TikTok’s Close Call, or Why the Walled Gardens Should Fall

A potential TikTok ban would barely matter if social media users had the ownership they deserve over their networks and identities

Imagine nobody had a phone number. Imagine when you wanted to call or text somebody, you had to use the app of your phone company — like AT&T or whoever. Now imagine your phone company suddenly got shut down for some reason. You would lose touch with all your people. That’d be terrible, right? Of course, this sounds crazy. But it’s essentially what might happen with TikTok.

Now, will TikTok actually get banned in the US? It was down, now it’s back up, but that’s contingent on a deal. Will ByteDance and the investors and the various governments all play nice together? Nobody knows. But whether or not it gets shut down this time, it’s already come way too close for comfort. And that should serve as a warning.

Personally, I never joined TikTok. But I fully relate to the millions of people who are feeling loss and anger at the possibility of a ban. I know what it’s like to care super deeply for an online space. But in my experience, it’s not the technology we care about. It’s the people. It’s the connections we form. It’s the communities we belong to.

Social media companies shouldn’t hold this kind of control over our ability to form communities. Just like phone companies shouldn’t hold control over who we can call or text. If you switch from AT&T to Verizon, you don’t have to worry about losing touch with your friends. Because your phone number doesn’t belong to your phone company. It belongs to you. The telephone system is interoperable. That’s a techie term, inter-operable, meaning it can operate interchangeably with any phone company.

But today’s big social media platforms — not just TikTok, but Instagram, Youtube, X, Snap, etc. — they are not interoperable. They are called Walled Gardens. Like these platforms have metaphorical walls around them that make it hard for people to come and go as they please. One of the ways they keep those walls intact is they don’t give you a direct connection to your community. You want to talk to your people, you gotta come inside the walls. And so, Walled Gardens are real good for business. But they’re not good for people.

Garden Discovery, 2017, courtesy serenamcrea.

This is especially true for creators. Ask a TikTok creator today why a ban would be so bad for them? It’s not because they love the TikTok User Interface so, so much. It’s because they’d lose their audience, their community that they’ve probably worked really hard to build. But just like your phone number belongs to you, a creator’s list of subscribers or followers should belong to them. I’ve heard it said that building a creative career on today’s big social media platforms is like “building a mansion on rented land.”

But it doesn’t have to be that way. Look at Substack, the newsletter platform. Substack creators don’t build a follower count, they build an email list. So if Substack the company goes away for whatever reason, the creators will all be fine, because they’ll have their lists. They have a direct connection to their audience. And lo and behold — email is an interoperable system. Social media should work the same way.

This is how the Internet was always supposed to work. Email was designed this way. So was the World Wide Web. So that no single entity had too much power. But over the last couple decades, companies like Meta and Alphabet (and more recently, TikTok) have taken advantage of the generous intentions behind the Internet’s original design to concentrate power in their own hands. They’ve become some of the most economically valuable companies in history. But it’s not because what they’ve built is so extremely great. It’s because we’ve allowed them to build walls around their gardens.

Now imagine that social media did work like the telephone system or the email system. That it was interoperable. Just like your phone number belongs to you, and your email address belongs to you, your identity on social media would belong to you— your content, your comments, your whole network of connections, the people you follow, and the people who follow you. And you could just hop from one platform to another and take all that with you. Sounds nice, right?

Would social media companies still be able to make money? Sure they would. Though probably not as much. Maybe Meta wouldn’t be valued at $1.5 trillion, maybe $150 billion — more like AT&T. And by the way, if it were easy for users to come and go as they pleased, the big platforms would face a lot more competition, and maybe that would make them treat their users better. Maybe we’d see social media companies do something about the mental health crisis they’ve contributed to, or other tragedies they’ve been complicit in causing.

And then, if one of these platforms had to shut down, for whatever reason, it really wouldn’t be a big deal to most of us. Sure, the investors might lose money and the employees would have to get new jobs. But the millions of users would probably be mostly fine. Creators wouldn’t lose their audiences. People wouldn’t lose their communities. Power would shift a bit from the hands of the few to the many. Where it belongs.

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