Why the TikTok Ban Affects Us All
Even if you don’t use TikTok, it highlights a huge issue
Imagine this: your business, your brand, your profile suddenly inaccessible to everyone who has ever seen, read or heard any of your amazing content.
Are you well known enough that your audience would say: “Hey, I really miss so and so’s articles or I wish I could watch that person’s videos”.
Or would you be forgotten and lost amongst all the other creators out there?
And what about all that content you released for free on rented platforms? Has that disappeared with your following?
This is what happened to hundreds and thousands of creators on the TikTok platform in the USA on Sunday, January 19th, 2025 due to a ban imposed by the Biden administration.
Those creators had lost the audience they had built up.
They had lost all their content.
They were filled with dread.
Everything gone.
It was like something that you might hear on a magic show.
Now you see it …
and now you don’t.
Fortunately for those creators, TikTok was back online after President Trump extended the enforcement deadline for the ban.
Your personal vault
I have encountered the topic of keeping backups many times in my career and I want to drive home this point today.
It’s not sexy nor does it spark delight and if you have it set up, most of the time it just happens in the background and is forgotten about.
In most corporate firms keeping backups is drilled into all tech solutions. I've had a few moments in my past when having access to a backup was a life saver.
I recall a time when I was on-call for a telecoms company. At 3am, I received an automated robotic voice call from the monitoring service.
“Pagerduty Alert. You have one trigger incident on Insurance Service. The failure is server 5 down. Press 4 to acknowledge. Press 3 to resolve ...”. I press 4 without listening to the full list of options.
Anyone who has worked in retail will know that selling insurance policies as an add-on to a product sale is a giant money-maker for a business. So, for part of the core insurance system to be down 5 hours before the next business day, was a big deal.
Climbing out of bed, bleary-eyed, dazed and working alone in the dead of the night I logged in to the IT systems with my laptop. I did the minimum amount of work required to get a service back online. A system reboot.
But that didn’t work.
This occurred in the days when we didn’t have the luxuries of working in modern cloud platforms, where I can rebuild a server with little effort in a matter of minutes.
I had to restore the failed server from a backup. Fortunately, this company took their backups serious taking them daily. I was able to restore the service by 6am before the beginning of the working day. There was enough time remaining to catch up on some much needed sleep.
Why rent when you can own
How many small and medium-sized businesses actually take backups seriously?
You see you don’t directly control the data and content you put on these rented platforms. By rented platforms, I mean TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, X (Twitter), Medium, Substack, to name a few. Your valuable content lives on a platform that is owned by someone else and the plug can be pulled on them at any moment, as we saw with TikTok last week.
We all need to own our data and be fearless if or when a platform dies. We need to be able to have access to our videos, podcasts, images and articles without being at the mercy of the troubles at social media companies.
Single points of failure in your business need to be addressed and backups are part of the way to solving this problem.
We need backups of our data because it’s ours.
A path to worry-free
I’m guilty as the next person. Some of my data is backed up while other files just sit on my phone or laptop.
But, a small step toward your information security is still a step in the right direction. So don’t dispair.
Select the data that would be most valuable to you if you lost it.
And start putting it in a safe place today.
Credits:
Music: Sleepless City by Keys of Moon | https://soundcloud.com/keysofmoon
Creative Commons CC BY 4.0 - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/