What Happens When The Clock Tiks?

We’re living in strange times.

10 years ago, the notion of Donald Trump as President of the United States was deemed as so outlandish, he was making appearances on Saturday Night Live and the Tonight Show as the butt of the joke. Now, after his initial four year term, he’s back in office once again and is not mincing words about his plans.

More interesting, though, is who’s coming with him this time. At the time of Trump’s first election, most social media platforms seemed to take a hard stand against many of his policies, or at least the way that he conducted himself publicly. Meta (Facebook and Instagram) instituted fact-checking safeguards so that users would at least be informed if the content they chose to consume was not based in reality. 

2025 looks entirely different. X, formerly known as Twitter, is now run by Trump’s close ally, Elon Musk. Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, has changed their course as founder Mark Zuckerberg attempts to win favour with the Trump administration. TikTok, still a massive international social media behemoth, was briefly banned by the United States’ Supreme Court before quickly coming back online. 

These issues raise huge questions around the future of social media. What happens if TikTok, or another social media platform, suddenly goes dark? If Meta’s platforms keep doing a hard-right turn politically, will users start to migrate away from their traditional scrolling habits? What does the future of social media look like, and what does all of that mean for your business?

TikTok’s Time Out

You may think of TikTok as a platform for short videos of celebrities doing funny dances, but it’s much more than that. Since its launch in 2016, TikTok has grown to become one of the most popular apps in the world, and boasts over a billion active users. Even if you’re not on TikTok yourself, people who you know definitely are, and they’re spending hours a day on the platform scrolling through content. 

The controversy stemmed from the fact that TikTok was developed by the Chinese company ByteDance, leading to concerns from the US government about the security of the platform. Multiple countries have expressed national security concerns over the data that the Chinese government may be collecting and receiving through the app, and in the United States this even led to a brief ban from the country’s top Court. 

Your business may not be on TikTok, but those connected with your business are definitely using the platform, especially in other countries. For non-American businesses with a large American following, the threat of TikTok going dark was a significant hit to their reach. What happens if a huge portion of your customer base suddenly can’t see your marketing?

This time the ban only lasted for a number of hours (many memes joked about mothers spending longer in labour!). However, this may have just been a warning shot to future platforms. The internet may be largely unregulated, but these apps are still private businesses, and political interference could change anything on short notice.

Meta Takes A Right Turn

When Donald Trump first took office in 2016 amidst a history of controversial statements and false narratives too numerous to mention, Meta decided to stand on guard. They, just like mainstream media platforms, implemented fact checking to label those false narratives as exactly that. If a cantankerous relative shared something that was verifiably untrue, it would be marked as exactly that. 

In recent weeks though, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is making significant changes to his platform that appear to be in deference to the new administration. At the start of the year, Zuckerberg announced that Meta was eliminating fact checkers, saying that they are ‘too politically biased’ and ‘have destroyed more trust than they’ve created.’ The change will, essentially, allow some of the most controversial content across Meta’s platforms to be broadcast unfettered and uncensored. 

The decision may or may not be political, but the backlash may be significant. Between Facebook, Instagram, and Threads, Meta boasts nearly 4 million users worldwide. While many will of course support the changes, users critical of the change in position may start to move away from the platforms in large numbers. It’s premature to assess the impact, but there may be a significant change in usage, just as X/Twitter has seen in the last 2 years.

This could represent a significant change for your business and its reach. If customers are routinely finding you through Facebook and Instagram, imagine if a large number of them migrated off of those platforms. Is your target demographic for your business one that may be critical of these changes, and remove themselves from these platforms in process? Is the anger temporary, or will users begin to migrate elsewhere? What can you do to help protect your business?

Look Out For Number One 

You can’t control a user’s social media behaviour, but you can control how you respond to it. If you are using social media marketing, make sure you’re varying your presence across multiple social media platforms (at least 2-3) to expand your reach. Each platform attracts a different segment of your audience, so even if they move off of one platform, all hope is not lost.

Learn to adapt! If certain platforms fall in popularity, new ones will rise to take their place. Our behaviours may change, but our social media addictions are not going anywhere. Save your content, keep it backed up, and be ready to implement your strategy on new and exciting platforms. Make sure your best ideas are stored safely offline so that you can implement them whenever you need.

Lastly, focus on the content that you own. Your blogs, your newsletters, your articles, etc. – those are yours, and that’s media that you own. A great social media strategy is going to help disseminate those ideas, and drive traffic back to your website, but that can happen on any number of platforms. Investing in your content is always a worthwhile investment. Ultimately you and your ideas are the best tool for your business.

We’re just here to help spread the message.  

Written in collaboration with Caitlin Spearing of OMG Social Media Agency