The TikTok spectacle: Five stages of grief

TikTok, created in 2016, has a turbulent history of scandal and success. The app has been argued to have ‘changed the world’, from music to consumption, but in the process has alerted concerns from the political sphere. These arose in 2019 when TikTok settled a legal dispute with the Federal Trade Commission after accusations that the app violated the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act. In 2020, Trump announced he was considering banning TikTok and later issued an executive order demanding ByteDance – the firm of which Tiksubsidiary – to divest itself from TikTok in the US. This discourse manifested as a bill to ban TikTok passed in the House and Senate in April 2024, which was upheld by the Supreme Court on January 17th, 2025, leading to the ban being implemented on January 18th, 2025. Trump, from whom this action originates, swiftly claimed he wanted to ‘save’ TikTok, and when he took office, signed an executive order granting TikTok a 75-day extension.

This affair elicited emotional reactions, with the social media platform being incredibly valuable and important to people and their livelihoods. The loss of TikTok was experienced by many as a grieving process, with people passing through five stages: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.

People believed the app to be too popular and too big to be banned.

Denial

Initially, while the political motivations against TikTok had been brewing for numerous years, and the law was signed in April, people were hesitant to believe that TikTok would be banned. Retrospectively, these ‘predictions’ were ultimately correct, but at the time, for the majority of people, they reflected a refusal to accept the situation. People believed the app to be too popular and too big to be banned. This was encouraged and mirrored by continuous appeals from TikTok, a Federal Appeal Court, and ultimately the Supreme Court, which despite efforts were not successful in overturning the law. The situation for many was so unfathomable that it was easier to deny the reality.

Anger

Moving forward, I witnessed a range of videos emerging criticizing the US Government. Following the Supreme Court hearing, people started to criticize the comments and questions of the Court towards Shou Chew, CEO of TikTok. These were used in conjunction with previous clips with Chew in the Senate. For example, there were bizarre questions about ‘never hearing of Singapore’, of which Chew is a citizen, and enquiring whether TikTok can track brain activity with the use of headphones. These were often light-hearted, but demonstrate an opposition to the institutions which are steering the future of TikTok in the US.

The loss of TikTok, for many people, is more than the loss of doom-scrolling but denotes the loss of livelihood

Bargaining

Most interestingly, as a form of resistance against the US Government, many TikTok users – from the US and otherwise – installed Xiaohongshu, officially known as RedNote and colloquially as ‘Chinese TikTok’. The opposition against TikTok was rooted in security concerns against China. The migration from TikTok to RedNote highlighted this as an unshared concern with the broader US population, further emphasized by the app reaching No. 1 in free download on both IOS and Android. It was a rare moment of interaction, stifled by language, corporate boundaries, and online censorship which polarizes Chinese and US individuals online. On the app, there has been a comparison of culture, building of cross-cultural communities, and homework help.

no one truly accepted the banning of TikTok, because the ban was reverted after just a few hours, portraying Trump in a positive light

Depression

Unfortunately, RedNote is not a viable solution for all TikTok users, and many people experienced sorrow. TikTok is, for many, an opportunity for income, and an essential application to sustain individuals’ lifestyles. TikTok has 1.04 billion active users and is, therefore, able to generate incredible rates of traffic and sales for businesses, and the loss of the app – with no sustainable alternative – would result in some people becoming unemployed and losing a valuable stream of income. Novelists have also expressed concern about the loss of ‘BookTok’, which similarly provides growth and opportunity for budding writers. The loss of TikTok, for many people, is more than the loss of doom-scrolling but denotes the loss of livelihood.

Acceptance

In this conceptualization, I’ve marked TikTok users posting confessions as their form of acceptance. From Charli Damelio vaping to the reveal of the man behind the Duolingo Mascot, in its final hours, TikTok was filled with admissions and announcements. Regardless, no one truly accepted the banning of TikTok, because the ban was reverted after just a few hours, portraying Trump in a positive light at the onset of his presidency. His action with TikTok diverted attention from his unconstitutional change of citizenship process, the pardoning of 1,500 rioters from January 6th, 2021, and removing the US from the Paris Agreement – actions that need to be checked and critiqued.