Why creators would let TikTok die
TikTok's best political path to survival runs through its content creators. Platform logic might get in the way.
A lot of people volunteer their time and energy to post content on Elon Musk’s social media platform in an effort to help him earn back his $44 billion misinvestment into Twitter.
This is stupid and misguided. Tragically, however, I am one of those people.
As a journalist I survive vampirically, via proximity to other humans. The labor economies of most content platforms are immorally extractive arrangements; alas, journalists live in a night-world where the public generally prefers to be reached via immoral platform rather than via salary-paying newspaper subscription — if the public prefers to be reached at all.
So there I am, bartering away my time and creative posting energy and AI-harvestable sentences to Colonel Cybertruck so he can sell weird ads for perverts at chumps like me. In exchange, I hope you depart the pervert app long enough to read this unmonetized blog, I guess. Please follow me elsewhere.
My candid views of platform-labor arrangements is that individual choices of exit over loyalty on the labor side (and content creators very much are the help, here) can be costly.
Social media are a fissured and unorganized settings. Decentralized boycott movements often fizzle out due to lack of coordination, high escape costs, and/or the absence of high-quality alternatives.
So when you’re on the labor side of things in a monopsony environment where there’s a vast number of sellers (us) but only a tiny or singular number of buyers coasting off network effects (Meta), it would be better to organize and act jointly with other creators to exercise collective bargaining power. In theory, we should negotiate better terms and conditions, just like a normal workplace. This is the logic of countervailing power.
This kind of creator-driven collective bargaining with a platform isn’t just a fantasy. It actually happened once.
In 2015, top creators on Vine noticed that the short-form video app, which had been acquired by Twitter, was starting to go into decline. Users were departing, engagement was dropping, and some huge Vine stars were decamping for YouTube and Facebook.
Almost 20 of the app’s top stars met with executives in Los Angeles for an intervention. Not to beg, but to bargain. As reported by Mic:
“If Vine would pay all 18 of them $1.2 million each, roll out several product changes and open up a more direct line of communication, everyone in the room would agree to produce 12 pieces of monthly original content for the app, or three vines per week.
If Vine agreed, they could theoretically generate billions of views and boost engagement on a starving app. If they said no, all the top stars on the platform would walk. …
In order to turn things around, the viners suggested several product changes that they thought would make the experience better for users at all levels.
One ask was for Vine to deal with harassment. Several viners said the community had taken a negative turn and their comments had turned into buckets of abuse. …
The Vine stars also begged for things like the ability to add links to Vine captions, a better recommendation page and a more functional suite of editing tools. …
However, after an hour of discussion during that last meeting at 1600 Vine Street, it was clear the deal was not going to go through.
"At that point, we knew Vine was dead," said one viner at the meeting.
"I remember saying, 'This app will die. We're the ones driving the views,'" said Alx James.
Nearly every major viner stopped posting original content to Vine or drastically reduced their efforts on the platform after the group proposal was rejected.
Within a year, Vine was dead. It wouldn’t be the first time a strike killed a company because management control was more important to a firm than its own survival.
As Malcolm Harris interpreted the incident in his book “Kids These Days,” "the company balked: They weren't the boss of these workers, they were a platform for these creators. ... This was a rare case when creative Internet labor was organized enough and held enough leverage to negotiate collectively, but the important lesson from the story is that platforms would rather disappear entirely than start collective bargaining with talent."
Armchair internet historians can ponder what social media might have looked like if Vine had struck a deal with the talent keeping the app afloat. There was certainly market demand for short-form social video. And thus the door swung open for ByteDance’s TikTok to take the medium to stratospheric popular heights.
But since platforms for content creators are quasi-monopsonies, they have an inherent tendency to kick around their users even as their existence comes under threat. Musk, after bloating Twitter with debt, immediately began alienating the power users he hated over some nonsense about verification blue checks, only to reverse course two years later as the service flounders.
Nor is TikTok immune. The U.S. government is demanding a sale of the company on a pretext of opaque national-security concerns, which TikTok is resisting and faces legal challenges. Amid this, I was struck by influential creator Hank Green’s recent interview about the situation on the Hard Fork podcast, in which Green said he had no idea how much money he makes from TikTok’s payment program to creators.
HANK GREEN: It hasn’t updated since January. It’s broken. It thinks I’m British. It’s paying me in pounds. The thing to remember about TikTok is that it’s not super together. Sometimes people are like, I think that TikTok is trying to do X, Y, and Z. And I’m like, oh, my gosh, if they are, nobody knows about it. …
CASEY NEWTON: I mean, one of my takeaways from what you’re saying, Hank, is sort of however you feel about the geopolitics of a ban, they sure don’t seem to be treating their creators all that well. And so as a result, what should be their biggest and loudest constituency has actually been a little oddly quiet, right? If you don’t even know how much money you’re making from the app, you’re probably not going to march in the streets demanding that they let it continue to exist.
GREEN: Yeah. If you went on Instagram the day that [TikTok] posted there, ‘You have to call your Congress,’ there’s lots of creators in the comments. They’re being like, ‘So now you want us to do stuff for you, and you’re not doing anything for us? Like, you’re giving us no signal for what’s happened to my account.’ And it’s oftentimes it’s things like people feel like they’ve been shadowbanned. And actually, their audience just got less interested in them because TikTok audiences move on extremely quickly from everything.
Obviously this is not every TikTok creator and user — lots of them are plenty mad at Congress.
But it wouldn’t be the first time a company imploded in part because its own workforce decided the operation wasn’t worth stepping up and salvaging. The platform may not even realize that in an situation like this, their workforce is a political ally that should be enlisted through negotiation, not via hamfisted petition. That might be because TikTok doesn’t view its creators as its workforce. But that’s what they are. Just see what happens when they stop posting.
Corporations are notoriously short sighted and have a tendency to do everything ass backwards. For instance, instead of paying a living wage they spend millions lobbying Congress and funding anti union tacticts so they won't have to do that. I cannot make that make sense😕
I really appreciate the reminders to analyze labor dynamics by the actual relationships to capital, not what words are applied to them. "Employee" doesn't just mean what the US Department of Labor calls it (much less what the DOL is willing to enforce), and "strike" doesn't just mean that a NLRB-recognized union has taken a vote...