Technology

6 TikTok creators on where they’ll go if the app is banned

Published

3 months ago

January 17, 2025

6 TikTok creators on where they’ll go if the app is banned

It’s been more than four years since Donald Trump first moved to expel TikTok from the US — and now, just days before a second Trump presidency begins, it just might happen.

President Joe Biden signed legislation last April that officially began the countdown that would force TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, to divest from the US business. But even afterward, the atmosphere on the video powerhouse was mostly nonchalant, with a handful of stray jokes about “this app disappearing” slotted between the usual fare.

In the last week, though, the vibe has shifted — my favorite creators are posting links to their other social accounts, audiences are making highlight reels of the most viral moments on the app, and they’re saying goodbye to their “Chinese spy” and threatening to hand over their data to the Chinese government. A Chinese-owned app Xiaohongshu, known as RedNote, topped the App Store this week, driven by a wave of “TikTok refugees” trying to recreate the experience of the platform. It’s feeling a bit like a fever dream last day of school.

For many creatives online, this wouldn’t be the first time they’ve had to migrate to new spaces: reach, engagement, and visibility are constantly shifting even on the largest and most stable platforms. But the possibility that a social media site of this size would disappear — or slowly break down until it’s nonfunctional — is a new threat. For small creators especially, TikTok is like playing the lottery: you don’t need thousands of followers for your video to get big, and this unpredictability incentivized the average person to upload content.

It’s still unclear what will happen to TikTok after January 19th. I asked content creators what their game plan is. (Responses have been edited and condensed for clarity.)

Noelle Johansen, @astraeagoods (89K followers)

“At the peak, I was making approximately 70 percent of my sales through TikTok from December 2020 to January 2022. Now, it drives at most, 10 percent of my sales,” says Noelle Johansen, who sells slogan sweatshirts, accessories, stickers, and other products.

“At my peak with TikTok, I was able to reach so many customers with ease. Instagram and Twitter have always been a shot in the dark as to whether the content will be seen, but TikTok was very consistent in showing my followers and potential new customers my videos,” Johansen told The Verge in an email. “I’ve also made great friends from the artist community on TikTok, and it’s difficult to translate that community to other social media. Most apps function a lot differently than TikTok, and many people don’t have the bandwidth to keep up with all of the new socials and building platforms there.”

Going forward, Johansen says they’ll focus on X and Instagram for sales while working to grow an audience on Bluesky and Threads.

Kay Poyer, @ladymisskay_ (704K followers)

“I think the ease of use on TikTok opened an avenue for a lot of would-be creators,” Kay Poyer, a popular creator making humor and commentary content, says. “Right now we’re seeing a cleaving point, where many will choose to stop or be forced to adapt back to older platforms (which tend to be more difficult to build followings on and monetize).”

As for her own plans, Poyer says she’ll stay where the engagement is if TikTok becomes unavailable — smaller platforms like Bluesky or Neptune aren’t yet impactful enough.

“I’m seeing a big spike in subscribers to my Substack, The Quiet Part, as well as followers flooding to my Instagram and Twitter,” Poyer told The Verge. “Personally I have chosen to make my podcast, Meat Bus, the flagship of my content. We’re launching our video episodes sometime next month on YouTube.”

Bethany Brookshire, @beebrookshire (18K followers)

Bethany Brookshire, a science journalist and author, has been sharing videos about human anatomy on TikTok, Bluesky, Instagram, and YouTube. Across platforms, Brookshire has observed differences in audiences — YouTube, for example, “is not a place [to] build an audience,” she says, citing negative comments on her work.

“Sometimes I feel like the only ethical way to produce any content is to write it out in artisanal chalk on an organically sourced vegan stone”

“I find people on TikTok comment and engage a lot more, and most importantly, their comments are often touching or funny,” she says. “When I was doing pelvic anatomy, a lot of people with uteruses wrote in to tell me they felt seen, that they had a specific condition, and they even bonded with each other in the comments.”

Brookshire told The Verge in an email that sharing content anywhere can at times feel fraught. Between Nazi content on Substack, right-wing ass-kissing at Meta, and the national security concerns of TikTok, it doesn’t feel like any platform is perfectly ideal.

“Sometimes I feel like the only ethical way to produce any content is to write it out in artisanal chalk on an organically sourced vegan stone, which I then try to show to a single person with their consent before gently tossing it into the ocean to complete its circle of life,” Brookshire says. “But if I want to inform, and I want to educate, I need to be in the places people go.”

Woodstock Farm Sanctuary, @woodstocksanctuary (117K followers)

The Woodstock Farm Sanctuary in upstate New York uses TikTok to share information with new audiences — the group’s Instagram following is mostly people who are already animal rights activists, vegans, or sanctuary supporters.

