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It’s not just Gen Z. Here’s what TikTok’s user base tells us about a potential ban’s impact.
The app skews younger, its users appear more politically polarized, and its user base is changing.
Mar 14, 2024, Vox
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 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.
