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The stress is setting in for American TikTok influencers, who are taking to their favorite app to vent their frustration after the legislation that could ban the platform was passed in the House with overwhelming support on Wednesday.
Content creators are now worried that they could be forced to return to dreaded nine-to-five careers as the bill now heads to the Senate.
Hilarious memes also surfaced on TikTok Wednesday afternoon as users cracked jokes about the potential ban of the platform that has more than a million of active users in the U.S..
Michelle York, an influencer who has nearly 200,000 followers on the platform, posted a video of herself wearing an awkward smile while singing along to the viral soundtrack ‘Me!’ from Glee.
‘All that work and what did it get me. Why did I do it,’ she sings as the overlaid text reads: ‘When you spent 20 years building a career in the insurance industry only to quit your job to be a content creator and now TikTok might be banned’.
Along posting the video, York wrote: ‘I keep getting messages about this & truthfully, I’m not super worried. It will take A LOT to actually go through, unlikely to happen in 2024.’
But she continued, ‘If it does, I have no control and will pivot. BE LOUD! Censorship is real,’ while asking her followers to find me on other platforms including Instagram.
A user made a hilarious meme with one scene from the Disney film Camp Rock 2 with the caption reading ‘Gen Z on their way to storm the capitol.’
The House voted 352-65 Wednesday in favor of the bill that would ban the app, as only 50 Democrats and 15 Republicans voted against it.
President Joe Biden has also urged the Senate to pass a bill that would force TikTok to separate from its Chinese parent company after the legislation.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters that Biden continued to support the bill that would ban the app and would sign it if it got to his desk.
The remarks sparked outrage among TikTok influencers including @pearlmania500, who has more than a million followers on the platform, as he furiously vents frustration in a video.
‘The only thing all 535 members of this congress could f**king agree on is to ban TikTok? That’s it?’ he yelled in the video that has amassed nearly ten millions of views.
‘I heard them talking about raising the minimum wage. Can’t f**king agree on that. Heard about talking about trying to keep prescription drug prices low for people. No, can’t agree on that!’ he continued.
‘But when it comes to banning TikTok, line up buddies! Bring that f**king Instagram and Microsoft money down here,’ he shouted.
Lawyer Brittany K. Barnett weighed in, posting a video of herself wandering with a serious expression, saying there are way more critical issues that lawmakers should prioritize.
She wrote: ‘When you are a lawyer trying to figure out why they are trying to ban TikTok but not raise minimum wage, lower housing costs, reform the criminal justice system…’
Other users who rely on the social media platform as their main source of income are worried about losing their jobs if TikTok is banned.
Lohanny Santos, a creator based in Brooklyn, New York, captioned her video: ‘Seems like TikTok is getting banned and I literally just got a new job running a TikTok account.’
Along posting the video, she wrote: ‘I literally just starting SLAYING on social media. And now they want me to die? That is insane. I LOVE BEING A TIK TOKER!’
Kali, who is a homeschooling her daughter while working as a content creator, said: ‘The TikTok ban makes me feel one of the musicians on the Titanic as it goes down.’
‘Like I’m gonna keep playing for y’all as the ship goes down,’ she added.
Plastic surgeon Michael Salzhauer, known as Dr.Miami on the platform, doesn’t seem to share the sentiment with other influencers.
He posted a video of him chuckling as he wrote: ‘Me knowing that I’ll still have a career even if TikTok gets banned because despite popular belief, I am an actual doctor.’
Meanwhile, his marketing agent Santina Rizzi also responded to the potential TikTok ban by saying, ‘me figuring out how I’m gonna rebrand after making an entire career bullying a plastic surgeon on an app that gets banned every other month.’
The two videos have elicited overwhelming reactions, with thousands of users commenting crying emojis under their posts.
Influencer Summer Noel chimed in by sharing her thoughts on the potential ban from a ‘Christian perspective’.
She said: ‘This is the perfect example of the Bible verse that says ‘the grass withers and the flowers fade, but the word of the lord remains forever’.
She described the platform and the community as ‘a big blessing from god’ that has provided so much blessing in her life.
Noel concluded the video by saying, ‘We do not need to worry, for god has not given us the spirit of fear, but of power, love and a sound mind.’
Politicians have long voiced their concern about TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, which is headquartered in Beijing and suspected to have ties to the Chinese Communist Party.
Stoking their fears are a set of Chinese national security laws that force organizations to comply with intelligence gathering.
In 2022, TikTok announced Project Texas, an unprecedented initiative to store all U.S. user data on servers within the country.
By June of that year, the platform reported that all U.S. user traffic was being rerouted to cloud infrastructure in the United States.
TikTok also announced that it would also delete ‘historic protected user data’ in data centers in both Virginia and Singapore.
If the bill were to pass the Senate and be signed into law, TikTok would lose a substantial portion of its advertising market.
A 2022 study from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health found the app generated $2 billion in ad revenue from users aged 13-17 in the United States alone.
