TikTok Already Changed Their Lives Forever

David Walter Banks for The Washington Post
Ames Doyle in their bedroom at their home in Stone Mountain, Georgia.

SAN FRANCISCO – When Ames Doyle began using TikTok in 2022, they were living a drastically different life.

Doyle, now 35, had a child with their husband, identified as a woman, dependably voted Democrat and assumed they were neurotypical. Then they started scrolling.

“The algorithm immediately was like, ‘Hey, you’re a lesbian,’” says Ames, a writer who lives in Atlanta.

As they swiped through the never-ending feed of vertical videos month after month, Doyle said they started to see themselves more clearly. They came out in August 2023, left their marriage and now identify as nonbinary and are taking testosterone. Doyle’s politics moved further left, motivated heavily by videos of Gaza. They even sought out and received an ADHD diagnosis after seeing their behavior reflected back in TikToks by other people with the disorder.

Doyle is one of many people who credit TikTok, the embattled Chinese-owned social media app for profoundly changing their lives. TikTok is used by more than 170 million people in the United States and according to Pew Research, a third of U.S. adults and 63 percent of teens are on it.

Late Saturday, the app and website went dark in the U.S. just before a nationwide ban against the video-sharing platform was set to kick in. It’s unclear how long TikTok will be offline. President-elect Donald Trump has said he will “save” it once he’s in office, and in a message shown to users, TikTok said it was fortunate President Trump indicated he would work on a solution.

The ban, even if it’s short-lived, has already prompted many to reflect on the impact of the app. Like other social media platforms, it’s mainly thought of as a source of entertainment and memes, and a bit of a time suck. But people have also used it to deconstruct their religion or find a new one, change lifelong political views, find sudden success, get “canceled” and everything in between since the app exploded in popularity in 2019.

“There are so many problems with TikTok, most of them are the same problems other social media platforms have,” said Casey Fiesler, an associate professor of information science at the University of Colorado, Boulder. “But [the government’s] not taking into account the harms that will happen from these communities going away. There seems to be this pattern of trying to fix the bad things in ways that completely undermine the good things. This is the most extreme version of that.”

In addition to concerns about privacy and data collection, TikTok has its fair share of bullying, disinformation and allegations of child exploitation. But some users say it offers more chances at real community than competing platforms.

In some ways, it was the very worst of TikTok that ended up helping Desiree Moore. After joining the app in 2020, she decided to share a still-raw part of her life with the hope of showing other people that they, too, can survive the worst. Moore was raised in abject poverty by people dealing with addiction. She got pregnant twice as a teenager and at 18, married a man who would go on to physically abuse her and her children. One day while she was at work, he beat her 5-month old daughter, Cady, who died in a hospital the next day.

After posting, Moore started receiving hateful comments that echoed the very worst things she thought about herself – including that it was her fault her daughter had died.

“It was the first time people had spoken out loud to me things I had said to myself, and it made me address those feelings,” said Moore, 35. “Telling my story on TikTok, the cruelty that I encountered originally, helped me find strength.”

The supportive commenters eventually drowned out the negative, forming a community that helped Moore after she discovered her former in-laws had placed a headstone at her daughter’s grave without her permission. With their encouragement and some crowdfunding, Moore was able to exhume Cady to have her cremated and her remains brought home.

Regular users of TikTok say there’s something unique about the way this network connects them to specific content or people. At the heart of that claim is an algorithm that uses data about everything from demographic details like your age and location, to how many seconds you linger on a video of an attractive person, to pick your next video. The result is a constantly customized main feed, called the “For You Page,” which some say spookily picks up on things they didn’t know about themselves, or shows them exactly what they need to see.

Halfway across the country from Moore, in downtown Chicago, Jen Incandela was quietly scrolling TikTok with headphones on when she discovered Moore’s account two and a half years ago. Incandela was trying to stay quiet so as not to draw the attention of her boyfriend, who she says was an alcoholic who financially, physically and sexually abused her. She had to call 911 multiple times, and he’d even been arrested after choking her and biting her. She’d taken him back.

