The odds of a ban on TikTok becoming a reality have never been this good.
The House of Representatives passed a bill to force a sale of the Chinese-owned app by a massive bipartisan margin on Wednesday — and the effort has some bipartisan support in the Senate, as well as the backing of President Joe Biden.
The vote came despite a long-running lobbying effort by the app’s parent company, ByteDance, to assuage lawmakers’ concerns over privacy and national security. That effort escalated last week when the app pushed its users to call and email their representatives, urging them to vote against the bill. The effort may have backfired, as callers flooded congressional phone lines and tipped ambivalent lawmakers into voting for the bill — but it also revealed the loyalty of the app’s user base.
But who exactly would be affected by such a bill? Though a third of American adults report being TikTok users, that user base has undergone some interesting changes since the platform rose to prominence in the pandemic era. Its user base is growing, but not necessarily in the most predictable way. And its users might actually have different views than the average, non-TikTokking American — lending some credence to critics’ arguments that the platform may be having an effect on how its users view the world.
The platform has been dominated by the youngest Americans — but they aren’t fueling its growth now
What has always set TikTok apart from other social media platforms is how quickly it grew. The pandemic is largely behind this boom: It took TikTok two years to get to the 40 million monthly American users it had entering 2020, according to figures released that year by the company. In the following eight months, it more than doubled that number, and it reported more than 100 million monthly users by August 2020.
Most of those users skewed young — and the user base continues to be younger than the rest of the country. The youngest American adults are…
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