Lifestyle
Here's how TikTok creators are preparing for a TikTok ban
TikTok creators are preparing for the app to potentially be shut down in the U.S. this month unless it’s sold to a non-Chinese company.
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Dan Kitwood/Getty Images
As a TikTok shutdown looms, many creators are preparing for life without the popular social media app that serves as news, entertainment and for some: income.
TikTok will be banned in the U.S. this month unless its owner, ByteDance, is sold to a company outside of China.
President-elect Donald Trump has asked the Supreme Court to block the law from going into effect — and NPR’s Bobby Allyn has reported that “for all the TikTokers out there who use the app every day, I think it’s fair to say it’s unlikely it will be disappearing anytime soon.”
But creators on the app are saying their goodbyes and planning for the app as they know it to go away in a matter of weeks.
For some creators, the end of TikTok would mean losing their main source of income.
Cora Lakey quit her six-figure job in talent acquisition and project management in October — because she was able to make a living on TikTok.
“I was, I would say, equaling my corporate salary for about three months before I took the leap to quit,” Lakey said.
TikTok has allowed her to pay off some of her student debt. Unlike her corporate job, becoming a full-time TikTok creator has also provided her autonomy over how she spends each hour of her day.
But recently she’s seen comments that a TikTok ban might force influencers like her to “get a real job.”
In a TikTok video, she retorted, “Influencers aren’t out of touch for crying about the TikTok ban. You’re out of touch for not realizing this is a real industry.”
Women have the most to lose: Eighty-four percent of influencers are women, according to a 2024 report from Influencer Marketing Hub, which follows the social media industry.
“Some would argue that with TikTok shutting down, they could wipe out about $1.3 billion in U.S. small business and creator revenue within just one month,” said Nicol Turner Lee, senior fellow in governance studies and director of the Center for Technology Innovation at the Brookings Institution.
“The creator economy is valued at $250 billion globally,” Turner Lee added.
President Biden signed the bill that would potentially ban TikTok, citing threats to national security.
The app gathers a lot of personal information from users, and lawmakers say they are concerned about the Chinese government spying on American users, or manipulating the platform to advance its own interests.
But Adam Aleksic, who goes by @etymologynerd on TikTok, doesn’t believe these claims.
“It’s not about China. It’s about the fact that they can’t control mass communication anymore, which has also been obvious since the war in Gaza started,” Aleksic said in a TikTok video.
Aleksic echoes a theme a lot of TikTok users share about the ban.
“The gatekeepers hate this, but they know they can’t stop us from using all of social media,” he said. “Instead, they can just try to limit us to the platforms they have the most control over.”
Among TikTok users, there’s a feeling of loss.
“I’m not as worried as I am disappointed,” said Anna Vatuone, who coaches people on developing their personal brands online.
Vatuone says she finds most of her clients through TikTok. Ahead of a potential ban on the app, she’s telling her hundred and eighty thousand followers to find her on Instagram and Substack.
“Rule one of personal branding is don’t put all your eggs in one basket,” Vatuone said. “Diversify and make sure that you’re in a lot of different places, because the truth is we don’t own our profiles anywhere.”
Ralph Tyndall posts videos about cardmaking to his one-and-a-half million followers. He’s been a full-time content creator for almost two years, and says it allowed him to leave his tech job that burned him out.
“I’ve kind of just been ignoring it, knowing that I don’t really have any control,” he said of a potential TikTok ban.
Tyndall used to make around $160 thousand annually at his tech job, however he now makes more as a content creator. He says he’ll be alright without the additional income from TikTok — but it’s the loss of community he’s more worried about. He’s been on TikTok longer than any other social media platform, and doesn’t want to lose the following he’s built up.
“While it’s great to chase the metrics and numbers and views, the thing that keeps me coming back is the community,” Tyndall said.
Rishika Vinnakota is a TikTok influencer who posts about her life as a college student to her twenty thousand followers. She says she’s “disappointed just because I built a community,” adding that “it’s really hard to get people to follow you from one platform to another, especially if you have a smaller platform.”
Vinnakota has three on-campus jobs, but makes the most of her income from TikTok partnerships and brand deals.
“It’s a little sad to go through and relive all my videos and download them and, you know, plan to post them on another platform,” she added.
Vinnakota uses a separate app to download her videos without the TikTok watermark — since videos posted on TikTok can’t be downloaded without the app’s logo.
While she can upload her TikTok videos to another platform, it won’t be as lucrative. Having a large following on TikTok makes brands want to work with her — and she doesn’t have nearly as many followers on other social media platforms.
“I mean, all of this could have been dealt with in a much better way,” she said of the lawmakers who orchestrated the potential ban.
“I’m still going to take content, film, post, edit. I’m going to do everything I do,” Vinnakota said. “It just might not be on TikTok anymore.”
This story was edited for radio by Barry Gordemer and edited for digital by Treye Green. It was produced by Claire Murashima.
