TikTok Ban? Social Media, Social Panic!

We are 3 weeks into the New Year, and there have already been new changes in the social media platforms we know and love. As social media connoisseurs ourselves, keeping up with social media trends, patterns, and news is important to us. 

​Gen Z’s and Millennials’ favorite app TikTok is being banned in the United States on January 19th, as of writing this blog. There has been talk about banning the app for a long time so it is no surprise that it is now here, although it is more abrupt than expected. There has been no exact word on what this ban actually means; some think that the app will still be usable but it won’t be listed in the App Store anymore which means it cannot get updates (leading to glitching, and eventually becoming unserviceable), others think it will be a nation-wide blackout of the app. Either way, the time has come that TikTok will cease to entertain us.

Of course, in true Gen Z and Millennial fashion, the reign of TikTok coming to an end has been full of emotions. For many, it is a sad time. “It is more than just an app” has been a popular comment on my personal FYP, with many videos of users making a collage of their most favorite trends and viral videos ranging from 2019 to now. And for many others, a joke has been made out of it. Unserious videos of memes and crude jokes about the ban have continued to go viral, many of which mock the government or exaggerate about what life will be like without TikTok (cue sad, cheesy music). ​

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There are a few different paths of what TikTok users are doing next. There are two new apps that users talk about that they are going to be turning to: RedNote, ironically another app based in China, and Neptune, a newly developed, woman-owned app that is not quite out yet (it is still in a Beta version). Both are quite similar to TikTok, with short videos to endlessly scroll through. People want to stick with the users and norms they are comfortable with. The other path, and perhaps the most surprising for a media-addicted society, is that users are ending the scroll. Returning to our roots of going outside or doing a hobby, some users are using this opportunity to put down their phone. Or, at least, only scrolling through the social media they already have. ​

Speaking of media they already have, Facebook is many American’s tried and true. Meta, Facebook’s company, has come out with a new implementation of their Free Speech restrictions. According to Meta, they are ending third-party fact checking and relying more on community notes, as well as lifting restrictions on speech that may have been overly censoring. Instead of being fact-checked by a program, their new community notes model will rely on users’ viewpoints to write and rate to get a variety of perspectives on content. 

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Furthermore, they are unrestricting many topics that they found were “prone to over-enforcement” of censorship. Choosing to have automated systems focus on more illegal and high-severity breaches of policy violations, teams of staff will be reviewing lower scale content that is flagged by users. In regards to political content, Meta is allowing it to be personalized; meaning it is up to the users themselves to customize their feeds to see more or less political content, instead of reducing all political content like has been done since 2021. 

At Superior Effect Marketing, we are taking the steps in keeping up with Facebook guidelines and staying up-to-date with changes all across social media. We are also saying goodbye to our beloved TikTok. However, it is not the end of short videos - Instagram Reels are here to stay (knock on wood) and we will continue to put forth creative videos. If you are wanting to up your social media game, contact us today!

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