After watching all of Moore’s videos in one night, Incandela says she had a revelation. Moore’s ex was like her boyfriend.

“If that a man was capable of murdering his own daughter still in diapers, a baby, then I’m nothing to this man sitting next to me,” said Incandela, 40, who made the decision to leave that night. “She saved my life.”

Users say there’s an edge and honestly to some TikTok posts that could feel out of place on a glossier feed like Instagram. In addition to grief and trauma, there’s also a ribbon of dark humor. Katie Hallum embraced that spirit in July 2022 when she made one of her first posts to TikTok: a joke about needing someone with an O blood type and healthy kidneys.

“You can’t be as painfully embarrassing or grossly honest on other social media as you can on TikTok,” said Hallum.

Diagnosed with a terminal kidney diseases at 18, Hallum had already been through two near death experiences and started dialysis when she set her video to a viral sound and hit post for a laugh. She was still going to school, still pursuing her dreams, but also thinking frankly about her own death.

“At 21 years old I should have been in the club, not figuring out how to write my last will and testimony,” said Hallum, now a radio reporter covering indigenous affairs in Oklahoma City.

The comments on her video matched her energy with jokes about ex-boyfriends who had O-negative blood. But one young woman commented asking how she could get tested to see if she was a match. Despite telling this complete stranger, 22-year old Savannah Stallbaumer, no thank you multiple times, Hallum eventually gave in. They matched and in 2023, Hallum received her kidney transplant.

Savannah Stallbaumer
Savannah Stallbaumer, left, donated a kidney to Katie Hallum after they met on TikTok.

“I think of what her sacrifice did for me and I think of the life I get to live now, and it’s very humbling,” says Hallum. “I couldn’t have done that without TikTok.”

There are, of course, different sides to TikTok. Not all are serious, not all are kind, and some are just strange clips of decades old TV shows shown in out-of-order one minute increments.

Krystina Koepnick had to go out of her way to find a different reality than what TikTok was showing her. Then a Republican from Arizona, Koepnick went viral in the worst way after posting a hot take about chemicals in sunscreen in 2021.

“That’s when I was slipping down the holistic health, crunchy, alt-right pipeline, and it was my anti-big pharma, anti-science take,” said Koepnick, 31, an artist who now lives near Denver.

After getting mass reported and banned and receiving death threats, she decided to stop posting and start seeking out other points of view by searching the app. She sought out liberal creators, the kinds of people she had grown up thinking were different from her, in part to become better at debating them. Eventually she changed her own worldview and now identifies as liberal.

“I feel so much less alone in the world. I feel like I understand myself better,” said Koepnick. “[TikTok] made me a much more open minded person overall, which just spills over into everything you do.”

Friendster, Myspace, Vine, LiveJournal, Tumblr and a number of online multiplayer games that spawned close-knit communities, have all come and gone, leaving their users to mourn the loss. People tend to disband and migrate to other online communities, but Fiesler notes they’re never exactly the same.

“Most online communities and platforms don’t live forever,” said Fiesler. “This kind of thing happens over and over again.”

Christine Mitchell has already had to move to a new platform once. The 72-year old is a full-time caregiver for her husband, who has dementia, in Reading, Pennsylvania. She started live-streaming on Reddit years ago, singing and playing music from the 60s and 70s and later on her acoustic guitar. She taught herself to play when she was 15 and has been doing it ever since. When Reddit shut down its live video broadcasts two years ago, she started from scratch on TikTok and found a new following.

“I don’t get out of the house very much, and it’s nice to have some connection with some people outside,” said Mitchell, who goes by Guitar Nana online. “I will soon be a double refugee.”

Mitchell doesn’t know where she’s going yet if she has to leave, but it won’t be Facebook or Instagram – she deleted all her Meta accounts last week over anger at CEO Mark Zuckerberg. She isn’t worried about starting something new, even though she’ll miss TikTok.

“To me it’s just the best one, but it’s not the only one.”