TikTok creators, partners remain optimistic ahead of app’s second ban deadline
Photo illustration shows the TikTok logo displayed on a mobile phone screen.
Sopa Images | Lightrocket | Getty Images
For the second time this year, TikTok is staring at a deadline that could determine its fate in the U.S. and that of numerous creators and brands that have built businesses on the Chinese-owned social app.
The sense of urgency that led some creators to post wistful goodbye videos in January has shifted to a more cautiously optimistic outlook, with creators and firms saying they believe TikTok will remain in the U.S. They are, however, hedging their bets.
“I’m trying to be optimistic and hope that they keep it, but as a creator, I have to be prepared either way,” said Gianna Christine, a creator with 2.7 million TikTok followers.
TikTok could be effectively banned in the U.S. on April 5 because of a national security law originally signed by former President Joe Biden that requires its Chinese parent ByteDance to divest the app’s American operations. ByteDance originally faced a Jan. 19 deadline to sell TikTok, but Trump signed an executive order instructing the attorney general to not enforce the law, granting the Chinese company 75 more days to divest the U.S. portion of its business.
Gianna Christine makes lifestyle videos about living in New York City to her nearly 3 million followers on TikTok.
Gianna Christine
Like others who spoke with CNBC, Christine said she hasn’t received any direct updates from TikTok about its future. Christine said she’s staying positive about TikTok’s chances of remaining in the U.S. but she’s also expanding her presence on platforms like Snapchat and YouTube as a precaution.
“You never know what will happen,” Christine said.
Throughout his 2024 presidential campaign, Trump said many positive comments about TikTok and used the app as a campaign tool. Trump said Sunday that he is “pretty certain” that a TikTok deal will be reached before the April deadline, according to AFP. Last week, Trump said he may extend the deadline if a deal isn’t reached and that he may reduce tariffs on China to help facilitate a transaction.
“I really don’t see TikTok getting banned,” said Olivia Plotnick, the founder of the Wai Social marketing and consultancy agency. “Trump really is going to want to show how amazing he is, and make a deal happen.”
TikTok and the White House did not respond to requests for comment.
Whatever is in store for TikTok, the company is acting like business as usual.
Current and former TikTok workers said they have received no communication from management about its future in the U.S. Brands and creators said they have received no updates from the company either.
That lack of communication and the uncertainty of the app’s future hasn’t stopped TikTok from moving forward with new partnerships.
Marketing firm Meltwater, for example, announced that it joined TikTok’s marketing partners program in March. Aditya Jami, Meltwater’s tech chief, said that his TikTok contacts seemed to be “in the dark” about the app’s future, but they went ahead with the partnership, which will require deep integration between the two companies.
“They are actually going to do more and more things that we can build together and then expose to our customers, so I feel like it’s going business as usual,” Jami said.
TikTok creator Alyssa McKay has more than 10 million followers, but she’s been proactive about diversifying her following across more platforms.
“If you’re not already posting on Snapchat, Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, that’s where you need to be,” said McKay, adding that her efforts to get ahead of a potential ban have resulted in her already earning more revenue from other platforms than she does on TikTok.
Alyssa McKay is a content creator with over 10 million followers on TikTok.
Alyssa McKay
The first TikTok ban deadline didn’t significantly alter the social media postings from creators and brands, according to data provided to CNBC by Later, a social media and influencer marketing firm.
Social media users increased their posts on Threads and YouTube by 10% and 6%, respectively, the week of the TikTok ban in January compared to the week prior, according to Later. Still, the general posting habits of brands and creators during the week after the January deadline compared to the week preceding it were nearly identical, a spokesperson for Later said.
Throughout March, creators and brands steadily reduced the number of scheduled TikTok posts they plan to publish during the weeks leading up to the April deadline while increasing their scheduled Instagram posts, Later data showed. The March data suggests creators and brands are “reallocating content to Instagram as a safer or more stable alternative,” the Later spokesperson said.
For a brief moment, the Chinese social media app RedNote rose to the top of Apple’s app store during the week leading to the January deadline. Known as Xiaohongshu in China, that app has similar short-video features as TikTok, but it has a user base comprised mostly of women from more affluent Chinese cities that embraced the sudden influx of American users, Plotnick of Wai Social said.
“They were super welcoming, and it was a really fun time,” Plotnick said.
RedNote’s moment in the sun won’t likely repeat. The app is no longer a priority now that TikTok has resumed normal operations, creators and brands said.
“I don’t foresee buzz around alternative apps like RedNote,” Later CEO Scott Sutton said. “Those were a blip and lacked the staying power of other platforms.”
It’s unclear whether lawmakers who are concerned about the Chinese Communist Party or TikTok-competitors like Meta or Google would take to the courts to enforce the national security law, said Neil Chilson, a former chief technologist at the Federal Trade Commission who now heads AI policy at Abundance Institute non-profit. Taking that kind of legal action carries the risk of upsetting TikTok’s giant user base and Trump, Chilson said.
“Trump likes this sort of leverage that the law provides him,” Chilson said. “He’s obviously using quite aggressively — not quite in the text of the law — his latitude to make deals to continue to string this along.”
WATCH: TikTok is a digital Trojan horse, says Hayman Capital’s Kyle Bass
Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg (L) speaks with Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella after posing for a family picture with guests who attend the “Tech for Good” Summit at the Elysee Palace in Paris, on May 23, 2018.
