Threat of TikTok ban has creators scrambling to build followings on Instagram, YouTube
Chad Spangler filming a video.
Courtesy: Chad Spangler
As TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew faced hours of grueling questioning from members of Congress in late March, small business owner Chad Spangler watched in frustration.
The bipartisan congressional committee was exploring how TikTok, the massively popular short-form video app owned by China’s ByteDance, could pose a potential privacy and security threat to U.S. consumers.
Representatives grilled Chew about the app’s addictive features, possibly dangerous posts and whether U.S. user data could end up in the hands of the Chinese government. Politicians have been threatening a nationwide TikTok ban unless ByteDance sells its stake in the app, a move China said it “strongly” opposed.
But that’s not the only source of dissent. Creators such as Spangler, who sells his artwork online, are worried about their livelihood.
TikTok has emerged as a major piece of the so-called creator economy, which has swelled past $100 billion annually, according to Influencer Marketing Hub. Creators have formed lucrative partnerships with brands, and small business owners such as Spangler use the sizable audiences they’ve built on TikTok to promote their work and drive traffic to their websites.
“That’s the power of TikTok,” Spangler said, adding that the app drives the majority of sales for his business, The Good Chad. “They’ve captured the lightning in the bottle that other platforms just haven’t been able to do yet.”
Spangler has more than 200,000 followers on TikTok, and his business brought in over $100,000 last year, largely because of his reach there. Influencer Marketing Hub’s data shows that the average annual income for an influencer in the U.S. was over $108,000, as of 2021.
TikTok has been on a meteoric rise in the U.S., capturing an increasing amount of consumer attention from people who used to spend more time on Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and Twitter. In 2021, TikTok topped a billion monthly users. An August Pew Research Center survey found that 67% of teens in the U.S. use TikTok and 16% said they are on it almost constantly.
Advertisers are following eyeballs. According to Insider Intelligence, TikTok now controls 2.3% of the worldwide digital ad market, putting it behind only Google, including YouTube; Facebook, including Instagram; Amazon, and Alibaba.
But with Congress bearing down on TikTok, the app’s role in the future of U.S. social media is shaky, as is the sustainability of businesses that have come to rely on it.
TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew testifies before the House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing on “TikTok: How Congress Can Safeguard American Data Privacy and Protect Children from Online Harms,” on Capitol Hill, March 23, 2023, in Washington, DC.
Olivier Douliery | Afp | Getty Images
In April, Montana legislators approved a bill that would ban TikTok from being offered in the state starting next year. TikTok said it opposes the bill, and claims there’s no clear way for the state to enforce it.
Congress has already banned the app on government devices, and some U.S. officials are trying to forbid its use altogether unless ByteDance divests.
ByteDance did not respond to CNBC’s request for comment.
The White House also threw its support behind a bipartisan Senate bill in March called the RESTRICT Act, which would give the Biden administration the power to ban platforms such as TikTok. But following significant pushback, momentum behind the bill has slowed dramatically.
As the debate gains steam, creators are in a state of limbo.
Creators are turning to other platforms
Vivian Tu, who lives in Miami, has been preparing for a possible TikTok ban by working to build her audience and diversify her content across multiple platforms.
She began posting on TikTok in 2021 as a fun way to help answer co-workers’ questions about finance and investing. By the end of her first week on the platform, she had more than 100,000 followers. Last year, she left behind a career on Wall Street and in tech media to pursue content creation full time.
Tu shares videos in an effort to serve as a friendly face for financial expertise. Aside from posting on TikTok, she uses Instagram, YouTube and Twitter, and she also runs a podcast and a weekly newsletter.
Tu said she began building out her presence on multiple platforms before a potential TikTok ban entered the equation, and she’s hoping she spread out her income sources enough to be OK if anything happens. But she called her work on TikTok, where she has more than 2.4 million followers, her “pride and joy.”
“It would be a huge letdown to see the app get banned,” she told CNBC in an interview.
The top social media companies in the U.S. are preparing to try to fill the vacuum.
Meta, which owns Instagram and Facebook, has been pumping money into its TikTok copycat, called Reels. CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on the company’s earnings call last month that users are resharing videos over 2 billion times a day, a number that’s doubled in the past six months, adding “we believe that we’re gaining share in short-form video.”
Snap and YouTube have been pouring billions of dollars into their own short-video features to compete with TikTok.
Tu said she expects there will be a “massive exodus” of creators that flock to other platforms if TikTok is banned, but that the app is hard to beat when it comes to discovering new and relevant content.
“That’s why someone like myself, who didn’t have a single follower, didn’t have a single video, could make a video and have the very first one get 3 million views,” she said. “That really doesn’t happen anywhere else.”
Emily Foster with her stuffed animals.
