Ayman Chaudhary turned her love for reading into a living on TikTok, posting video snippets about books like those banned in schools in ultra-conservative parts of the United States.

Now the online platform she relies on to support her family is poised to be banned in what entrepreneurs using TikTok condemn as an attack on their livelihoods.

“It’s so essential to small businesses and creators; it’s my full-time job,” the 23-year-old Chicago resident told AFP.

“It makes me really worried that I live in a country that would pass bans like these instead of focusing on what’s actually important, like gun control and healthcare and education.”

A new US law put TikTok’s parent, Chinese tech giant ByteDance, on a nine-month deadline to divest the hugely popular video platform or have it banned in the United States.

US lawmakers argued that TikTok can be used by the Chinese government for espionage and propaganda as long as it is owned by ByteDance.

“Everybody who’s involved in deciding whether or not this platform is going to get banned is turning a blind eye to how it’s going to affect all of the small businesses,” said Bilal Rehman of Texas. 

His @bilalrehmanstudio TikTok account, which playfully promotes his company’s interior design projects, has some 500,000 followers.

“They don’t really understand social media and how it works,” the 24-year-old added.

TikTok has gone from a novelty to a necessity for many US small businesses, according to an Oxford Economics study backed by the platform.

TikTok fuels growth for more than seven million businesses in the United States, helping generate billions of dollars and supporting more than 224,000 jobs, the study determined.

“It’s become such a huge part of our economy that taking that away is going to be devastating to millions of people,” Rehman said of TikTok.

Chaudhary took to TikTok to share her passion for reading in early 2020 while enduring Covid-19 lockdowns.

“I made a handful of videos and, long story short, one went viral,” Chaudhary said.

Opportunities to make money from sponsors or advertising came as her audience grew, and posting on her @aymansbooks TikTok account became a job.

She saw books she extolled snapped up by readers, as she shined attention on titles banned from schools or libraries in parts of the country.

– Unique vibe –

A TikTok ban would be a particularly hard blow to businesses just starting out, according to eMarketer analyst Jasmine Enberg.

“Social media has democratized the commerce landscape, and TikTok really supercharged that,” Enberg told AFP.

“It’s become a crucial platform for many small businesses, especially those that are in niche industries or sell quirky products.”

One factor setting TikTok apart from rival platforms is the potential for videos to be spread quickly by a highly engaged audience, according to Enberg.

“The potential to be discovered on TikTok is really unparalleled, and that’s largely thanks to its algorithm as well as the entertaining kind of content that it hosts,” she said.

A young generation is using TikTok as a search engine of sorts, making queries as they might on Google and seeing what the algorithm serves up, said SOCi director of market insights Damian Rollison.

“It feels like it has been created by your peers, so they’re telling you the real deal about whatever the topic might be,” Rollison said of the trend.

TikTok lovers say it has a unique style that will be missed in the case of a ban.

“There is definitely a different vibe on TikTok versus YouTube or Instagram,” said Chaudhary.

“TikTok has a lot more humor in it and a lot more creativity than I see happening on Instagram.”

“My favorite part about TikTok is, it feels almost like you’re on a FaceTime call with your friend,” Rehman said.

“It feels really raw and authentic.”

Rollison advised businesses relying on TikTok to make contingency plans in event of a ban, sticking with short-form video, given the appetite for such content.

“The demand signals are so powerful amongst younger users that I believe the usage patterns are going to survive any of the outcomes,” Rollison said.

“Learning that ecosystem is not only a useful but even critical strategy.”

Her fluffy face now frail, Kabosu still flashes the enigmatic smile that made her the go-to meme dog for millennials and inspired a $23 billion cryptocurrency beloved by Elon Musk.

She’s best known as the logo of Dogecoin, but to Atsuko Sato, Kabosu is the elderly former rescue puppy who accompanies her every day to work at a kindergarten.

“It felt so strange” to discover her dog was an internet celebrity, Sato told AFP in Sakura, where Tokyo’s eastern sprawl gives way to fields of rice and solar panels.

In 2010, two years after adopting the shiba inu, Sato posted a picture on her blog of Kabosu crossing her paws on the sofa and giving the camera a beguiling look.

That image became the “Doge” meme — and later an NFT digital artwork that sold for $4 million.

“She’s pulling a weird face,” Sato laughed. “Now I think she looks really nice” in the famous photo but “at first I thought it could be trashed”.

The meme grew from an online forum post into an anarchic in-joke that bounced from college bedrooms to office emails.

“One of my friends messaged me: ‘Isn’t this picture Kabosu?’ Then I searched for it and found all sorts of memes, like Kabosu turning into a doughnut,” Sato said.

The 62-year-old is now so used to “unbelievable” events that when Tesla boss Musk changed the icon for Twitter, now X, to Kabosu’s face last year, she “wasn’t even that surprised”.

“In the last few years I’ve been able to connect the online version of Kabosu, all these unexpected things seen from a distance, with our real lives.”

– ‘Mona Lisa of the internet’ –

Kabosu spends most days resting in a cart at the kindergarten or on a big cushion at home, where fan-made Doge tributes adorn the walls.

The memes typically use goofy broken English to reveal the inner thoughts of Kabosu and other shiba inu “doge” — usually pronounced like pizza “dough” but with a “j” at the end.

“Very love. Such star OMG. So heart. Much drawing,” says one framed print using this signature “doge speak”.

Kabosu fell ill with leukaemia and liver disease at the end of 2022, and Sato is sure the “invisible power” of prayers from fans worldwide helped her pull through.

