On Saturday, TikTok users in the United States scrolled through the app for what could be its final hours after the Supreme Court upheld a law that requires ByteDance, TikTok’s Chinese parent company, to sell the app by Sunday or otherwise face a ban.
The mood was relatively somber, at least by TikTok’s typically unserious standards.
Alix Earle, a content creator with 7.2 million followers who rose to fame on the app in 2022, posted tearful videos mourning the platform.
“I feel like I’m going Through heartbreak,” Ms. Earle wrote in one video. “This platform is more than an app or a job to me. I have so many Memories on here. I have posted every day for the past 6 years of my life. I’ve shared my friends, family, relationships, personal struggles, secrets.”
Ms. Earle added that she had been “in denial” about the ban. She wasn’t the only one.
In the days leading up to the Supreme Court’s ruling, the tone on the app was jokey and even optimistic as many users did not believe that TikTok, a platform with 170 million users in the United States, would actually be banned.
Some users posted satirical videos bidding farewell to their supposed Chinese spies, a play on a long-running TikTok joke that all American users are assigned agents of the Chinese government to spy on them through the app. Others offered instructions on how to use a virtual private network in hopes of circumventing the ban.
On Friday, the Supreme Court unanimously upheld the law that effectively bans TikTok in the United States. After the ruling, emotions on the app began to shift. While some users were still laughing, others started posting more earnestly.
“There’s so much nostalgia and so much memory there,” Marc D’Amelio said of the app in an interview this week. In 2020, his daughter Charli D’Amelio became the most followed TikTok user in the world for posting videos of her dancing in her house, reaching 100 million followers. This week, she reposted several of her old dance videos and followers left comments lamenting the end of an era.
“Finishing how we started,” many commenters wrote on Ms. D’Amelio’s videos, a nod to her status as one of the platform’s earliest breakout stars.
Other users posted farewell addresses, thanking fans and viewers and mentioning other social media platforms where they would still be available, like Instagram and YouTube. (For some, that included a Chinese video platform called RedNote that had become popular in recent days.)
Even through the sadness, TikTok’s trademark humor was present.
Markell Washington, a 27-year-old content creator in Los Angeles, hosted a mock funeral for the app in his home with a group of friends. He turned his coffee table into a makeshift casket, cutting an oversize TikTok logo out of poster board and placing it inside. He purchased 50 red roses from a grocery store and lit candles to set the scene. The group dressed in all black along with Mr. Washington, who gave a eulogy for the app.
But the loss of TikTok is no joke, Mr. Washington said. Before finding success on the app, he worked at a Subway sandwich shop. The app provided him “financial freedom,” he said. Since Friday’s ruling, the vibes on the app have become “super genuine and emotional,” he said, referencing Ms. Earle’s tearful videos.
“It has hit me, but it doesn’t seem real because it has been such an impactful thing in my life,” Mr. Washington said. “It’s like losing a relative.”
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