With the rise of Elon Musk as Twitter’s official shit-stirrer-in-chief, conversations about the essentiality of social media services have dominated headlines in the United States—and with good reason. Though the everyday use of social media channels for sharing pictures, videos, comments and more, is something regularly taken for granted by users and professionals of all shapes and sizes—the reality is that shared media is a product of trust. Without it, shared media’s value becomes diminished as its benefits can be unevenly distributed amongst its users—or worse, if it makes users more susceptible to the activity of bad actors.
Ultimately, that is why I deleted Twitter, and it is why I’ve never installed TikTok.
It’s not that I have a personal beef with TikTok culture, TikTok content, or TikTok’s preferred style of media creation. By and large, I think that microformat video production is a cultural phenomenon that TikTok started, and I don’t see it going anywhere. Also, while I don’t have a TikTok account, I think that the network’s content is fun—and is doing quite a bit to redefine what it means to create “entertaining” content in a scientifically predictable fashion.
Nonetheless, despite the meteoric cultural phenomenon that TikTok represents, the fact that it is also Chinese spyware is perhaps the service’s worst-kept secret.
This even applies to many people who happily use and enjoy the service, and just openly don’t give a shit if you bring up the fact that TikTok presents massive security vulnerabilities for the average user.
Honestly? I can understand why people don’t care: Because digital crimes, and data-based, crimes are silent crimes—and in the occurrence of these situations, being the subject of data theft or scrutiny does not always translate into immediate criminal activity the moment it occurs. More likely, data is stolen and then used months—or even years later—in a digital crime such as identity theft. Because of the separation between when someone’s data is stolen and when it is used, it is difficult for everyday people to fully quantify or appreciate the effects of having their data stolen.
That is why the Trump administration attempted to implement a ban on the social media service in 2020, and it more or less failed in the 11th hour after being blocked by a federal judge—who ruled that the Trump Administration overstepped their bounds by trying to use their emergency economic powers to ban the app wholesale from the United States. But something that even many TikTok users have never fully understood, is that this legal action has never protected the service from being banned by an act of Congress.
With growing concerns that TikTok is being used to spy on American citizens, a bipartisan group of federal lawmakers has introduced legislation that would make TikTok a banned service, and illegal to use inside of the United States.
Whether this ban actually passes both houses of congress and ends up on the president’s desk is another story. Regardless of its prospective success, however, I think there is a good reason to expect a TikTok ban to someday come down the pike.
Despite what we currently know about TikTok, however, micro-video is a cultural phenomenon that is here to stay. Should TikTok get banned, content creators have had the time to develop their own standards and best practices for making micro videos—and that can ultimately be taken over to competing services.
What some might not be expecting, however, is that if TikTok gets banned from the United States, Facebook could stand to reap the greatest benefits from the service’s demise. Facebook is the one company that has been trying to take on TikTok ever since its US release, and in September of 2021, released a competing service with similar features—conveniently called Facebook Reels.
Facebook Reels is in fact so similar to TikTok, that you could say it is pretty much an American-made carbon copy of the service—which makes for an odd economic role reversal, considering it Is usually Chinese companies that are accused of stealing American intellectual property.
Of course, to many, this is a blatantly unoriginal attempt by Facebook at competing for young users—but the proof is in the pudding. Ever since its inception, the service has started to gain steam—so much so, that it is becoming a destination where users can see both Facebook original content, as well as the highest charting content from TikTok that gets re-posted to Facebook. Being completely honest, when I am looking at the quality of Reels feeds relative to TikTok feeds: As time goes on they are becoming increasingly indistinguishable from one another. Ultimately, that is a good thing as it means that Facebook Reels is becoming a destination for high-quality micro-content—and one that, with some unintended help from congress, could allow Facebook to usurp TikTok’s position as the destination for high-quality micro-content.
For those that are waist-deep in creating TikTok content, and have taken a look at TikTok’s growth rate and userbase figures relative to that of Facebook, this might look like a seismic shift. To some degree, I think that it is. TikTok is growing at an average rate of 15% per year, while Facebook has largely experienced some 2% growth except for the year of the pandemic. TikTok is also seen as a place where Gen Z and Alpha Gen love to congregate, but the thing is, for some TikTok users, the transition to Facebook Reelz has already started to happen.
