What Type Of Impact Would A TikTok Ban Have On Local Influencers?

CHARLOTTE – “If TikTok will be taken away, it would be taking away a piece of a little girl’s dream to be famous.”

Clarissa Rankin is one of the millions of influencers on TikTok that are concerned about the popular app being shut down in the United States. House lawmakers advanced the bill on Thursday that would ban the app, unless TikTok left its China-owned parent company, ByteDance.

Rankin uses TikTok to grow her truck driving training business in Gastonia and to connect with all of her 1.8 million followers around the globe.

“TikTok is my home base. That’s where I first got recognized,” says Rankin. “That’s when I first got seen all over the world nationwide, and I have built up a nice form of living off of just sponsorships.”

Rankin makes close to 300,000 dollars a year from sponsorships she has gotten through her TikTok account. Everything from Febreeze, to Amazon, to Indeed.

“TikTok has changed my life,” Rankin Says. “It has put me into believing in my dreams because it put me in front of the world.”

Meredith Dean is a full-time content creator and social media coach in Charlotte. She tells WCCB’s Emma Mondo that a lot of her clients would lose their livelihood if TikTok went away, but everyone would lose an educational tool.

“It would be super upsetting for me because I’ve learned so much about other cultures and other countries and just all these different concepts that I would have never been exposed to otherwise,” says Dean.

She also says that in order to ban something completely, people should have to understand it completely.

“Even through watching the trial, the TikTok trial with the CEO of TikTok, you could tell that the people that were asking him questions, it felt like they had never been on TikTok themselves before.”

Former White House Chief Information Officer Theresa Payton is now the CEO of Foltalice Solutions, a cybersecurity network based in Charlotte.

Payton says she’s surprised how quickly the bill was pushed through and wonders how they plan to shut down an app nationwide.

“Are they going to tell the Apple Store and Google Play you have to remove the app from the store if the person is a US citizen?” says Payton. “So, the implementation of a ban is going to be hard and you’re not going to hit 100%.”