Then in November last year, a $100,000 statue of Kabosu and her sofa crowdfunded by Own The Doge, a crypto organisation dedicated to the meme, was unveiled in a park in Sakura.

Sato and Own The Doge have also donated large sums to international charities, including more than $1 million to Save the Children. The NGO says it is “the single largest crypto contribution” it has ever received.

“The Doge is the most popular dog of the modern era,” said Tridog, a pseudonymous member of Own The Doge, describing Kabosu as “the Mona Lisa of the internet”.

– ‘People’s crypto’ –

Dogecoin was started as a joke by two software engineers and is now the world’s eighth most valuable cryptocurrency with a market cap of $23 billion.

“The Doge meme was pretty big on the internet in 2013 and I spent a lot of time on Reddit and other forums back then,” Dogecoin co-founder Billy Markus told AFP.

Markus, who is no longer affiliated with Dogecoin, was amused by the “silliness and innocence” of the memes.

Fellow founder Jackson Palmer “drank a beer and saw the doge meme and Bitcoin in the news and thought saying he was gonna invest in Dogecoin would make a funny tweet”, he said.

Markus found the idea “hilarious” and created the coin in “a few hours” before contacting Palmer and taking it live.

“Lots of weird stuff happened after that,” he said.

Since then, Dogecoin has been backed by stoner hip-hop king Snoop Dogg, “Shark Tank” entrepreneur Mark Cuban and Kiss bassist Gene Simmons, who once tweeted: “I bought Dogecoin… six figures.”

But its most keen supporter is probably the billionaire Musk, who jokes about the currency on X — sending its value soaring — and hails it as “the people’s crypto”.

Dogecoin has also inspired a plethora of other cheap and highly volatile “memecoins”, including spin-off Shiba Inu and others based on dogs, cats or Donald Trump.

– ‘Legend lives on’ –

A solitary figure wearing a Doge mask looks out over the Los Angeles skyline — this is Tridog, who says he has “worked for a dog photograph for almost three years”.

Own The Doge is his full-time job, and he preaches their motto D.O.G.E, or “Do Only Good Every Day”.

In 2021, Sato sold the viral photo of Kabosu as a non-fungible token (NFT), a digital ownership certificate that can be traded online, to a group of crypto art collectors called PleasrDAO for $4.2 million.

That makes it “a top-five most expensive photo ever sold”, Tridog told AFP.

PleasrDAO split the NFT’s value into a brand-new memecoin called $DOG, allowing many people to collectively “own” the meme.

Own The Doge has brought fans and other meme stars to Japan to meet Kabosu and Sato, and it recently secured the intellectual property rights to the famous photo, paving the way to make Doge toys, films and other products.

As a rescue dog, Kabosu’s real birthday is unknown, but Sato estimates her age at 18 — past the average lifespan for a shiba inu.

When Kabosu dies, “the world will mourn”, Tridog said, but “a legend always lives on”.

He hopes people will remember “the deeper values” behind the Doge meme: “the wholesomeness, the silliness, the not taking yourself too seriously.”

Chinese tech giant ByteDance has said it has no plans to sell TikTok after a new US law put it on a deadline to divest from the hugely popular video platform or have it banned in the United States.

US lawmakers set the nine-month deadline on national security grounds, alleging that TikTok can be used by the Chinese government for espionage and propaganda as long as it is owned by ByteDance.

The Information, a tech-focused US news site, reported that ByteDance was looking at scenarios for selling TikTok without the powerful secret algorithm that recommends videos to its more than one billion users around the world.

ByteDance denied it was considering a sale.

“Foreign media reports about ByteDance exploring the sale of TikTok are untrue,” the company posted Thursday on Toutiao, a Chinese-language platform it owns.

“ByteDance does not have any plans to sell TikTok.”

TikTok has been a political and diplomatic hot potato for years, first finding itself in the crosshairs of former president Donald Trump’s administration, which tried unsuccessfully to ban it.

It has forcefully denied any link to the Chinese government, and said it has not and will not share US user data with Beijing.

TikTok says it has also spent around $1.5 billion on “Project Texas”, under which US user data would be stored in the United States.

Its critics say the data is only part of the problem, and that the TikTok recommendation algorithm — the “secret sauce” for its success — must also be disconnected from ByteDance.

TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew has said the company will take the fight against the new law to the courts, but some experts believe that for the US Supreme Court, national security considerations could outweigh free speech protection.

– Bullish investors –

The estimated valuations of TikTok are in the tens of billions of dollars, and any forced sale would present major complications.

Among those with deep enough pockets, US tech giants such as Instagram-parent Meta or Google would likely be blocked from buying the app over competition concerns.

Further, many investors consider TikTok’s recommendation algorithm to be its most valuable feature.

But any sale of such technology by a Chinese company would require approval from Beijing, which designated such algorithms as protected technology following Trump’s attempt to ban TikTok in 2020.

Beijing has so far vocally opposed any forced sale of TikTok, saying it will take all necessary measures to protect Chinese companies.

While TikTok is a global phenomenon, it represents a small fraction of ByteDance’s revenue, according to analysts and investors. 

ByteDance has enjoyed explosive growth in recent years, becoming one of the most valuable companies in the world. Its international investors, including US firms General Atlantic and SIG as well as Japan’s SoftBank, have stakes worth billions.

“TikTok US is a very small part of the overall business. It is an exciting part of the story, for sure, but… relative to the overall size, it’s a very small part,” ByteDance investor Mitchell Green, of US-based Lead Edge Capital, told CNBC television last month.

“If it was kicked out of the US, we would not sell.”