As of today, September 13, 2025, TikTok’s 170 million American users are being involuntarily shifted to M2, a U.S.-exclusive app launched by ByteDance on September 5 to comply with U.S. data security laws. This forced migration isolates U.S. users from the global TikTok community, likely curbing creators’ international reach & drawing sharp criticism for fracturing a platform once celebrated for its global connectivity.
During the brief January 2025 blackout, frustrated users flocked to Red Note, a Chinese app similar to TikTok, to protest, voicing distrust in the app’s future & government oversight, with some suspecting an attempt to conceal Israel’s actions in Palestine & Gaza as well as censor American voices critiquing them—concerns heightened by the recent appointment of Erica Mindel, a former IDF soldier, as TikTok’s Public Policy Manager for Hate Speech to oversee content moderation.
With ByteDance facing a September 17, 2025, deadline to sell TikTok’s U.S. operations to an American buyer, failure to do so could trigger a permanent blackout of American accounts in early 2026. Many users & creators now question whether M2 is a genuine solution or a superficial fix that risks eroding TikTok’s vibrant ecosystem under the weight of regulatory pressures.
In the months leading up to this forced migration, I made many attempts to reach out to TikTok support in order to change my Necrolicious account location from the US to Japan since the option to do so manually disappeared on this account. I created numerous support tickets. Each ticket received canned replies of “If we need anything else, we’ll contact you” & simply closed without any resolution, no matter how many follow-up messages I sent. I recently gave up & simply started a new account for the Japan region, which you can find here:
Additionally, I have been uploading copies of my videos to YouTube & actually have much better reach on that platform, with one recent video breaking out to nearly 110,000 views.
I also made a counterpart account for English uploads on both platforms, but have not yet utilised them. I am simply unsure if the demand for English content is insufficient to warrant doubling my video creation workload. Besides that, there are so many English content creators in Japan already. It seems like the market is saturated & I would rather connect with Japanese audiences. If you think I should start creating content in English, tell me in the comments below.
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