Americans keep swiping: Users scramble onto rival apps before TikTok’s sell-or-ban deadline

Happy Friday! Not a great way to start the weekend, but important nonetheless: A new report detailed the alarming rise in cancer among women under 65. While breast cancer remains the biggest risk, lung cancer cases are on the rise.

In today’s big story, time is running out for TikTok as its sell-or-ban deadline is just days away.

What’s on deck

Markets: When it comes to your 2025 investing strategy, size shouldn’t matter.

Tech: Meta’s aggressive approach to underperformers is a nod to Amazon’s playbook.

Business: Streamlining. Rightsizing. Reduction of force. Companies are using confusing language to disguise job cuts.

But first, we can’t keep swiping.

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The big story

Tick tock for TikTok

TikTok’s For You Page might soon be for no one.

The social media platform is days away from a shutdown in the US thanks to a divest-or-ban law passed back in April.

Or is it?

To quickly recap: A law requires ByteDance, the Chinese company that owns TikTok, to sell its US operations to a non-Chinese owner by Sunday.

However, anything beyond the above statement is unclear, as Business Insider’s Peter Kafka explains.

There is some murkiness and conflicting reports on everything from how the law will be enforced to what will happen to TikTok if it isn’t sold and the app’s potential workarounds. Peter broke down all the possible scenarios.

Two central figures in the TikTok saga are the Supreme Court and President-elect Donald Trump.

With the former, TikTok argued the law violates the First Amendment. (Give me mindless day-in-the-life videos, or give me death.) However, legal experts told BI the app’s argument might not have been good enough to get the highest court in the land to step in.

Then there’s Trump. Despite having once backed a TikTok ban, the incoming president has done a 180.

He’s now much more supportive of the app, even inviting CEO Shou Chew to attend his inauguration. Some Democratic lawmakers are cheering Trump on regarding his TikTok efforts.

But as Peter points out, there are still questions about what Trump could do, even as president, to prevent the ban.

In the meantime, the world keeps swiping. One way or another.

Americans are proving stubborn, resourceful, or a combination of both as they look to scratch their social-media itch.

RedNote, which is basically China’s version of Instagram, is surging in popularity in the US. The irony is Americans are essentially thumbing their nose at the US government by jumping to another Chinese-owned app, writes BI’s Katie Notopoulos.

RedNote has become so popular that Duolingo told BI it’s seen 216% growth in new Mandarin learners in the US.

If TikTok truly is gone for good starting Sunday, there could be more US winners as users continue to look for a new home. And wherever the self-anointed “TikTok refugees” land, the ad dollars could follow.

Some familiar names could just gobble back up more business, according to Wall Street analysts, but emerging platforms like Reddit and Trade Desk might also stand to benefit, writes BI’s Kelly Cloonan.

As for content creators who have built businesses on TikTok, it’s another lesson in the importance of diversification.

News brief

Top headlines

3 things in markets

1. America’s economic exceptionalism isn’t going anywhere. If you’re wondering whether US market dominance peaked in 2024 — when US GDP neared $30 trillion and dwarfed both the Eurozone and China — the answer is no. JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs both urged investors to bet on the red, white, and blue this year.

2. Dutch Bros, Tempur-Sealy, and Mattel make the cut. UBS made its case for small and mid caps, with analysts pointing out how smaller firms outdid their larger peers by 2% per year in the long term. Interest-rate cuts aren’t on the forecast after last month’s knockout jobs report, but UBS still had some top picks for smaller stocks to buy.

3. Six shocks that could shake up markets in 2025. It’s hard to predict surprises, but that doesn’t stop some strategists from trying. From a global internet outage to another year of 20% stock gains, here are the curveballs Bank of America thinks could rattle investors.

3 things in tech

1. The Musk-Bezos space race. Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin successfully sent its New Glenn rocket into orbit on Thursday. Its competitor SpaceX ran its seventh Starship launch later that day, but the mega-rocket unexpectedly dropped out of communications and exploded after liftoff. Pressure is mounting on both Bezos and Musk, as they prepare for Trump’s White House return.

2. Amazon’s RTO headaches. The company’s five-day return-to-office mandate is off to a bumpy start thanks to a shortage of office space. Some employees told BI the rollout was riddled with issues like a lack of desks and meeting rooms, and workplace theft. Plus, they’re still on video chats.

3. The times, they are a-changin’ — and Big Tech workers pay the price. Meta and Microsoft are embracing Amazon’s brutal management style, prioritizing lean, high-performing teams over employee retention. “The overarching trend is that corporations feel they have more power over their employees,” one former Googler told BI.

3 things in business

1. Nonregrettable attrition (noun): a euphemistic term for layoffs. Many companies go out of their way to avoid calling job cuts what they are. But whether it’s “rightsizing,” “streamlining,” or Meta’s recent buzzphrase “nonregrettable attrition,” the corporate lingo of job cuts doesn’t soften the blow to employees.

2. Justin Baldoni sues Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds, claiming $400 million in damages. The “It Ends With Us” director filed a 179-page suit on Thursday, accusing his costar of hijacking the movie and destroying his reputation. Lively previously accused Baldoni of sexual harassment and of trying to smear her in the press, claims that Baldoni has denied.

3. All the lonely (young) people. Gen Z adults are the loneliest and least optimistic generation, a new survey found. It’s not just about young Americans having fewer social connections. More time alone and young people getting married later are also factors. Boomers, on the other hand, are on a different wavelength.

In other news

• IMF World Economic Outlook Update launches.
• Senate committee hearing on Kristi Noem, Trump’s nominee to lead the Department of Homeland Security.
• China releases quarterly GDP data.

The Insider Today team: Dan DeFrancesco, deputy editor and anchor, in New York. Grace Lett, editor, in Chicago. Ella Hopkins, associate editor, in London. Hallam Bullock, senior editor, in London. Amanda Yen, associate editor, in New York. Elizabeth Casolo, fellow, in Chicago.