In the spring of 2022, Chloe Joy Sextons mother died after a years-long battle with brain cancer.
The loss came during what was already a trying period in Sextons life.
Shed recently given birth herself, and had been fired from her job after getting pregnant.
Photo illustration by Matthew Cooley. Images in illustration by Adobe Stock, 4; Getty Images, 2; via tiktok, 2
She had lost her mother, she had lost her job, but she still hadTikTok.
They have helped me in so many different ways.
The creators-turned-plaintiffs have little in common outside of TikTok changing their lives.
Their communities are sprawling and incredibly diverse, with followings ranging between just over 100,000 and nearly seven million.
The push to ban or restrict the use of TikTok in the United States is not new.
The Biden administration started to put pressure on the app itself a year later.
A few months later, the Biden administration threatened to ban the app unless ByteDance sold its stake.
The charge to ban TikTok continued.
Earlier this year, lawmakers introduced a new bill, the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act.
Multiple lawmakerscited the proliferation of pro-Palestinan contentas a reason for supporting the ban.
The bill passed with broad support, and Biden signed it into law in April.
The legislation held that from the day Biden signed it, ByteDance had 270 days to sell TikTok.
Tran says the app is now responsible for 90 percent of their sales.
Brian Firebaugh, a small-scale Texas cattle rancher with nearly half a million followers, feels similarly.
Thats ultimately what TikTok has built for us, he says.
Ill be honest, all of our customers come from TikTok like 100 percent of them.
Small-scale ranchers and farmers are in a constant battle to stay afloat against their mass-production competitors.
I keep hearing about people who want to shut down TikTok because its ruining our youth.
Yeah, I dont think Im ruining children.
Im helping to educate.
Spann, a survivor of sexual violence herself, took her outrage to TikTok.
King is not a shrieking teen.
He was a 45-year-old health care worker when he first started messing around on TikTok.
Hed always wanted to be an entertainer, and recognized the app as an outlet for his creativity.
I could not even convey to my husband what was happening in my phone as my audience grew.
The Senate passed the bill a few days later.
Biden signed it 24 hours after that.
Oh my god, what am I going to do?
Its going to be informational stuff.
Its going to be STEM education, all that sort of stuff, he says.
Theyd see that its more than what they think it is.
If the government can do this to TikTok, what else are they going to do?
I was able to kind of fuse the two and TikTok allowed it to grow wings.
Freedom of expression is a crucial driver of Townsends presence on the app.
Lawmakers themselves have caught onto this.
Vance (R-Ohio).
Both parties hosted TikTok creators at their nominating conventions this summer.
The Harris campaign did not respond to questions fromRolling Stoneabout the legislation Biden signed and whether she supports it.
Judges on the D.C. Alan Rozenshtein, an associate professor at University of Minnesota Law School, is skeptical that the D.C.
Circuit Court or, ultimately, the Supreme Court will prevent such a law from taking effect.
The lawmakers who support it have insisted its not technically a ban and that they just want divestiture.
TikTok only accounts for a small percentage of ByteDances overall business, andits losing moneyas it is.
She posted a video of the experience on TikTok a few days later.
Users derive so much value from a platform like TikTok in terms of education, entertainment, and empowerment.
Why are we trying to delegitimize content creation and influencing as work?
So Im like, No, this affects creators and individual users.
Theres a lot of unknowns right now, she says, but I am still very hopeful.