Students walk on the Stanford University campus on March 14, 2019, in Stanford, Calif.
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Ben Margot/AP
When Theo Baker arrived at Stanford University a few years ago, he joined the student newspaper, following the path of his journalist parents, Peter Baker, a White House correspondent for The New York Times, and Susan Glasser, a writer for The New Yorker.
Through his reporting as a student journalist, he eventually broke a story about manipulated data in Stanford President Marc Tessier-Lavigne’s neuroscience research that helped lead to the university president’s resignation.
Theo Baker’s book, How to Rule the World: An Education in Power at Stanford University was released May 19. In it, Baker describes Stanford as a place where proximity to Silicon Valley gives rise to a parallel system of influence, recruitment and money, with investors looking to identify promising students almost as soon as they arrive on campus.
He told Morning Edition host Steve Inskeep there was “a sort of Stanford inside Stanford,” where elite students are drawn into an “alternate reality” of excess and access to cut corners.
In the interview, he discusses how Stanford is not just a university but also a pipeline where status and power can matter as much as ideas.
We reached out to Stanford University for comment and have not heard back.
Listen to the interview by clicking play on the blue box above.
The scoreboard shows the results of the women’s singles final match between Iga Swiatek of Poland and Amanda Anisimova of the U.S. at the Wimbledon Tennis Championships in London, Saturday, July 12, 2025.
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Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP
Fifteen points in tennis? Nice. Thirty, 40 — even better. Advantage — that sounds good. “Love” — that also must be great, right? Well, not quite.
As the French Open rolls on and Serena Williams has announced her return to the sport, maybe you’ve been paying a little more attention to tennis. The sport’s scoring system is notably distinct, and can sometimes be hard to grasp for newcomers. But even tennis aficionados might not know why, or how, “love” became the unmistakable callout for zero points. For this installment of NPR’s Word of the Week, we’re exploring how a word that signifies trailing behind got such a sweet name.
“Love” comes from the heart — or an egg?
It’s hard to pinpoint when the first tennis ball went over the net. Tennis is a derivative of lots of other sports, such as “jeu de paume,” a handball game played in France, said JT Buzanga, the collections manager at the International Tennis Hall of Fame museum.
But tennis became a patented, official sport in 1874, said Steve Flink, a journalist whose tennis coverage got him inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame. It has retained its unique, mysterious scoring system ever since.
“By and large, the original system has held up almost entirely,” Flink said.
The use of “love” goes back to the late 18th century, said Jesse Sheidlower, a lexicographer. But it was used earlier than that in card games such as whist and bridge. Before the term made its way to tennis, the sport favored plain old “nothing,” or “nil,” he said.
Why love in the first place, though? Historians don’t really know for sure, but there are a few theories.
The French could have something to do with it. Some historians believe “love” derives from “l’oeuf,” which means “the egg” in French. Because eggs are shaped like zeros, terms such as “goose egg” and “duck’s egg” have been used in other contexts to mean zero, Sheidlower said.
It’s also possible English speakers mispronounced l’oeuf as “love.” But Sheidlower isn’t convinced that’s the answer.
“It’s the French equivalent of an English expression. But since that expression doesn’t appear in French, the French word wouldn’t have been used,” he said.
To be sure, France has had a lot of influence on tennis culture, Buzanga said. For example, “deuce” or a game tied at 40 points, comes from the French word for “two”: “deux.” But he prefers another prominent theory: that “love” comes from the idiom “for the love of the game.” Even if a player hasn’t scored, it doesn’t matter, because their heart is in it. It’s the theory Sheidlower said is the most plausible, because the idiom was used by the English before tennis was popularized.
Another variation of the “love of the game” theory is that the word could have come from the Dutch “lof,” or “honor” — or the Latin “amare,” meaning “to love,” Flink said.
But if tennis’ “love” doesn’t come from a French word, the theory at least has a French sensibility.
“I think the ‘for the love of the game’ is kind of romantic,” Buzanga said.
“Love” probably isn’t going anywhere
Tennis used to be a sport of leisure. The style of play has changed a lot over the years; players are more athletic and competitive, for instance, Flink said. But the rules of the sport are more steadfast, he said.
“There’s this incredible, enduring respect for tradition in tennis,” he said. “Changes are not made easily.”
There has been one major change in modern history: the tie-break. Matches can go on and on because players have to score two consecutive points to break a deuce, or by two games to break a tied set. But the onset of television meant matches would have to get shorter if the sport wanted to capture a larger audience, Flink said.
Change even came for “love.” An alternative sprouted up in the 1970s, and is still used today: “bagel,” named for its zero shape, Sheidlower said. Novices may say “zero,” and insiders will understand what they mean, but they “will needle them about it,” Flink said.
But “love” still prevails.
“People kind of like it,” Flink said. “It’s different. Why say zero when you can say love?”
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