyagi. “For me it wasn’t that important, I was just using the app to promote my other work. But it was strange and unfair to a lot of people, especially those who were actually making money and getting deals with brands.”
Losing TikTok didn’t affect Tyagi’s livelihood, but it did disconnect her from her account. Until she took a trip to the United States.
“When I visited the United States, I was surprised to see that my profile was still active,” says Tyagi. It was like a trip back in time. She even posted some videos. Most of his followers at home couldn’t see them, of course, but he did get some interaction from Indians living abroad.
“There are millions of accounts that are still there,” says Tyagi. He is struck by the fact that TikTok keeps them. “I wonder if they have hope that India will one day allow them to return.”
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