Source: Emily Foster
Emily Foster, a small business owner, agrees. She said other media platforms can’t come close to offering the type of exposure she gets from TikTok.
Foster designs stuffed animals that she sells through her Etsy shop and her website called Alpacasews. She said she started sewing the plushies by hand as gifts for her friends and on commission. But when a video of a dragon she made during the pandemic received 1,000 views on TikTok — a number that’s tiny for her these days — she said it gave her the confidence to open an Etsy shop.
“I was like, ‘Oh my god, this could be something,'” she told CNBC.
Foster’s designs quickly gained traction on TikTok, where she now has more than 250,000 followers. She recently shared a behind-the-scenes video that showed her packaging up an order for someone who ordered one of every stuffed animal in her Etsy shop. The video quickly amassed more than 500,000 views, and her entire inventory sold out within a day.
‘Audience just isn’t there’
Demand for Foster’s stuffies soon outpaced her ability to make them by hand, so she turned to crowdfunding site Kickstarter to raise money to cover manufacturing costs. She raised over $100,000 in her most recent Kickstarter campaign, which came after three of her videos went viral on TikTok.
“My business would never be where it is today without TikTok,” she said.
With the looming threat of a TikTok ban, Foster said she’s been sharing content across Instagram, YouTube and Twitter to try to expand her following. At this point, she said, her business would probably survive if TikTok goes away, but it would be difficult.
“The audience just isn’t there, especially for smaller creators,” she said.
Beyond the money, Foster is concerned about losing the following she’s worked so hard to build. She said she’s met “fantastic” friends, artists and other small business owners on the platform.
“You’re never quite alone. It means a lot,” she said. “I’m stressed about potentially losing sales, potentially losing customers, but it’s more so just losing a community that’ll break my heart.”
For Spangler, the artist, the debate surrounding TikTok is maddening not just because of what it could mean for his livelihood, but because it seems to him that lawmakers are ill-informed about what the app does.
Spangler recalled one Republican congressman asking Chew in his testimony about whether TikTok connects to a user’s home Wi-Fi network.
“If you even have a working knowledge of anything technology related, if you watched those hearings, it was just very embarrassing,” Spangler said. “What’s extra frustrating is it feels like this is being potentially taken away from me by people who have no idea how any of this works.”
Spangler channeled his anger into his artwork. After the hearing, he designed a T-shirt featuring a zombie-like congressman with the phrase, “Does the TikTak use a Wi-Fi?”
He shared a video about it on TikTok and made almost $2,500 from T-shirt sales in less than two days.
WATCH: TikTok’s regulatory scrutiny may be a tailwind for Meta
Palantir Technologies CEO Alex Karp attends the Pennsylvania Energy and Innovation Summit on the campus of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, July 15, 2025.
Andrew Caballero-reynolds | Afp | Getty Images
Palantir expanded its lawsuit against two former employees on Thursday to include the CEO of their new artificial intelligence startup, Percepta AI.
In the suit, Palantir alleged that Percepta CEO and co-founder Hirsh Jain, co-founder Radha Jain, and a third employee, Joanna Cohen, violated their non-solicitation agreements, hiring top talent to create a competitive business.
Palantir and Percepta didn’t immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment.
The three defendants are accused of attempting to “poach” executives and developers from their former company and “plunder Palantir’s valuable intellectual property.”
Cohen and Radha Jain, who were named in the original lawsuit filed in October, were previously senior engineers at Palantir. Hirsh Jain, an executive responsible for the company’s healthcare portfolio, was added as another defendant in the latest complaint.
Palantir said the defendants were “entrusted” with the company’s “crown jewels,” including source code, customer workflows and proprietary customer engagement strategies.
The former employees “brazenly disregarded their contractual and legal commitments to Palantir and instead chose a path of deception and unjust competition,” the plaintiffs said in the document, which was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.
Cohen and Radha Jain denied the initial allegations in a November filing, and agreed to stop working for Percepta during the proceedings.
The suit accused Hirsh Jain, who resigned from Palantir in August 2024, of an “aggressive campaign” to recruit other employees to join Percepta, and said the startup has already hired at least 10 former Palantir employees.
An alleged message written by Hirsh Jain in November 2024 read, “I’m down to pillage the best devs at palantir when they’re at their maximum richness.”
The complaint says Rhada Jain wrote another message saying, “God thinking about poaching is so fun.”
Palantir, which was co-founded by Peter Thiel, CEO Alex Karp and others, builds analytics software for companies and government agencies, including the U.S. military. The company’s stock price has soared more than tenfold since the end of 2023, lifting its market cap close to $450 billion.
Palantir also accused Cohen of sending herself highly confidential documents shortly after announcing her resignation from the company in March. Cohen allegedly took photos of sensitive information, the suit said, and downloaded the files onto her personal phone.
