What Happens When TikTok’s Trend Machine Shuts Down?

If you were to use TikTok’s own vernacular to describe its current state, you might say the vibes are unsettled. A law banning the app in the US is set to go into effect on Jan. 19, though it’s anyone’s guess whether it actually will. Legal experts have generally described TikTok’s path to salvation as narrow—lower courts have sided with the Biden administration, and President-elect Donald Trump cannot himself squash the ban he first proposed in 2020 once he takes office. But the Supreme Court has agreed to hear the app’s appeal, and Trump has asked the court to delay the ban’s implementation until after he takes office in hopes of brokering a deal with its parent company, ByteDance Ltd. ByteDance, too, could head off the ban by selling its US business, but the Chinese company has said it has no intention of doing so.

What hangs in the balance is a platform that, for better or worse, has emerged as a vast engine for cultural production. The app says it has more than 170 million active users in the US, and according to a Pew Research survey almost two-thirds of adults under 30 use it regularly. In early 2024, Bloomberg reported that ByteDance was aiming for more than $17 billion in US sales for the year via TikTok Shop, which allows users to buy products they encounter directly on the app. From this milieu, trends emerge constantly and ceaselessly. 

But what happens on TikTok doesn’t stay there. Instead the app has become something of an assignment editor for the internet at large, pushing the ideas of TikTok creators—girl dinner, everything shower, quiet luxury—out into traditional media and onto other platforms, as well as into the marketing plans for all kinds of products. The app’s memes and trends can spout seemingly at random—do we all remember “very demure, very mindful”?—and saturate the internet in a matter of days, influencing an enormous amount of economic activity, both on and off the app. The most successful TikTok creators are able to quit their day job in favor of reviewing Amazon products or producing recipe tutorials, and brands that catch on among users, such as e.l.f Beauty and Duolingo, have seen their revenue soar. Sometimes that’s thanks to sales directly through TikTok Shop, but more often through the force of the app’s influence on all kinds of spending.

TikTok’s speed and scale have forced many sectors of the US consumer economy—beauty, fashion, health and wellness, hospitality, food and fitness among them—to remake themselves in its image to a degree that couldn’t have been predicted even five years ago. According to a report by MediaRadar, brands spent an estimated $4 billion on TikTok ads in 2023. That figure doesn’t include all the more oblique ways brands spend money to get their products in front of social media users.

Now there’s a very real chance that all of that will vanish.  If TikTok falls, where will the trends sprout from? The most obvious place would be Instagram, which was itself the dominant social media driver of consumer trends before TikTok surpassed it in the past few years with YouTube a somewhat distant second.

The internet will continue spitting out an endless and baffling series of trends even if TikTok’s ban goes into effect—it did before the app existed, after all. So the question isn’t whether the internet trend-industrial complex will endure, but to what extent it will be diminished, and what the nature of its output will be.