What We Lose If We Actually Ban TikTok

Life without TikTok—or, at least, life in the United States without easy access to the video-sharing platform that more than a third of us are now hooked on—what would it be like? 

This month, what began as a perhaps dismissable holdover bit of Trump-era bluster has turned into a matter of top political priority: The Biden administration is now reportedly dead serious about threatening ByteDance, TikTok’s company, with a ban on the app in the US (and is getting close to shoring up the power from Congress to do so). It’s the end result of years of stalled negotiations between TikTok and the government amidst a growing national anxiety—ranging from concern to full-out conspiracies—about the wildly popular Chinese-based social platform that’s all but transformed the internet and American culture itself. 

On Tuesday, TikTok chief executive Shou Zi Chew made a personal appeal on the platform to its 150 million users in the US, in an implicit reminder of the stakes at hand: Without access to TikTok (or in the case of TikTok’s proposal known as Project Texas, which would wall off American user data into its own American-fed algorithm), what would it look like—both for Americans and the rest of the world—to be so cut off from the rest of the feed? 

Chew made his first appearance before Congress on Thursday amid the heightened scrutiny. For a little internationally informed speculation surrounding the sure-to-be spectacle, I reached out to Marcus Bösch, the German researcher and consultant who has been studying the platform and documenting global trends and top stories via his Substack newsletter, “Understanding TikTok,” since July 2020. Zooming in from his home in Cologne, Bösch, who’s writing his doctoral dissertation on TikTok, explains how he’d first become intrigued by the platform following a decade-long career in journalism, all the way back to the app’s Musica.ly days, when early influencers like Lisa and Lena first became so ubiquitous in Germany that “you couldn’t buy shampoo at the supermarket without their faces on it!” Together, we try to imagine a world—well, an America—potentially bereft of TikTok’s raw engine of influence.

The below interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. 

Vanity Fair: Can I just ask, first, how much time you spend on TikTok? 

Marcus Bösch: It definitely depends. When the Russian invasion of Ukraine started, I spent, like, six hours a day minimum, for three weeks straight. Not six hours in a row, but two in the morning, two in the afternoon, two in the evening. Probably more. These days, because I have a day job, I try to reduce usage. It’s like one or two hours in the evening instead of Netflix, but throughout the day, I get so much TikTok content on Twitter. 

What’s surprised you most about paying that kind of close attention to TikTok over the past years?

The whole notion of TikTok users totally changed. It was younger and, let’s say, nerdier. Now, it has become pretty mainstream. I love watching traditional media or politicians struggling with the app and trying to catch up, but failing—and this term that has been coined around that: “meta cringe.” As in, are they doing it on purpose so you keep on thinking about them? 

The notion of “high-density” as a concept popped up somewhere, and I was like, oh my God, that’s such a good take on why TikTok is different.

Wait, tell me about that.

Josh Constine, a former TechCrunch editor and now VC investor,, wrote a post about content density two years ago, where he argued why TikTok beats Insta Stories because Instagram Stories are pretty linear. You have 78 slides, and it’s super boring. Meanwhile, TikTok condenses everything with transitions and layering—it keeps you engaged.