Meet the Creators Suing America to Save TikTok

In the spring of 2022, Chloe Joy Sexton’s mother died after a years-long battle with brain cancer. The loss came during what was already a trying period in Sexton’s life. She’d recently given birth herself, and had been fired from her job after getting pregnant. Now, at 27 years old, she was taking custody of her seven-year-old sister Charlotte, who she would raise along with her own newborn baby, as well as her partner’s young son.

She had lost her mother, she had lost her job, but she still had TikTok.

Sexton had built a modest following on the platform by posting about women’s rights ahead of the 2020 election, but it took on a new meaning after she gave birth and watched as her mother’s health worsened. “I was being very vulnerable all the time, because how could you not with that many hormones coursing through your body and that amount of fear,” Sexton says. “I was terrified, but at the end of the day I knew this following was growing, and that I had this amazing support.”

Sexton poured her heart out to her followers — but was also posting about baking, which she’d long dreamed of doing professionally. She started selling cookies — giant ones — to her followers faster than she could ship them out, and quickly grew her new small business to the point that she was able to open a brick-and-mortar store in Memphis and publish a cookbook.

“This is a community of people who watched me go through some of the most painful and horrible experiences of my life,” she says. “They have helped me in so many different ways. I may not know them, but they’re the reason I was able to find resources for free bereavement counseling for me and my little sister, and the reason I was able to contact and sue my old employer, because people taught me how to reach the [Equal Opportunity Employment Commission].”

Sexton understands the value of TikTok as well as anyone, which is why she’s currently suing the United States government over its effort to ban it.

“My whole life is on that app,” she says.

Sexton is one of eight TikTok creators who in May filed a lawsuit in response to legislation — which passed through Congress with overwhelming bipartisan support and which President Joe Biden signed in April — that would ban the culture-shifting, short-form video platform unless it’s sold by its Chinese parent company, ByteDance. The justification behind the potential ban is that the app poses a national security risk because of its ties to China. The creators say there’s insufficient proof of any such risk, and that the legislation violates their First Amendment rights, depriving Americans of an invaluable means of expression, a launchpad for small businesses, and a forum for fostering community.

The creators-turned-plaintiffs have little in common outside of TikTok changing their lives. Their communities are sprawling and incredibly diverse, with followings ranging between just over 100,000 and nearly seven million. Their content encompasses everything from sports, literature, beauty, religion, and politics, to what it’s like to run a ranch, promotion of Black-owned businesses, and advocacy for survivors of sexual violence. They post fun stories about navigating escape rooms with their friends, but also educational ones about government legislation, inspirational ones about college football teams, and heart-wrenching ones about personal loss.

The push to ban or restrict the use of TikTok in the United States is not new. Politicians and the FBI have raised national security concerns as the app’s popularity has grown, reasoning that through ByteDance, the Chinese government has access to the data of the 170 million Americans who use it. “You’re placing the control of information — like what information America’s youth gets — in the hands of America’s foremost adversary,” former Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.), who sponsored the legislation the creators are suing over, told The New York Times before leaving Congress earlier this year. (Gallagher departed to take a job at ​​Palantir, a spy tech company whose executives aggressively lobbied in favor of restrictions against TikTok.) 

In 2020, former President Donald Trump issued an executive order calling for ByteDance to sell TikTok, writing that he believes there is “credible evidence” that ByteDance “might take action that threatens to impair the national security of the United States.” Trump’s order was blocked in federal court, and President Joe Biden officially killed it not long after taking office in 2021.

The Biden administration started to put pressure on the app itself a year later. The president signed a bill prohibiting TikTok on government devices in December of 2022, right around the time a bipartisan group of lawmakers introduced legislation to ban it outright, dubbed the “ANTI-SOCIAL CCP Act.” A few months later, the Biden administration threatened to ban the app unless ByteDance sold its stake. TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew testified before Congress, insisting the app is “free from any manipulation from any government,” while touting an initiative, dubbed Project Texas, to migrate all American user data to Oracle servers housed in Texas.

The charge to ban TikTok continued. Earlier this year, lawmakers introduced a new bill, the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act. The Biden administration publicly lobbied for the legislation and briefed lawmakers about supposed security risks posed by Chinese control of TikTok, while raising the possibility that China could use the platform to meddle in the 2024 elections. 

Connecticut Rep. Jim Himes, a relatively hawkish Democrat and the ranking member on the House Intelligence Committee, did not find the Biden administration’s lobbying campaign persuasive. “I refer to the TikTok-China threat as theoretical,” he told Rolling Stone in March, adding that “there’s not evidence really that the Chinese have used social media platforms to try to affect presidential elections.”

