The Supreme Court upheld the TikTok ban. Now what?

The U.S. Supreme Court has officially decided that it will not spare TikTok from the “divest-or-ban” law that goes into effect on January 19. Two days before that date, the highest court in the land decreed that the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act does not violate the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

TikTok appealed to the Supreme Court after a District Court chose to uphold the controversial law. In a 20-page order, the Supreme Court claimed that the “scale and susceptibility to foreign adversary control, together with the vast swaths of sensitive data the platform collects, justify differential treatment” for TikTok. There were no noted dissents from among the Court’s nine justices.

Now that the legal drama surrounding the TikTok ban has subsided (and it does seem like it will be a U.S. ban, not a divestiture), the fallout is starting to take shape. Which platforms are angling to be the next TikTok? How will brands reallocate their budgets? And perhaps most importantly, where will platformless creators and other so-called “TikTok refugees” go next?

Platforms

The general belief seems to be that YouTube and Instagram stand to gain the most in the wake of TikTok’s delisting on American app stores. Both of those platforms have developed full-featured versions of TikTok’s signature format (Shorts for YouTube and Reels for Instagram) and have rolled out multifaceted monetization suites to reward the creators who upload those vertical videos.

Some other players are also determined to woo TikTok refugees in large numbers. Snapchat has pointed out its connections to the subset of creator culture TikTok incubated, and it has noted that 60% of its users are also daily visitors to the TikTok app.

Substack has also made overtures to displaced TikTok users. Its rollout of live video could attract some of the creators who made bank on TikTok with lucrative, shoppable streams.

Or maybe the next hot video app hasn’t been launched yet. Entrepreneur Mark Cuban

has expressed interest in funding a TikTok clone that would be built on the decentralized protocol that powers X alternative Bluesky. That could be a good long-term solution, though it won’t do much to help the creators who will lose access to major accounts on Sunday.

Brands

At the end of the day, creators leaving TikTok will probably go to the platforms that can pay them the most, which is why there’s currently a feeding frenzy going on in the world of influencer marketing. Digiday has published a rundown of the incentives platforms are offering to convince brands and agencies to send ad dollars their way.

The most common carrot dangled by these competing platforms seems to be ad spend matches. YouTube, Pinterest, Meta, and Reddit have all offered to provide advertisers with ad credits that will scale depending on the amount of spend. Reddit is matching up to $1,000 of ad spend, whereas Pinterest and Meta are using fixed percentages to calculate those rewards.

The timing of these initiatives — Meta’s is specifically tied to the month of January, for example — shows how the TikTok ban is warping the influencer ad market. “We’ve definitely seen ad credit opportunities across channels — Pinterest, in particular, has been pushing our team quite hard on these offers lately,” Markacy Co-Founder and Co-CEO Tucker Matheson told Digiday.

Creators

As high-level entities jockey for position amid a shifting landscape, are the TikTokers who made the app into a social phenomenon getting lost in the shuffle? Many of them have consistently opposed the TikTok ban and have even filed their own suits in hopes of keeping the law from taking effect. With those efforts spurned, thousands of professional creators must figure out what’s next.

Short-form stars who kept on trucking after the downfall of Vine advised disgruntled TikTokers to keep at it. They encouraged other creators to focus on the process of content creation while also paying attention to the social media platforms that are bubbling under the surface.

But at the end of the day, the TikTok ban will still hurt the careers of U.S.-based creators. Twitch streamers are frustrated because they’ll be losing access to one of their strongest audience-building tools, and the shuttering of TikTok is expected to have an extraordinary economic impact for small business owners as well.

Of course, it could all end up being a whole lot of nothing, too. Incoming president Donald Trump has vowed to overturn the TikTok ban, so by the time his second term kicks into high gear, platforms may find that their efforts to convert TikTok refugees were a bit premature.