What the TikTok ban tells us about social media in 2025

I usually write my articles here before posting them on LinkedIn. I'm doing the opposite for once: posting on LinkedIn first and sending you there. The discussion about the current TikTok mess is just too eventful to edit an article here with many updates. Also, the discussion on LinkedIn on this one is quite amusing.

If I try to frame from an innovation standpoint what are the main takeaways about the TikTok shitshow, I would list these five:

1. Social media platforms are now incumbents, and it shows off. While still vastly used and active, users (consumers, brands) are distrustful of them and ready to jump ship at any point. Investing too much into them from now on should be considered a loss-leading activity.
2. In 2025, there is no real alternative to reaching millions (billions?) of potential customers within seconds and without much friction, if any. We now fully understand, though, that this unique value proposition, combined with their refusal to invest in any proper moderation, has made these platforms highly toxic.
3. As an innovator, the tradeoff of using these platforms and investing a lot of time, skills, and resources to "get your word out" is now clearly accepting to deal with toxic channels in exchange for reaching as many potential customers as possible. If you're an established brand, from now on, it's a fully Faustian bargain.
4. Any other big bet to supplant them, like the D.O.A. Metaverse idea, won't do this job. In that case, because of hardware friction (wearing any sort of goggles is a huge entry barrier to getting people to interact on a platform several hours a day at any random time in their life). Not to mention the plain lack of added value in being fully immersed.
5. As we are, for established brands, the most interesting question might be about developing tools to reduce their communication from a social media hose to a fine laser beam of direct communication. After twenty years and plus of working on CRM (customer relationship management) and supposedly harvesting vast amounts of customer data, you'd think they should be able to do that. And yet, this is still (mostly) an open field for innovation.

Well, in any case, here is a link to my post on Linkedin and the initial text posted last week:

🍿 Something I would find vastly amusing regarding the TikTok ban' would be that ByteDance ends up saying, never mind, we're not staying in the US, and you have nothing to buy.

💡 TikTok has "only" 150 million users in the US. They have nearly as many in Indonesia, with a total of 1.5 billion active users.

➡ It would take TikTok only one year to grow the equivalent of its user base outside the US.

But wait ! (... edited on Jan. 18)

👻 As a follow-up to this discussion, the buzz right now in the US is all about American kids massively leaving TikTok for Xiaohongshu (小红书 - "Little Red Book"), a 100% Chinese platform not giving a second thought about TikTok – and certainly not fighting for it for one minute.

This app, which is 100% under CPC control, is also nicknamed 'Little Spy' because it obviously offers zero data privacy. It's quite a tell about how current users feel about these businesses. Just like with cigarette companies, they want to feed their addiction and don't have any loyalty for their dealer. This is both horrifying and hilarious at the same time.