The legislation came to Congress as protests against American support for Israel’s military offensive against Gaza flourished around the nation in a movement largely driven by young people — many of whom were organizing and sharing information on TikTok. Multiple lawmakers cited the proliferation of pro-Palestinan content as a reason for supporting the ban. To users, it read like a direct confirmation that the ban was intended to infringe on the political free speech of young people.

The bill passed with broad support, and Biden signed it into law in April. The legislation held that from the day Biden signed it, ByteDance had 270 days to sell TikTok. If it fails to do so — by January 19, 2025 — the platform will be banned from app stores and web-hosting services. “We should not cede the most important media platform in the world to our adversary in the Chinese Communist Party,” Rep. Jake Auchincloss (D-Mass.), who co-sponsored the legislation, said earlier this year, also citing how the app is “bad for mental health.”

Auchincloss’ argument about mental health — which other lawmakers made in rationalizing their vote for the ban — could be made about any social media platform. The eight creators suing the government post on just about all of them, but have relatively miniscule followings elsewhere despite posting the same content. “It really does boil down to the algorithm,” says Sexton, who has over 2.2 million followers on TikTok and less than 30,000 on Instagram. “You can just so clearly see the vast difference in how it gets to the person who cares about the content.”

The creators see TikTok as a unique — and irreplaceable — platform for discovery and expression, and for making a living and driving small business. TikTok earlier this year commissioned Oxford Economics to compile a report about the app’s economic impact, and the firm found that TikTok led to nearly $15 billion in revenue for small business owners in 2023, contributed nearly $25 billion to the national GDP, and supported nearly 225,000 jobs.

“It’s just the community, the way they interact with us,” Paul Tran, who co-founded Love and Pebble skincare with his wife before their frozen beauty pops went viral on TikTok, says of how TikTok can drive so much e-commerce. Tran says the app is now responsible for 90 percent of their sales.

“There’s this American Dream that we could build a business ourselves, and that’s what me and my wife are doing,” he says. “For this to be happening in our government, something that we look toward to protect us and ensure that we have our freedom … it’s just like they’re taking that all away.” 

Brian Firebaugh, a small-scale Texas cattle rancher with nearly half a million followers, feels similarly. “It allowed me to quit a full-time job working for corporate America, to basically be on the ranch 24/7,” he says, noting that being able to stay home allowed him to adopt his two-year-old son, Rooster.

When Rolling Stone first attempted to interview him, Rooster was strapped in his carseat as his dad drove some cows who had wandered into a nest of snakes to the local vet. “That’s ultimately what TikTok has built for us,” he says. “It’s built up our small business, which has allowed us to adopt a baby boy and provide him with a quality of life that is so rarely [accessible] today.” 

Losing access to the app would have devastating consequences on Firebaugh’s ability to maintain his livelihood and the close relationship he’s fostering with his son. “I’m nothing more than a small business, first-generation rancher that’s never been involved in ranching before,” he explains. “There’s like, four or five million small businesses just on TikTok that are using it to market their business and to survive. I’ll be honest, all of our customers come from TikTok — like 100 percent of them.”

Small-scale ranchers and farmers are in a constant battle to stay afloat against their mass-production competitors. Firebaugh uses TikTok to sell his product, but also to invite users into his world and educate others about ranching and meat production. “I keep hearing about people who want to shut down TikTok because it’s ruining our youth. And I’m like, teachers are calling me every day and asking me if they could play my videos in their classrooms. Yeah, I don’t think I’m ruining children. I’m helping to educate.” 

Kiera Spann, an activist and influencer with over 770,000 followers, also understands the value of TikTok as an educational tool, and like Sexton, as a place to share potentially life-saving resources.

Spann was a sophomore at the University of Delaware in 2021 when there was a domestic violence incident on campus. She attended a protest against the university’s non-response and saw members of fraternities laugh from their porches at the women demonstrating. Spann, a survivor of sexual violence herself, took her outrage to TikTok. Her post went viral, racking up millions of views and driving national coverage of the attack, including from Rolling Stone. “Our university was forced to do something about it because of all the attention that TikTok was able to get to it,” Spann says, detailing how the protests spurred reforms of Greek life, on-campus safety measures, and the passage of new Title IX legislation in Delaware.

“I’ve created a community of survivors on my page,” says Spann, who now has over 750,000 followers and continues to post about sexual violence, reproductive rights, and her life as a young woman in America. “Every time I tell my story, I connect with someone else who is also a survivor who feels like they can open up and talk about it, whether that is through my comments, or in my DMs, or in person.”

Spann says she’s fighting the ban for this community: “When I was reached out to and asked about it, it wasn’t even a question, because so many of my followers have met each other and engaged with each other through my account, not just me.” 

