TikTok is a Hydra. What Happens If It Gets Slain?

Even if TikTok gets banned in the United States, our problems with short-form video are far from over.

You’re reading “Passing Through Digital Babylon”, a newsletter of insights and reflections from the digital empire while journeying towards the heavenly city. If that sounds interesting to you, please consider subscribing!

This week’s newsletter will focus on the big-picture social media landscape and one of the most pressing questions hanging over it: will the United States ban TikTok? Momentum is growing from federal and state governments, and even colleges are starting to restrict access to the app, but there is still a lot of ground to cover for a nation-wide ban of the app for everyday Americans.

This piece will assume that yes, at some point this year, TikTok will be thoroughly banned in the United States; I’ll leave it up to your imagination how exactly that will happen. There is a sense of hope that “if this platform can just get banned or blocked, it will slow the corrosive effects of this digital fentanyl on our society and our younger generations”. This piece is going to throw a wet blanket on that implicit optimism: even if TikTok the platform gets banned, TikTok as short-form video and as a cultural force is here to stay. Even if the Chinese Communist Party gets the boot (as it should), numerous other problems remain as two other heads of short form video - YouTube and Instagram¹ - take its place.

What Even Is TikTok?

One hangup I’ve encountered in having these discussions with people is that there is sometimes confusion over what exactly people mean when they say “TikTok”. Is it:

1. The name of a particular social media platform?

2. The name of the type of content on TikTok (akin to “Tweets” on Twitter)?

3. The name of a fundamentally new milieu of social media?

While 1 is plainly true, the correct answer is that all of the above are valid uses of “TikTok”. This means that when people talk about TikTok getting banned, it means that even if 1 gets banned, you still have to contend with 2 and 3.

Between 2 and 3, the former seems the easier to grasp, so let’s start there: what do you call the kind of content on TikTok? There doesn’t seem to be an official consensus, but the two terms I regularly see are “a Tok” or “a TikTok”, as in “I sent you a Tok” or “I watched a TikTok”. The term “TikTok” is a shorthand for TikTok’s pioneering version of short-form video and the algorithm that supplies it.

But what happens when other platforms duplicate that exact same short-form video format, including a crappier version of the algorithm behind it? YouTube calls their version of TikToks “Shorts”, and Instagram/Facebook call them “Reels”. Aside from a different platform and algorithm, they’re fundamentally the same type of content. For creators who upload to both TikTok and another platform (usually YouTube), it’s often the very same video file, or at most a lightly modified derivative.

When it comes to the type of content on TikTok, does it cease to be called TikTok when the exact same content - often down to the exact same video file - is uploaded to places where they’re called “Shorts” or Reels”?

I’d argue the answer to this is “no”; it’s just TikTok by another name.

This leads into 3. There was an era in the early-to-mid 2010s where the term “Facebook” could simultaneously refer to 1) the platform itself, 2) the stand-in representative for social media as a whole, and 3) a term describing a new cultural force in society, whose effects we must now contend with. I’d argue we are at a point where the word “TikTok” can be used along the same three line: it refers to a particular platform, it can now serve as a stand-in for the new era of social media, and it is arguably one of the most powerful cultural forces in society today. Perhaps with the exception of YouTube, no other social media platform can be spoken of to this degree of all-encompassing depth. TikTok has, as a recent Washington Post article summarized, “ate the Internet”, and it is even eating parts of the internet that Facebook or YouTube traditionally has not touched, such as the Google search engine itself.

Taken together, when we talk about “banning TikTok”, it ought to be clear that even if the platform TikTok is banned, TikTok as a type of content and as a new cultural force is not going anywhere. In fact, two very large competitors stand to carry the torch for TikTok should the platform get blocked: YouTube and Instagram.

Monopolist Villains Turned Unlikely Heroes

If TikTok the platform were to get banned, it immediately raises the question: where does all this gargantuan amount of creative energy and consumptive focus go? That supply and demand has to be picked up somewhere. The 80 minutes that people spend on TikTok per day (on average) will not just reduce to 0 minutes just because the platform is inaccessible; it will just get spent elsewhere, and right now, that “elsewhere” will almost certainly be YouTube and Instagram.

This creates an interesting conundrum for the tech world. At the federal level, there has been incredible mounting pressure against Google and Meta to treat them as monopolies in violation of U.S. antitrust law. For their control over the digital ad economy (Google) and over the social media industry (Meta), both companies are now increasingly viewed as being large enough to stifle the very thing that makes capitalism great: competition.

But when a rival competitor from a hostile foreign power gains cultural ascendancy in the West², and there is overwhelming evidence that this rival competitor is actively being used by said hostile foreign power to spy on American citizens, suddenly the question becomes: who is the American Goliath that can stand against the Chinese Goliath?

Suddenly, two companies that have been looked at with derision now may be the very two platforms capable of absorbing the gargantuan amount of creative energy and consumptive focus created by TikTok if the platform gets banned.

This is why I say that TikTok is a hydra. Even if the platform gets banned, there are already two equally massive companies, one of which owns YouTube, ready to become the new de-facto TikTok platform because of all the TikTok content they already have. Either one of these platforms are more than capable of carrying on the TikTok culture in TikTok’s absence, and all the problems created by TikTok’s culture and content will just move into a different house.

In short: if you’re concerned about the negative mental and spiritual effects of TikTok and its content (as I think you should), the battle is not won just because TikTok the platform gets blocked. The problems created by TikTok now transcend the platform itself and will continue onward even if the platform itself is gone. The need for media literacy education will remain as paramount as ever, as will the need for brave influencer-evangelists to descend into hell to be salt and light amid an incredible darkness - whether that darkness lives on TikTok itself or one of the heads it spawns after its demise.

Substack Chat for This Week: Your Favorite Substack Reads

Thanks for reading Passing Through Digital Babylon. Next week I am going to do something that a reader suggested and begin detailing my blueprint for how churches can attempt to make good short-form video content on their institutional social media accounts. There is a chance that might need to be a two-part piece, but I hope it becomes a helpful resource as I continue to beat the drum that churches need to be prepared for this new era of social media - it is already here, even if it is not fully saturated yet.

For this week’s Substack Chat, I want to know what are some of your favorite Substacks that you’re reading? The more time I spend with Substack the more I’ve come to love its culture and pro-writing atmosphere, so I’m always looking for new things to read! Link your favorite pieces and I’ll check them out!

If you’ve enjoyed this piece, please consider subscribing and sharing with your friends wherever you can! And remember: together, all of us are passing through this temporary digital empire towards the celestial city.

Austin

1. As of this writing, it remains a long-shot as to whether Instagram can successfully pivot its users towards Reels. Antecedently, I am beginning to hear the language of “reels” more often in conversations with friends and church members, but these are overwhelmingly Instagram users and not Facebook users. I remain thoroughly unconvinced that Reels will take off on Facebook even if they gain meaningful traction on Instagram.

2. This point is an entire book by itself, but there is a very strong argument to be made that TikTok’s ascendancy in the West is a direct result of the monopolization of social media created by Meta and its platforms. So the argument goes, had these Big Tech companies been kept in check from growing too large, it would’ve created the fertile competitive soil necessary for a TikTok-like platform to arise as an American company, and not a Chinese one. Because Western social media has been in an inherently anti-competitive oligarchy for the past half-decade or more, the only way a true competitor could compete was if it came from a non-Western technological superpower.