US TikTok ban could echo India chaos as users seek options

By Jaspreet Singh, Arsheeya Bajwa and Deborah Mary Sophia

(Reuters) - TikTok fans in the U.S. are racing to secure alternatives and safeguard their digital empires ahead of a looming shutdown on Sunday, evoking the chaos of India's 2020 ban that erased the app from the lives of 200 million users overnight.

While the U.S. ban has been debated for months, India acted swiftly in June 2020 to block TikTok and nearly 60 other Chinese apps over national security concerns, stripping many creators of their main source of income and shattering a digital community.

The disruption forced content creators to rebuild their followings and businesses on new homegrown apps and established platforms such as Meta-owned Instagram, which emerged as a big winner of the ban. While top influencers successfully made the switch and even expanded their audiences, smaller creators struggled to achieve the same success.

Gaurav Arora, who had 10.8 million followers on TikTok and bears an uncanny resemblance to Indian cricketer Virat Kohli, said he had to act quickly.

"I used to earn between 100,000 and 200,000 Indian rupees ($1,155 to $2,310) per month on TikTok," said Arora, who shifted to platforms such as YouTube where he now boasts 11.3 million subscribers.

The vacuum left by TikTok drove a surge toward domestic platforms like Moj and Josh, especially in India's smaller towns and rural areas, where TikTok had transformed locals into stars, showcasing everything from dance routines to personal stories.

Moj and Josh, launched just a month after the ban, have seen lifetime downloads of roughly 360 million and 308 million, respectively, in the country, according to market intelligence firm Sensor Tower.

"TikTok in India catered to every demography and every type of user, not just tier-1 cities. That's why other applications like Moj were quickly able to take advantage of the ban," said Priya Adivarekar, a digital creator and visiting faculty at Xavier Institute of Communications in Mumbai.

In the U.S., a similar trend is unfolding as millions of "TikTok Refugees" sign up for the Chinese social media app RedNote.

However, experts caution that the user experience on these new apps often falls short of what TikTok had provided, allowing U.S. tech giants to fill the gap. Instagram Reels, a TikTok-like service launched in August 2020 just months after the Chinese app was banned in India, has found its biggest audience in the country.

"The only beneficiary (of the ban), if there was any clear beneficiary from this, did seem to be Instagram," said Apar Gupta, observer trustee of Internet Freedom Foundation, an Indian advocacy group.

"The greater loss was to the people of India. ByteDance completely pulled out of India. You didn't have people having the ability of engaging in content or a creator economy to the same extent that others had," he added.

While TikTok's overall impact on India's economy before the ban is unclear, the company estimates that it drove $15 billion in revenue for U.S. small businesses in 2023 and contributed about $24 billion to the world's largest economy.

"For top influencers, these platform disruptions matter a little less, especially since they are already present on a bunch of platforms," said Aditya Vashistha, assistant professor of Information Science at Cornell University.

"The impact on the micro-influencers and the mid-tier influencers is going to be much stronger. I see similar ripple effects both in the U.S. and in India."

($1 = 86.5660 Indian rupees)

(Reporting by Jaspreet Singh, Arsheeya Bajwa, Kritika Lamba and Deborah Sophia in Bengaluru; Editing by Aditya Soni and Anil D'Silva)