When the legislation to ban TikTok was introduced in Congress earlier this year, users revolted, leading to what one House Republican described to Rolling Stone as a “nonstop” barrage of calls and messages from “shrieking teens” demanding the bill be scrapped. Meanwhile, influencers like Steven King — another of the eight creators now suing the government — descended on Washington, D.C., in person to lobby against the bill. 

King is not a “shrieking teen.” He was a 45-year-old health care worker when he first started messing around on TikTok. He’d always wanted to be an entertainer, and recognized the app as an outlet for his creativity. “I always get emotional over this, because it was a pivotal point that sent my life into this trajectory that I could never have imagined in my wildest dreams,” he says of when he first started to get traction. “I could not even convey to my husband what was happening in my phone as my audience grew.”

King — who posts bubbly videos about fashion, food, travel, and more as @btypep — has nearly seven million followers. He posted a video calling for them to make their voices heard as Congress considered the TikTok ban, in which he stood with tape over his mouth next to a series of messages extolling the virtues of the app, including a note about how small businesses contributed nearly $25 billion to the economy in 2023. TikTok invited him to go to Congress to speak directly to lawmakers, and he was in D.C. when the House passed the proposed ban.

“It was heartbreaking to find, as we are standing right there on Capitol Hill watching the votes come in, to see that it didn’t go in our favor,” he says. The Senate passed the bill a few days later. Biden signed it 24 hours after that. “When you hear the news, it’s like, ‘Oh, my god, this is my job,’” King says. “‘Oh my god, what am I going to do?’”

Tim Martin, a college football coach who posts sports commentary to over a million followers, also traveled to D.C. to speak with lawmakers. Martin says that while lawmakers “are open to listening,” many of them simply don’t understand the app, and that if they spent time on it they’d see it’s not just dancing videos. “It’s going to be informational stuff. It’s going to be STEM education, all that sort of stuff,” he says. “They’d see that it’s more than what they think it is.” 

King and Martin both cited Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) as the creators’ biggest advocate in D.C. Khanna agrees that most lawmakers don’t truly understand the platform beyond stereotypes of dancing teenagers. “There are people out there who are teaching history, there are people out there teaching chemistry, there are people out there commenting about mental health. There are people on there who are sharing what it’s like to grow up in an interracial family,” he says. “In many ways, they’re creating community and helping articulate beliefs, and it’s a place where folks can have a political viewpoint that isn’t going to get on CNN or MSNBC.” 

Khanna believes that the legislation passed in April was an “over-broad” violation of users’ First Amendment rights, and that “Washington can’t tell young people to get involved and participate in the political process, and then take away the very platform that so many are using to express their beliefs and identity.”

No young person has gotten involved in the political process more directly than 27-year-old Rep. Maxwell Frost (D-Fla.), the first member of Gen-Z elected to the House of Representatives. Frost sees the legislation not only as a product of lawmakers misunderstanding TikTok, but of the skewed priorities of Congress.

“Would I like it if TikTok were completely owned and operated by Americans or by someone other than a company connected to China? The answer is yes, and I 100 percent share those concerns,” Frost says. “We have problems in terms of data privacy and our data being misused, yes, by current foreign adversaries, but also by folks domestically, and by people across the world and in countries that are not foreign adversaries as well.”

Khanna and Frost both say that they feel the information provided to lawmakers in order to justify national security concerns about the app has not been robust enough to merit such drastic action. “Not only do I think that [a ban] won’t solve the problem that we have, but I think we might find ourselves in a very similar situation five, six, seven, eight years down the road,” says Frost, who along with Khanna believes the solution shouldn’t be an outright ban targeting a specific platform, but a recalibration of laws protecting user data and privacy across the board.

The creators, too, wonder why Congress is going after one specific platform rather than addressing data security more broadly. “If the government is truly worried about data security, it would enact a law that applies to all social media,” says Topher Townsend, a rapper and conservative commentator with over 2.5 million followers. “If the government can do this to TikTok, what else are they going to do? What’s next?” 

Townsend’s content centers around his Christian faith, his music, and his support for Trump as a Black conservative, and he credits TikTok with his success as a musician. “I’ve been able to successfully become an independent artist without any major label backing because of TikTok and its algorithm,” he says. “All of my biggest tracks went viral from a video I posted to TikTok — even though I posted the same video to other platforms. It’s great that I was getting some traction for my political commentary, but my heart was in the music. I was able to kind of fuse the two and TikTok allowed it to grow wings.”  

