What the TikTok Ban Reveals about Librarianship and Digital Preservation

What is content without context and community?

Posted on January 27, 2025 in Blog Posts

What happens when a community vanishes? This is not a new question: communities, civilizations, and lineages have all disappeared before. Traces are left behind, but how do we pick up the pieces? How do we recreate a space that once existed? Do libraries have a role in this sort of preservation?

At the time of this writing, the fate of TikTok is still hanging in the balance. The Supreme Court ruled to uphold the ban, and President Biden said he wouldn’t enforce the ban on his last day in office, but on the night of January 18, TikTok went dark for the United States. The app returned to mostly normal functionality in the afternoon on January 19. There is now a 75-day extension before the ban takes effect unless its parent company, ByteDance, reaches a deal with the US government.

Since the start of 2025, creators on TikTok have been confronting the reality that this platform might actually go away and the Sword of Damocles might fall. It’s been emotional for me, primarily a TikTok content consumer, to see the reposts of videos that made me fall in love with creators or a montage of moments that made me laugh, life hacks that changed the way I do ordinary tasks, or moments of community that seemingly brought a global platform together for a few moments.

When the idea of the TikTok ban first came into our consciousness, I think there was an assumption that the app would still exist: we could still scroll on our phones, but there would no longer be any support or updates, the Creator Fund would disappear, and we’d slowly lose functionality. (The app “Flappy Bird” is an example of what might have happened to TikTok in this instance.) The reality of the app going completely dark, with United States residents unable to access any content at all, was a blunt reminder of how ephemeral online communities can be.

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TikTok’s impact on college students

Librarians think about how to preserve physical objects and spaces and how to build community face-to-face. But how do we document and archive a community that existed through cultural exchanges, memes, playlists, tags, and a self-created language?

When I think of the way I approach interactions with students, I’m losing a tool that helps me keep up to date on trends with Gen Z students. It’s not necessarily that I expect every student to know the inside jokes and the dances that exist on TikTok, but I can get a sense of the issues that students are paying attention to. I can bring them up when examples are needed for searching or developing topics and research questions. TikTok was a neutral space to learn about the populations we work with, a space where we could observe each other without judgment (though I am by no means suggesting TikTok was a beacon of neutrality or a judgment-free zone).

I’ve discussed before how social media mimics scholarly conversation or how the growth and development of memes are analogous to doing research. These skills are practiced before students even get to college-level courses. TikTok users cooperatively developed a system of citation and giving credit. New ideas developed from serendipitous connections through the algorithm. Are students losing a safe place to develop these skills? I’m trying to think of another social media platform that has the culture of TikTok or the functionalities that made TikTok valuable as a learning tool, and I’m coming up empty.

Returning to the question at hand, when thinking about how to document and archive TikTok, I have to remind myself that it’s not that TikTok itself is going away, but that its presence in the United States might be diminished. (Even in the aftermath of 20 or so hours without TikTok, there have been many users who say it “feels different” now because it all seemed like political theater to demonstrate power and control.) So then it becomes a question of documenting the US experience of TikTok. Can we chart out the connections between creators? Analyze small businesses across the last five years? Do we have to make something intangible tangible in order to keep it alive?  

Not only do we lose the platform, but we also lose the context of the platform. Even though the app has millions of users, it still somehow could feel like you were just FaceTiming with a friend or in a small classroom with an engaging professor. I can download my favorite TikTok videos and watch them over and over, but the context in which they were created will be lost, and that is the element of preservation that I can’t quite wrap my head around when thinking about what to do in its absence. To me, it feels like TikTok archiving might have to become more of an oral tradition—jokes and memes and music passed on through connections and friendships. It’s like remembering your high school years, your time in college, the “good old days.” It’s about capturing the feeling and replicating those connections. That’s what keeps it alive.

Keeping the knowledge connections when the space is lost

Someone recently made a TikTok where they put up the text, “If the TikTok ban goes into effect, I’ll have ‘read something in a book’ a lot less moving forward,” referencing the idea that we’re learning things through that platform that we might not want to admit we’ve learned through social media, so we reframe it as something that may appear more educational. I can’t say how much I’ve learned from TikTok since I made an account in 2020. At some point in 2024, my father said to me, “How do you know the things you know?” and I had to say it was mostly through social media and how it has connected me to knowledge bases I never would have had access to before. Have we, as a society, ever had such access to personal, first-hand accounts of current events before?

So how do we stay connected to the people and communities that have given out free education for the past four or five years? TikTok created a platform where multiple perspectives on an issue could be shared, with users stitching each other’s videos to add context or a different insight. If misinformation started to spread, other creators quickly corrected it, sometimes drowning out the misinformation. If the ban goes through, there’s no consensus about what other platform people will flock to. I know there is hope from Meta that Instagram Reels will become the new digital forum, but there’s pushback from the TikTok user base against Mark Zuckerberg’s goals for the future. Some have moved to the Mandarin-language app RedNote.

The library should have a role in attempting to preserve these valuable knowledge connections. I maintain that librarians have moved from keepers of knowledge to facilitators of knowledge. My job as a librarian is to help students find the connections between their interests, create pathways through their research, and build a base of knowledge that can be shared. TikTok’s algorithm did this with an amazing amount of ease, and now we may well be faced with the task of recreating that computer magic without the social media platform that made it possible.

What’s next?

I am by no means suggesting that it is impossible to do the job of an instruction librarian (or any other kind of librarian) without TikTok. I was a librarian before I downloaded the app, and I will be one if or when it goes away. But I feel lucky that this app made it possible for me to do some of the things I’ve been able to do in my instructional career and the lessons I’ve taught. It helped me connect with students and write journal articles and know so much about worlds I never knew existed.

For me, librarianship is about community and connections. It makes sense, then, that I feel deeply and strongly about TikTok, an app that fostered those two things incredibly well. If our access to TikTok disappears, I think I’ll feel out of touch for a bit. In some ways, I’ll have to recalibrate how I engage with the internet. I think in the coming weeks, we’ll get to see users—many of whom are our students and patrons—engage in evaluation. Which platform accomplishes the goals that users are looking for? What company is engaged in business practices its users support? How do ethics come into play when posting and commenting?

The questions that the TikTok ban has prompted are questions we confront in source evaluation and in research and are built into acronyms and frameworks that we bring into the classroom and the work that we do. These are deeper questions of authority, trustworthiness, and what it means when it feels like there are no satisfactory answers or no answers that feel good or right or just. I think it’s easy to go through the world with blinders on and not have to confront these ideas. But something as monumental as this brings those questions to the forefront. And how do we answer them? That’s the question I’m left with as well.

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