“TikTok has allowed us to reach people who don’t even know what animal sanctuaries are,” social media coordinator Riki Higgins told The Verge in an email. “While we still primarily fundraise via Meta platforms, we seem to make the biggest education and advocacy impact when we post on TikTok.”

With a small social media and marketing team of two, Woodstock Farm Sanctuary (like other small businesses and organizations) must be strategic in how it uses its efforts. YouTube content can be more labor-intensive, Higgins says, and Instagram Reels is missing key features like 2x video speed and the ability to pause videos.

“TikTok users really, really don’t like Reels. They view it as the platform where jokes, trends, etc., go to die, where outdated content gets recycled, and especially younger users see it as an app only older audiences use,” Higgins says.

The sanctuary says it will meet audiences wherever they migrate in the case that TikTok becomes inaccessible.

Anna Rangos, @honeywhippedfeta (15K followers)

Anna Rangos, who works in social media and makes tech and cultural commentary videos, is no stranger to having to pick up and leave a social media platform for somewhere else. As a retired sex worker, she saw firsthand how fragile a social media following could be.

“You could wake up one day to find your accounts deactivated, and restoring them? Forget it. Good luck getting any kind of service from Meta,” Rangos said in an email. Having an account deleted means lost income and hours of trying to rebuild a following. “Over my time in the industry, I went through three or four Instagram accounts, constantly trying to recapture my following.”

Sex workers and sex education creators regularly deal with their content being removed, censored, or entire accounts deleted. Rangos says that though the community on TikTok is more welcoming, she’s working to stake out her own space through a website and a newsletter. She also plans to stay active on YouTube, Pinterest, and Bluesky.

“I don’t plan on using Meta products much, given [Mark] Zuckerberg’s recent announcements regarding fact-checking,” she wrote in an email.

Amanda Chavira, @lost.birds.beads (10K followers)

“I have found so much joy and community on TikTok mostly through Native TikTok,” says Amanda Chavira, an Indigenous beader who built an audience through tutorials and cultural content. “It’s sad to see TikTok go.”

Chavira says she plans to reupload some of her content to YouTube Shorts to see how her videos perform there but otherwise will be waiting to see if another viable video platform comes along. Chavira won’t be pivoting to Meta: she says she plans to delete her accounts on Threads, Instagram, and Facebook.

“I’d been considering leaving my Meta accounts for a long time,” she said in an email. “Facebook felt like a terrible place through election cycles, and then the pandemic, [and] then every other post I was seeing was a suggested ad or clickbait article. For Instagram, I’ve really been struggling to reach my target audience and didn’t have the time available to post all the time to try to increase engagement.” Her final straw was Meta’s decision to end the fact-checking program and Zuckerberg’s “pandering to the Trump administration,” she says.

Technology

Buckle up for more subscriptions

Published

3 hours ago

April 11, 2025

Press Room

Two weeks ago, Garmin announced it was launching a new subscription. Where the Garmin Connect app had previously offered everything from in-depth metrics and training plans for free, the beloved fitness tech company was now adding premium AI summaries, among other features, behind a paywall. In The Verge comments, my social media mentions, and the r/Garmin subreddit, cries about enshittification ensued.

Then, earlier this week, Garmin-competitor Polar announced that it, too, was launching a premium subscription called Polar Fitness Plan. There was no AI component, but in a nutshell, Polar is now asking long-time users to pay for training plans that it had previously, in some capacity, offered for free.

The march toward subscriptions, particularly in the wearable space, didn’t crop up overnight. You could trace it back to Apple’s infamous services event in 2019 (if not earlier), when the company made a marked shift from hardware to services. But Garmin and Polar’s examples stand out. In the world of premium rugged smartwatches, long-time fans often accepted the several hundreds — sometimes thousands — of dollars for their hardware because they didn’t paywall features.

“Garmins have always felt a little on the high side price wise, but it was justifiable as there was no ongoing cost,” Threads user aaronpfisher told me when I asked Garmin loyalists how they felt. “Strava have taken more and more and hidden behind a paywall and that’s how I fear this will end up too.”

“Customers are rightly worried that all of the best features will be behind a paywall,” says subscriptions expert Robbie Kellman Baxter, author of The Membership Economy and The Forever Transaction. “They have told customers not to worry — that the base software will always be available for free. But they have not been clear about whether or how much they will continue to improve the free version.”

It’s an understandable frustration. Generally, Baxter says, customers are resistant to subscribing to access features or their variations if they’ve previously received them for free. That’s borne out in recent examples. Oura Health, maker of the popular smart ring, faced immense backlash upon launching a subscription alongside Oura Ring Gen 3 in 2021. Recently, popular tech YouTuber Marques Brownlee, better known as MKBHD, also incurred the internet’s wrath when he introduced a subscription to his wallpaper app. Likewise, BMW also received heat when it tried to add a monthly subscription for heated seats in its cars.