Charles Platiau | AFP | Getty Images
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella on Tuesday said that as much as 30% of the company’s code is now written by artificial intelligence.
“I’d say maybe 20%, 30% of the code that is inside of our repos today and some of our projects are probably all written by software,” Nadella said during a conversation before a live audience with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
The pair of CEOs were speaking at Meta’s inaugural LlamaCon AI developer event in Menlo Park, California. Nadella added that the amount of code being written by AI at Microsoft is going up steadily.
Nadella asked Zuckerberg how much of Meta’s code was coming from AI. Zuckerberg said he didn’t know the exact figure off the top of his head, but he said Meta is building an AI model that can in turn build future versions of the company’s Llama family of AI models.
“Our bet is sort of that in the next year probably … maybe half the development is going to be done by AI, as opposed to people, and then that will just kind of increase from there,” Zuckerberg said.
Microsoft and Meta together employ tens of thousands of software developers, but they’re the latest companies to discuss how AI is replacing some of the work written by human software developers.
Since OpenAI’s launch of ChatGPT in late 2022, people have turned to AI for a number of tasks, including customer service work, generating sales pitches and software development itself.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai in October said that more than 25% of new code was written by AI. Earlier this month, Shopify CEO Tobi Lutke told employees that they will have to prove AI cannot do a job before asking for more headcount. Similarly, Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn on Monday announced in a memo that the language-teaching company will gradually turn to AI in lieu of human contractors.
Earlier this month CNBC and other outlets reported that OpenAI was in talks to acquire Windsurf, a startup with “vibe coding” software that spits out whole programs with a few words of input. The dream is that with machines helping to write code, organizations will be able to produce more and better software.
Technology
Samsung flags uncertain economic climate after smartphone, chip sales power quarterly results beat
A Waymo self-driving car, seen with a driver, stops at a red light outside the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., on Friday, March 31, 2025.
Bill Clark | CQ-Roll Call, Inc. | Getty Images
Alphabet-owned Waymo and Toyota on Tuesday announced a preliminary partnership to explore bringing robotaxi tech to personally-owned vehicles.
“The companies will explore how to leverage Waymo’s autonomous technology and Toyota’s vehicle expertise to enhance next-generation personally owned vehicles,” the two companies announced.
The companies said they aim to use the partnership to more quickly develop driver assistance and autonomous vehicle technologies for personal vehicles. Toyota is the world’s largest automaker by sales.
Waymo co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana said the strategic partnership could also result in the Google-owned company incorporating Toyota’s “vehicles into our ride-hailing fleet.”
The Toyota tie-up is the latest automotive partnership for Waymo.
The self-driving company has previously worked with automakers such as Jaguar Land Rover, Stellantis predecessor Fiat Chrysler, Daimler Trucks, Mercedes-Benz parent Daimler, Hyundai Motor and China’s Geely Zeekr. The partnerships, many of which touted long-term tie-ups, largely resulted in automakers producing modified vehicles for testing or for Waymo to use in its fleets.
The partnership with Toyota will not affect Waymo’s plans to deploy Hyundai and Zeekr vehicles through the Waymo One service in the future, a spokesman for the Alphabet-owned company told CNBC.
Waymo is now serving 250,000 paid rides per week, up from 200,000 in February, before Waymo opened in Austin and expanded in the San Francisco Bay Area in March. Waymo is already running its commercial, driverless ride-hailing services in the San Francisco, Los Angeles, Phoenix and Austin regions.
Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai noted in first-quarter earnings last week that Waymo has not entirely defined its long-term business model, and there is “future optionality around personal ownership” of vehicles equipped with Waymo’s self-driving technology.
Waymo and Toyota are not the only companies turning their focus to personally-owned autonomous vehicles. When GM announced in December that it was abandoning its Cruise robotaxi business, the company said it would instead focus on the development of autonomous systems for use in personal vehicles.
Toyota previously invested in and partnered with Tesla, Elon Musk’s automaker which now aims to compete with Waymo on driverless tech. Toyota sold the its stake in the EV maker in June 2017.
Tesla, once seen as a pioneer in self-driving tech, does not yet produce cars that are safe to use without a human driver at the wheel, ready to steer or brake at any time.
Elon Musk, Tesla CEO, criticized Waymo on a recent earnings call claiming the robotaxis are too expensive for mass-production. Musk also promised Tesla will be “selling fully autonomous rides in June in Austin,” using Model Y vehicles with a new “unsupervised” version of the company’s “Full Self-Driving” or FSD systems installed.
— CNBC reporter Michael Wayland contributed to this report.
-
Sports3 years ago‘Storybook stuff’: Inside the night Bryce Harper sent the Phillies to the World Series
-
Sports1 year agoStory injured on diving stop, exits Red Sox game
-
Sports1 year agoGame 1 of WS least-watched in recorded history
-
Sports2 years agoMLB Rank 2023: Ranking baseball’s top 100 players
-
Sports4 years ago
Team Europe easily wins 4th straight Laver Cup
-
Environment2 years agoJapan and South Korea have a lot at stake in a free and open South China Sea
-
Environment2 years agoGame-changing Lectric XPedition launched as affordable electric cargo bike
-
Business3 years agoBank of England’s extraordinary response to government policy is almost unthinkable | Ed Conway