Though the early growing pains of Reels still concern the fact that much of the content is from TikTok—and therefore unoriginal—I think the phenomenon of reposting will still break in favor of assisting Reels’ adoption. Giving users the ability to repost content from TikTok to Reels can provide the unintentional benefit of giving content creators a fallback account in the event that TikTok is effectively banned from the United States. Additionally, it increases user familiarity with Reels—so more people have an idea of how to use it, regardless of whether they are using it today. So why aren’t user growth statistics reflecting this shift? Easy: because the likeliness that most TikTok users are already Facebook users is pretty high—so if anything, this shift would be expressed in the average amount of time different demographics spend on Facebook relative to other services. All the same, if there were any significant growth, it would be experienced among users between the ages of 16-29.
What I am trying to say is something that some may not want to hear—particularly my beloved Zoomer readers: TikTok being banned in the United States would likely make Facebook—or its sister network Instagram—your new home, for better (or for worse).
It is also important to recognize that TikTok being banned would be an ideal outcome for the marketers, organizations, and businesses that presently rely on Facebook today. Perhaps the most obvious reason for why this is the case, is because less user base fragmentation between networks means that it would be easier to plan, fund, and execute, paid campaigns. Instead of worrying about the funding guidelines, metrics, and best use cases of a bunch of networks, marketers can just use Facebook—and find creative ways of combining Reels with time-tested Facebook features that TikTok doesn’t have, like Fanpages. Finally, Facebook Ads is the gold standard of social media advertising—and dare I say digital advertising writ large: It is highly targeted, extremely nuanced, and scalable to all kinds of budgets. Having the ability to use Facebook ads to fund paid campaigns on Reels is a potent feature of Facebook ads, and I could imagine that having all of these capabilities in one service will be very appealing to many advertisers as it can help their budgets go far.
Perhaps what is even more interesting than the potential that Facebook could actually overtake TikTok, is that with the apocalyptic levels of pot stirring going on at Twitter, it is quite possible that we could be witness to extreme levels of user consolidation in the social media space over the next few years. The reality is that with Instagram being a Meta product, the demise of both TikTok and Twitter at this particular time would run the risk of making Facebook in particular, a company with unique levels of power and influence relative to its remaining contemporaries.
Ultimately, whether that is actually good for the customer is another story. History has shown that most times it is not. After all, this was proven during the Facebook advertising fiasco that happened during the 2016 US presidential election, just as much as it was proven during the January 6th attack on the US capital in 2021. The truth of the matter is that Facebook’s market dominance has never actually been good for the users of Facebook—only the customers of Facebook. So while judges, regulators, politicians, and the like have all tried handily to ensure that Facebook would not become a social media monopoly—or merely a company with outsized social and marketplace influence—the question of its resurgence to social dominance could be less so a matter of if, and more so a matter of when.
While politicians like to think that they can try to regulate Facebook, and may succeed in some measure or another, there is a certain degree to which these efforts are tantamount to fighting gravity. Facebook didn’t tell Elon Musk to be an agent of chaos at Twitter. Facebook didn’t tell TikTok to embed spyware into its service and threaten US national security. Even now, Facebook isn’t running campaigns against TikTok’s spyware, or putting a gun to any user’s head forcing them to convert. So, if despite these things, Facebook’s influence should consolidate nonetheless due to the artificial decline of more popular services, then what could politicians possibly regulate? New feature sets? Get real. If I rolled my eyes harder, I would snap my fucking neck.
Despite being a marketer that uses Facebook ads, I don’t know if Reels being positioned to pick up TikTok’s losses is necessarily a good thing. If there is anything that could be learned from the last 6 months of tech industry news, it is that it only takes one madman to destroy a precariously centralized system that so many people’s lives may rely on. With this understanding in mind, I don’t think a viable solution to the incredible drawbacks of social media’s centralization is effectively more centralization. TikTok being banned from The United States will likely result in exactly that. Nor do I think that the solution is coming out with an identical service that is only differentiated by the sanity of its c-suite. Given the current moment, with myriad problems plaguing the social media industry, you could say that over-centralization is treated as an issue of the lowest importance. Try as some might, my concern is that it will remain an issue of lowest importance—that is, until the next time we notice it is too late to address.
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