But that anger might be something consumers have to get used to in the coming months. Increasingly, hardware sales no longer keep the lights on — and President Trump’s tariffs will only add fuel to the subscription wars.

Regardless of what the final tariff rates are, experts who have spoken to The Verge largely agree that gadget prices — and the price of everything else — will rise. Should nothing change, it might spur short-term buying, as consumers rush to snap up devices before price hikes. It may lead to people holding onto their devices longer and buying less in the mid-to-long term. In that scenario, charging for services becomes the most obvious way to keep the lights on.

“If hardware becomes more expensive, software will be a way for hardware companies to grow.”

“If hardware becomes more expensive, software will be a way for hardware companies to grow,” says Baxter, noting that Trump’s tariffs will push companies to focus on accelerating software and software-as-a-service subscriptions. “It also might change how they manufacture their products—designing for long-term stability and software flexibility. If companies designed hardware to last twice as long, and to deliver much of the value through software upgrades, they might be able to funnel more of their revenue through the ‘software’ side than the ‘hardware’ side.”

The question is whether companies can convince their customers the cost is worth it. Simply slapping on new features without thinking of the value they can provide could alienate loyal users. In fitness tech, athletes have largely decried Strava’s attempt to add value to its subscription through AI summaries, describing the feature as useless. (Or, more cuttingly, like “reading a book report a third-grader wrote.”)

Either way, it doesn’t look like there’ll be any relief for subscription fatigue any time soon.

Technology

Can't find your Android phone? Here's what to do to track it down

Published

3 hours ago

April 11, 2025

Press Room

Can't find your Android phone? Here's what to do to track it down

You’re about to run out of the house, and suddenly your phone is nowhere to be found. Or you get in your car after being at the store, and your phone’s not in your bag.

Does this scenario sound familiar? Whether you’re someone who loses or misplaces your phone frequently or just once in a blue moon, we’ve all been there.

Unfortunately, finding your phone is not so easy. Perhaps you try calling it, but your ringer is on silent. Or it fell into the cracks somewhere, and you can’t see the screen light up. Luckily, there’s another way to find your Android phone if you’re unsure where you last left it.

iPhone users, be sure to check out four ways to find your lost iPhone, with and without other devices.

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A man looking at his smartwatch (Kurt “CyberGuy” Knutsson)

1. Ping your phone using your smartwatch

One way to find your Android phone if you’re not quite sure where you last left is to rely on your smartwatch, which you can use to ping your phone. This feature sends a signal to your phone, making it ring loudly even if it’s on silent, helping you locate it quickly.

Open the watch app: On your Android watch (such as a Samsung Galaxy watch), swipe down to access the quick settings menu.
Find the Find My Phone icon: Look for an icon that resembles a phone with sound waves around it.
Ping your phone: Tap the icon, and your phone will start ringing, making it easier to find.

2. Use your Google Account to ‘Find My Device’

If you have access to a device connected to your Google account, such as a laptop, tablet or another smartphone, you can use it to find your Android phone. This feature is part of Google’s ecosystem and allows you to locate your phone through the Google Play Store or any web browser.

WHAT IS ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (AI)?

To use Google’s Find My Device feature, a few things must have been set up on your Android phone before it was lost:

Your phone must be signed into your Google account
Location Services must be turned on
The Find My Device feature must be enabled:Go to Settings → Security → Find My Device and ensure it’s on
Your phone must be powered on and connected to mobile data or Wi-Fi for real-time tracking
(Optional but helpful) Your device should be visible on Google Play. You can check this at play.google.com/settings and ensure visibility is turned on

If these conditions are met, you can use any device (such as a laptop, tablet or another phone) connected to the internet to find your lost Android phone:z

On any device, open a web browser or the Google Play Store app
Log in with the same Google account linked to your lost phone
In the web browser, go to Find My Device. If using the Google Play Store, open the menu and select Find My Device
Google will display your phone’s last known location on a map
You can also use options to make it ring, lock it or erase its data to protect your personal information

Find My Device map (Google)

LOOKING FOR MORE WAYS TO LOCK DOWN YOUR ANDROID? HERE’S HOW TO DO IT

3. Utilize the old-school method

It may go without saying, but with all this convenient technology, sometimes the tried-and-true methods are easily forgotten. If you happen to lose your Android, consider retracing your steps: call the places you visited within the last few hours, ask employees if anyone found their phone, and check all the nooks and crannies in your car, bag, etc. You can also try calling your phone to see if anyone answers, and if they’re honest, you can find a safe, public place to meet up. Also, if you happen to lose your phone in a ride-share, those apps have methods to communicate with the driver in order to get your phone back.