Freedom of expression is a crucial driver of Townsend’s presence on the app. “When I would post my views [on other platforms], I would always just get vitriol and it kind of discouraged me from speaking out more, because at the end of the day, I wanted peace,” he says. On TikTok, Townsend says he found a lot of “positivity” in sharing his views with a community that wasn’t algorithmically limited to friends, family, and the close network created by the algorithm of social-circle based media platforms. 

Lawmakers themselves have caught onto this. Even in the aftermath of the legislation’s passage in April, scores of elected officials who supported the ban have joined the platform in a bid to engage with voters. Biden joined the app, and Vice President Kamala Harris and her campaign are making waves by weaponizing viral sounds and trends in service of her campaign. Trump, who flip-flopped on his support for the ban after seeing the backlash it brought Biden — and potentially as a way to court young voters in an election year — recently joined the app himself, as did his running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio). Both parties hosted TikTok creators at their nominating conventions this summer.

“There is a rank hypocrisy in this town where everyone now is using the platform to get votes,” Khanna says.

The Harris campaign did not respond to questions from Rolling Stone about the legislation Biden signed and whether she supports it.

Judges on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals heard oral arguments in the creators’ case — along with two other consolidated lawsuits against the government over the ban — last Monday. Both sides of the case have requested a ruling by December 6, and whichever side comes out on the wrong side of that ruling is expected to appeal to the Supreme Court — which could stay the law until it’s able to rule.

Alan Rozenshtein, an associate professor at University of Minnesota Law School, is skeptical that the D.C. Circuit Court — or, ultimately, the Supreme Court — will prevent such a law from taking effect. He believes the case will come down to Congress’ power to legislate in the interest of national security, and notes that the courts tend to defer to the political branches on such matters. “I think this is a pretty serious law written by pretty serious people through a pretty serious process, passed in an overwhelming fashion, and it is just extremely hard to convince a court to then strike that law down and take ownership [of the consequences],” he says.

It’s going to be difficult for TikTok to survive in the United States if the law isn’t overturned by the courts. The lawmakers who support it have insisted it’s not technically a ban and that they just want divestiture. The problem is that pulling off such a sale in such a short amount of time would be nearly impossible. Regardless, Reuters reported earlier this year that ByteDance would rather shut down TikTok in the U.S. than sell it — and its algorithm, which is also integral to ByteDance’s other properties — to an American company. TikTok only accounts for a small percentage of ByteDance’s overall business, and it’s losing money as it is.

TikTok provided a brief statement to Rolling Stone about the lawsuit, noting that it is “grateful members of our creator community have stepped forward to defend their First Amendment rights and the right of free expression of the 170 million Americans who use TikTok to connect, learn and, in many cases, earn a livelihood.”

As the court mulls the platform’s fate, the creators involved in the lawsuit continue to have fun making content and building their communities — all while knowing full well that the platform that changed their lives could be taken from them in a matter of months.

On a recent Friday night in Washington, D.C., Rolling Stone met local creator Talia Cadet at Beat the Bomb — a wild take on escape rooms that involves a lot of exploding paint. 

Gaggles of twenty-somethings waited their turn, sipping frozen cocktails and watching the two giant glass cubes — the final rooms of the life-sized puzzle game — that dominated the lobby. A timer counted down the seconds as players clad in what looked like hazmat suits scrambled to deactivate the “bomb” inside before the clock ran out and cannons of fluorescent paint splattered them.

Cadet, who hours ago had wrapped up her workday as a full-time job social media and digital strategist, greeted her friends with a Kentucky Mule in one hand, and a smartphone with a selfie-light attached to it in the other. It wasn’t hard to identify Cadet’s social media bona fides by the way she wielded her phone’s camera as she and her friends scrambled through a room full of lasers before getting drenched in foam. She posted a video of the experience on TikTok a few days later.

Nights at escape rooms are an exception for Cadet, who centers most of her content around curated lists exploring books, local events, and more, while promoting local Black-owned businesses and whatever else may interest her at the time. “Users derive so much value from a platform like TikTok in terms of education, entertainment, and empowerment. Why are we trying to delegitimize content creation and influencing as work?” she says. “Users use this to find community, to find people who look and live like them, to find resources, to conduct searches, to share their stories to amplify stories and people that would otherwise be overlooked. So I’m like, ‘No, this affects creators and individual users.’”

Cadet attended the oral arguments in D.C. last week, as did Spann, who posted a video recapping the hearing and running down some of the “unprecedented” dynamics of the case, touting the value of TikTok for herself and others, and noting that the case is still very much “up in the air.”

“I think people understand — especially our audiences — that a lot is at stake,” Cadet says of the lawsuit. “The communities we’ve built are at stake, access to information is at stake, and the ability to tell your own stories and control your own narratives is at stake.”

“There’s a lot of unknowns right now,” she says, “but I am still very hopeful.”