“At Percepta, they seek to succeed not through old-fashioned ingenuity and competition, but through outright theft and deceit,” Palantir said in the filing.
Among other things, Palantir is asking for the defendants to be forced to return any confidential information in their possession, and to avoid working at Percepta or venture backer General Catalyst for 12 months from the time of an order.
Technology
Trump ‘sells out’ U.S. national security with Nvidia chip sales to China, Sen. Warren says
Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., speaks during a Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee confirmation hearing on President Donald Trump’s nominees to lead the National Economic Council, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and Federal Housing Finance Agency, on Capitol Hill in Washington, Feb. 27, 2025.
Annabelle Gordon | Reuters
President Donald Trump‘s decision to let Nvidia sell its advanced H200 artificial intelligence chips to China “sells out American national security,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., said Thursday.
Warren also reiterated her call for Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang to testify before Congress about the agreement, along with Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick.
The senator’s fiery remarks on the Senate floor came three days after Trump announced on social media that the U.S. semiconductor giant Nvidia could sell the chips to “approved customers” in China, so long as the U.S. gets a 25% cut of the revenues.
The announcement drew concerns both from Democrats and some of Trump’s Republican allies, who have been vocal about protecting America’s hardware advantage over China in the race to AI superiority.
Warren, in Thursday’s remarks, urged Congress to pass bipartisan legislation that “reins in this administration” by imposing new chip export restrictions. Critics of the bill say it could undermine U.S. chipmakers’ competitiveness.
The Trump administration knows that China gaining access to the chips, which have previously been subject to export restrictions, “poses a serious threat to our technological leadership and national security,” Warren said on the Senate floor.
She noted that shortly before Trump announced his decision on the H200 chips on Monday, the Department of Justice touted a crackdown touted a crackdown on a “major China-linked AI tech smuggling network.”
“So why did the President make this bad deal that sells out the American economy and sells out American national security?” she asked. “It’s simple: In the Trump administration, money talks.”
“Mr. Huang understands that in this administration, being able to cozy up to Donald Trump might be the most important corporate CEO skill of all,” Warren said.
She pointed to Huang attending a $1 million-per-plate dinner at Trump’s Florida home Mar-a-Lago, and Nvidia’s later donations to the president’s under-construction White House ballroom.
“Those are just the most obvious possible reasons to cut this deal,” Warren said, “and who knows what else Mr. Huang might have done behind closed doors to persuade President Trump and Secretary Lutnick into making this dangerous concession.”
CNBC has reached out to Nvidia for comment on the senator’s remarks.
The Axiom-4 mission, with a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft and Falcon 9 rocket, lifts off from Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, June 25, 2025.
Giorgio Viera | AFP | Getty Images
Elon Musk responded to the latest report that SpaceX is going public in 2026, calling it “accurate.”
The article from Ars Technica’s Eric Berger examined why this is the right time for Musk’s space venture to IPO, and said the rise of artificial intelligence and opportunities for data centers in space play an important role in the move.
“As usual, Eric is accurate,” Musk wrote on his social media platform X in response to Berger’s article.
Musk’s comment comes after multiple news outlets said that SpaceX was looking to go public in 2026, with The Information and Wall Street Journal both reporting last week on the likeliness of an IPO, as well as a new share sale valuing the company at about $800 billion.
Bloomberg said this week that the company was pursuing an IPO in 2026 and is looking to raise more than $30 billion.
Over the weekend, Musk said on X that reports of the $800 billion valuation were “not accurate” and addressed the amount his company gets from NASA.
“While I have great fondness for @NASA, they will constitute less than 5% of our revenue next year,” Musk wrote. “Commercial Starlink is by far our largest contributor to revenue. Some people have claimed that SpaceX gets ‘subsidized’ by NASA. This is absolutely false.”
SpaceX didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Heading into 2026, SpaceX and Tesla CEO Musk look set to gain a powerful ally in the government’s space program.
Jared Isaacman, who paid millions to lead two private spaceflights with SpaceX in 2021 and 2024, is likely to become the next NASA administrator and was voted through committee on Monday.
He now heads to a full Senate vote for confirmation.
SpaceX is a key contractor for NASA, but acting administrator Sean Duffy has criticized Musk’s space operation for being behind on the Artemis moon trip, which has seen several delays.
Musk lashed out at Duffy, accusing him on X of “trying to kill NASA!”
Duffy, who is the secretary of transportation, was handed the reins of the space program this summer by President Donald Trump, after he pulled Isaacman’s nomination following a clash with Musk.
Trump said at the time that Isaacman’s relationship with Musk represented a conflict of interest.
The renomination of Isaacman at the beginning of November signaled that the relationship between Trump and Musk was on the mend, and the Tesla CEO’s attendance at a White House dinner later that month solidified the return to camaraderie.
— CNBC’s Lora Kolodny contributed to this report.
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