Quickly – get your recipes for whipped feta and peanut butter quiche downloaded, learn to create a perfect French braid, and laugh uproariously at the guy pretending to skateboard into a crate of chickens. Maybe even follow an Eighties make-up tutorial and admire someone’s coffee with a cat drawn in the foam. Because America has lost TikTok, and we might never see the like again.
While YouTube has become a drunk tank of conspiracy theorists shouting at each other about the moon, X ( formerly known as Twitter) is a sinkhole crawling with low beasts of the Earth, and Facebook is for your aunts to post in their cottage-core crafts group, TikTok is for the young. We’re in an era where Gen Z have grown up scrolling hourly through comedy clips, budget plans, funny dogs, weird food and spectacular sporting fails, and their minds have been trained to function like the analogue flipbooks older generations used to make, where an energetic stickman would gallop through a variety of activities and poses in milliseconds.
There’s no time to pause; TikTok runs like a never-ending movie of an unmedicated ADHD brain, where everyone in the world can post a five-second clip of themselves doing something, with very little regard for what it is. The platform could just as easily have been called “Mummy, watch me!”
As of Sunday, however, it’s not quite everyone in the world. TikTok has been switched off in the US for fear of allowing its home, China, access to Western user data, and the possibility that it will be used to “manipulate beliefs”. We can only hope Trump will do the same if a fun video-sharing site called Prav-data, based in Moscow, launches soon. As is usual for the ever-swerving Trump, of course, he’s now “looking into it” and might “delay the ban” in the hope that a US buyer can be found for the site.
Currently, however, young Americans – 110 million of two billion worldwide, in fact – are grief-stricken at the loss, particularly those who’ve made money from sharing clips, and are now staring into the financial black hole where “explore this haunted house with me, guys!” used to be. The real concern on this side of the pond, though, is the sudden lack of content.
Brits have fallen hard for TikTok, too, and we’ve become happily used to the bright colours and shouty captions, like a bag of Skittles for the eyes. And if that’s a bit much, we also apparently enjoy the “tradwife” homesteading and the “17 people from one Milwaukee family do a dance with tractors” clips. Without the slick dazzle of US content, we’re stuck with the British stuff – a quick scroll reveals one random woman droning “come with me as I do an M&S and Aldi price comparison”, and a man from the Isle of Dogs (possibly) urging followers to use a shorter hose when washing the car.
But all is not lost. One young British TikTokker called Kirsty has recently posted a clip. “I’m going to miss the Americans so badly,” she admits. “But I feel like this could be good for us.” She goes on to explain that the boring British TikTok is “London TikTok”. We need to branch out – we should be watching Scottish TikTok – “so funny!”, or Welsh TikTok. She concludes, “We can’t let the whole ship go down because of one sailor, do you know what I’m saying?”
We do. This is our chance to step up and make TikTok funny, self-deprecating, rainy (no more Malibu swimwear – bring on the cagoules) and full of absurd bits of history and classic cake recipes. Goodnight, America. Good morning, Britain. In fact, is Richard Madeley on TikTok? With a really good tractor dance, he could probably go viral worldwide.
