As TikTok faces existential threats from governments in the U.S. and Canada, the platform’s Canadian content creators are concerned with how the turbulence will impact their ability to grow an online audience and access local support.

“TikTok is by far my largest audience,” Tope Babalola tells Playback Daily, adding that he and many other creators rely on the U.S. for a “large part of our audience.”

In April 2024, the U.S. passed the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, which would force any application designated as foreign adversary-controlled to sell to a trusted buyer within 270 days.

Those days ran out on Sunday (Jan. 19) for TikTok and other applications owned by Chinese company ByteDance, which were shuttered in the U.S. the same day. The app came back online approximately 12 hours later thanks to a promise from President Donald Trump to sign an executive order to delay the law’s enforcement for another 75 days, proposing a 50% joint ownership venture with the U.S. Trump was the first to propose a TikTok ban in 2020.

Despite Trump’s executive order, the application is not available to download from Apple and Google’s respective app stores in the U.S. at press time. Users with TikTok already downloaded on their phone may use the application.

Closer to home, the Canadian government ordered TikTok to dissolve its Canadian operations while still allowing the platform to exist in the country. TikTok Canada has challenged the decision at the Federal Court of Appeal, which is pending at press time.

For Canadian comedians and partners Darcy Michael (Spun Out) and Jeremy Baer (Darcy & Jer: No Refunds), better known as Darcy and Jer, TikTok has helped to promote their comedy and bring their comedy album No Refunds to No. 1 on the iTunes comedy chart.

“I had quit stand-up in 2018 because I had done it for, at that point, 18 years,” says Michael. “Then in 2019, I started posting on TikTok. We just finished a 55-city tour around North America and the U.K. in September and we’re about to do another 35 cities starting in February … None of that would have happened without TikTok.”

Michael, who has 3.9 million followers on the platform, says he is concerned about the dissolving of TikTok Canada. For his upcoming tour, Michael says that TikTok Canada reached out to them and added pre-sale ticket options on all of his videos, which led to a huge bump in sales.

“These are people that I’ve worked with for four years, they’re good people, they’re friends of mine,” says Michael. “TikTok is an industry disruptor, not just for music, comedy and books, but for small businesses. It’s disrupting all those industries by giving access to people. The idea that they’re closing the offices just doesn’t make sense to me.”

In its challenge against the Canadian government, TikTok Canada said the claim of national security concerns was not “transparent, intelligible or justified.” TikTok also said that the closure of the Canadian offices would eliminate hundreds of jobs that support millions of Canadian users and potentially threaten more than 250,000 contracts with Canadian advertisers.

Karim Bardeesy, executive director of the Dais, a public policy and leadership think tank at Toronto Metropolitan University, says Canada following through with a ban similar to the U.S. could be possible, or even likely.

“The main argument around the law was around national security issues and those national security issues are common to the U.S. and Canada,” says Bardeesy. “[Canada] is increasingly aligning with the U.S. on policies that are at the intersection of security of technology.”

Another reason Bardeesy could see Canada following through with a TikTok ban could be to avoid potentially punitive trade action from the U.S. On Monday (Jan. 20), Trump floated placing 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico starting Feb. 1.

Toronto-based creator, screenwriter and filmmaker Babalola, who has two million followers on the platform, says that having a large audience has helped with success in traditional media, such as film and television.

“Even with the projects that I’m developing in the traditional space right now, a large part of why people were able to take on a quote-unquote ‘newer creator’ like me is because of that audience,” says Babalola. “It was almost like a proof-of-concept in a way.”

According to Babalola, the 12-hours without U.S. creators on the app has been dubbed “Commonwealth TikTok” with creators from Canada, the U.K., Australia and many other countries being able to reach audiences they had not been able to interact with previously.

While creators lost access to the U.S. audience of about 170 million people, it shows how the application could persevere beyond that.

Another concern for Canadian creators could be increased U.S. influence on how these sites operate due to fear of reprisal from the U.S. administration.

“If the app is sold to an American company in order to stay operational in the U.S., I imagine there will be a significant change in the structure of the platform,” says Babalola. “We’ll have to wait and see how it plays out.”

According to Bardeesy, the U.S. administration has ways of punishing companies in other lucrative product areas, giving the example that if the YouTube algorithm is doing things the administration does not like, Trump could in turn punish Google’s cloud services division.

“It’s a highly volatile and unusual time where these plutocrats and their companies are in all kinds of businesses that interrelate and, many of which, are of significant interest to the U.S. administration,” says Bardeesy.

Recently on Jan. 7, Mark Zuckerberg of Meta, referring to the recent U.S. election as feeling like a cultural tipping point, announced sweeping changes to the company’s moderation system, including replacing fact-checkers with community notes, similar to X. In the video Zuckerberg discusses simplifying content policies and removing restrictions on topics such as immigration and gender. Both Zuckerberg and X owner Elon Musk were in attendance at Trump’s inauguration on Monday.

However, Bardeesy also notes that the companies such as Meta will still want to cross the political divides in order to reach as large an audience as possible.

“[If you’re] catering to the whims and the political preferences of the new administration… it seems like you’re narrowing your audience,” says Bardeesy. “I think, for the very largest firms, they will need to continue to reach across the political divides.”

Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images