TikTookay chief govt Shou Zi Chew mentioned a ban would take the platform away from the 170 million Americans who use it. “Make no mistake, this is a ban — a ban on TikTok and a ban on you and your voice,” he mentioned, including: “We are not going anywhere.”
After the Senate vote, some customers scrambled to ask their communities, “What platform are we going to now?”
Others, significantly some with stigmatized pursuits or marginalized identities, expressed deeper nervousness over the potential lack of close-knit circles constructed by way of TikTookay that might show troublesome to rebuild elsewhere.
“We’ve already built such a strong ecosystem on TikTok,” mentioned Jackie Gonzalez, who has discovered consolation and neighborhood on #DeafTookay. “To tear that down and force us to rebuild somewhere else would be a setback for sure.”
Sam Reall, 21, was recognized with Tourette’s syndrome when he was 6. As he navigated his early years, he tried his greatest to cover the relentless tics — the sudden actions and sounds brought on by the situation, for which there isn’t any treatment. Isolated and confused, Reall believed he was “cursed.”
“I didn’t know anyone else had the same condition and felt very much alone,” mentioned Reall, from Illinois.
That modified in 2021, when he started posting to TikTookay in a bid to boost consciousness of the situation, which about 1.4 million folks within the United States have, in line with the CDC.
What got here subsequent had been “hundreds of conversations” between Reall and others like him, plus conversations with their family members and members of the family. Reall mentioned he has made “lifelong friends” because of the Tourette’s neighborhood on TikTookay, grow to be extra assured and even stopped hiding his tics. He’s additionally helped others get recognized and search medical assist.
“I have had people tell me they were able to better understand their condition as a result of my content,” he mentioned, including that if such a platform existed when he was youthful, it will have “completely changed” his childhood.
The proposed TikTookay ban could be “a huge step backward for the community,” Reall mentioned. Trying to maneuver it elsewhere simply wouldn’t work, he mentioned, noting that he usually posts his movies to Instagram, however they don’t attain as many individuals.
While rising up, Jackie Gonzalez did what many deaf or laborious of listening to folks do in a hearing-centered world: She discovered to learn lips. It was “for survival,” the Austin-based enterprise proprietor mentioned by way of e mail, “with those around me oblivious to the work I was doing in order to connect.”
Years later, Gonzalez’s TikTookay movies on deafness — together with a sequence during which she lip-reads conversations of celebrities caught on digital camera — have racked up tens of millions of views.
“TikTok has seen this ability and has acknowledged it in a way I never could have dreamed of,” Gonzalez mentioned. “It feels good.”
At the guts of what customers name “DeafTok” is a world the place being deaf doesn’t imply lacking out. On DeafTookay, with the ability to flip off listening to aids on a loud aircraft is a perk. Music could be loved by way of vibrations, and lip-reading is handled not simply as a survival technique however as a expertise.
Elizabeth Harris additionally discovered help on the platform, making American Sign Language covers of in style songs and speaking about on a regular basis experiences, like going to the films on a date and sporting closed-caption glasses.
Harris, 22, plans to maintain posting her work on different platforms if TikTookay is banned, however she mentioned she doesn’t assume she will be able to re-create the identical form of neighborhood on Instagram “because how someone engages on TikTok is different,” she wrote in an e mail.
She requested followers in a March video about what they plan to do if there’s a ban, saying, “I feel like we’re together and we’re connected, and I don’t want to lose that.”
For people who find themselves grieving, TikTookay can function a digital diary, one which helps them log the mourning means of these they’ve misplaced — mother and father, siblings, youngsters and pets — and navigate life with out them.
Three-year-old Auria Valdez liked timber and rain and leaping in puddles. She thought of squirrels her associates. In 2018, she died of a uncommon and aggressive type of most cancers.
In the years since her demise, her mom, Gabrielle Valdez, has used TikTookay to boost consciousness of childhood most cancers, to search out coping instruments and to attach with others experiencing loss.
“You never think your child can get cancer, and you definitely never think they can die,” she mentioned. “I am proof that both can happen, so I used my journey to help others.”
Valdez, 30, mentioned rising a neighborhood on TikTookay was simpler than on different platforms the place she felt she needed to “pay” her “way to be heard.” TikTookay offered her with world attain and constructive engagement by way of use of hashtags like #grieftok and #childloss, she mentioned.
Valdez mentioned her account helps her and others speak about demise “in a world that doesn’t prepare us ahead of time for it.” Without TikTookay as an outlet for her grief, she worries that she’s going to “go back to holding that all in.”
Carson Drain, 29, first took to TikTookay in 2022, after shedding each her mother and father the earlier yr, only one month aside.
“I would lose an entire community,” Drain mentioned Wednesday of the platform’s potential ban, explaining that nobody in her private life had been in a position to relate to her double loss. But she discovered “a steady community and support system” on TikTookay amongst others who had misplaced mother and father — an essential a part of her therapeutic course of.
“TikTok made me realize that I wasn’t alone in my sadness, anger and depression.”
Kristie Carnevale, 34, posted her first romance #GuideTookay video on a solo Christmas Eve throughout the pandemic and rapidly discovered a spot the place she might brazenly talk about the “spicy books” she’s loved because the “Fifty Shades of Grey” craze. Three years later, the Detroit-based enterprise proprietor generates a lot of her enterprise by way of TikTookay. But that first evening speaks to why she caught round.
“It really spawned out of loneliness and the urge for community and having someone to talk to,” Carnevale mentioned.
For a very long time, the style “was seen as a guilty pleasure” she mentioned. “You didn’t tell people you read romances.”
But over the previous few years, the romance #GuideTookay neighborhood has flourished, making strides in altering the notion of the style — which Carnevale notes is “a women-led part of the industry,” with books that heart on ladies’s tales and needs.
Tanya Baker, who joined the neighborhood in 2021, mentioned that whereas there may be nonetheless progress to be made, it “has made so many people open and comfortable” with studying romance books and “talking about them with no shame.”
On her account, Baker, 28, dives into numerous tropes, recommends books and shares bookish life-style content material. The Southern California-based creator mentioned the work on TikTookay allowed her to give up her 9-to-5 job and has been a supply of lifelong friendships that she credit, partly, to the subject material.
“Some of the topics that are discussed in romance books are deeply personal and it brings forth a certain amount of vulnerability,” she mentioned, “for someone to openly say they loved a book and detail why.”
Baker mentioned she is devastated by the information of a possible ban. “I don’t believe the magic on BookTok can be recreated/duplicated,” she wrote.
When Carnevale thinks a few potential ban, “it breaks my heart,” she mentioned. She worries for creators like herself who make a residing on the platform, however she additionally fears shedding what she calls “a little corner of happy in a really, really tough world right now.”