BEST ANTIVIRUS FOR ANDROIDS – CYBERGUY PICKS 2025

What to consider if you lose or misplace your Android

Anyone can lose their phone at some point. Therefore, be careful what apps and security you have on your phone. For instance, if you have banking apps, notes with your passwords listed or private messages and emails, you’ll want to have an extra layer of security on your phone, like a keypad lock or biometric security. This way, if your phone is placed in the wrong hands, they can’t access your sensitive data.

Even if you have those security features on your Android, if you call your phone and someone happens to answer, be wary of what information you give them. Though one would hope the finder would be honest, you never know. They could set you up for a scam, so trust your gut.

Other tips to protect your Android phone: Essential accessories

To minimize the risk of damage happening to your Android phone, whether that damage is from when you lost or misplaced it, it may be worth investing in some protective gear and tools. Here are some must-haves for any smartphone owner.

1. Install strong antivirus software to keep your Android safe

The best way to safeguard yourself from malicious links that install malware, potentially accessing your private information, is to have antivirus software installed on all your devices. This protection can also alert you to phishing emails and ransomware scams, keeping your personal information and digital assets safe. Get my picks for the best 2025 antivirus protection winners for your Windows, Mac, Android and iOS devices.

2. Invest in a durable phone case

A sturdy phone case can prevent damage from drops, bumps and scratches. Consider cases from reputable brands offering shock absorption, reinforced corners and raised edges to protect the screen and camera. Look for materials such as silicone, TPU or hybrid constructions that combine multiple layers for enhanced durability. Additionally, some cases come with added functionalities like kickstands or cardholders, making them both protective and practical.

3. Opt for a high-quality charger

Using a high-quality charger ensures your phone charges efficiently and safely. Look for chargers that offer fast charging capabilities and are certified by your phone’s manufacturer. Plus, investing in a reliable charger can save you from the frustration of slow charging times and potential damage to your device. It’s always worth having a dependable charger on hand, especially for those busy days when you need a quick power boost.

A woman with a dead Android (Kurt “CyberGuy” Knutsson)

UPDATED ANDROID MALWARE CAN HIJACK CALLS YOU MAKE TO YOUR BANK

4. Consider a privacy screen

Privacy screens can prevent prying eyes from viewing your phone’s display, adding an extra layer of security. They are especially useful in public places. Imagine being on a crowded train or in a busy cafe, these screens can give you peace of mind knowing your personal information stays private. Plus, they can also reduce glare, making it easier to see your screen in bright environments.

BEST ACCESSORIES FOR YOUR ANDROID

Kurt’s key takeaways

Losing your phone can be a frustrating experience, but with the right strategies and tools at your disposal, you can recover it quickly and efficiently. Whether you rely on your smartwatch to ping your device, utilize Google’s “Find My Device” feature or revert to the classic method of retracing your steps, there are multiple ways to help you locate your Android phone. So, the next time you find yourself frantically searching for your phone, you’ll be equipped with the knowledge and tools to handle the situation with confidence.

What strategies or tools have you found most effective for locating your lost phone, and do you have any personal stories to share about your experiences with misplaced devices? Let us know by writing us at Cyberguy.com/Contact.

For more of my tech tips and security alerts, subscribe to my free CyberGuy Report Newsletter by heading to Cyberguy.com/Newsletter.

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Kurt “CyberGuy” Knutsson is an award-winning tech journalist who has a deep love of technology, gear and gadgets that make life better with his contributions for Fox News & FOX Business beginning mornings on “FOX & Friends.” Got a tech question? Get Kurt’s free CyberGuy Newsletter, share your voice, a story idea or comment at CyberGuy.com.

Technology

Microsoft is about to launch Recall for real this time

Published

18 hours ago

April 10, 2025

Press Room

Microsoft is about to launch Recall for real this time

Microsoft is starting to gradually roll out a preview of Recall, its feature that captures screenshots of what you do on a Copilot Plus PC to find again later, to Windows Insiders, according to a blog post published Thursday.

This new rollout could indicate that Microsoft is finally getting close to launching Recall more widely. Microsoft originally intended to launch Recall alongside Copilot Plus PCs last June, but the feature was delayed following concerns raised by security experts. The company then planned to launch it in October, but that got pushed as well so that the company could deliver “a secure and trusted experience.”

The company did release a preview of Recall in November to Windows Insiders in the Dev Channel for Qualcomm Copilot Plus PCs and made a preview available to Intel- and AMD-powered Copilot Plus PC shortly after. And after a couple weeks of testing, my colleague Tom Warren said that Recall is “creepy, clever, and compelling.”

In Thursday’s blog post, Microsoft spells out that you have to opt in to saving snapshots with Recall, and you can pause saving them “at any time.”