Last night I was a guest on the BBC News' Focus on Africa Show with Waihiga Mwaura where we had a brief but insightful conversation about the seemingly imminent banning of TikTok in the US which is due to happen tomorrow, Sunday the 19th January 2025.

In the attached video recording, we approached our conversation from a Kenyan and African perspective to better understand what the implications and considerations could be for users in the US as well as those in Africa, looking at both positive and negative aspects, going forward.

As things stand, unless there is some sort of last minute intervention by current US President Joe Biden, or incoming US President Elect Donald Trump when he takes office on Monday the 20th January 2024, TikTok will mostly likely go offline tomorrow (Sunday) to comply with the banning deadline.

TikTok has over 170M users in the US as of this writing and is easily one of the most popular social media platforms in the US that has disrupted the status quo there over the past 5 years or so. Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts are competing content formats that mimic how TikTok works.

TikTok's biggest innovation and 'secret sauce' is its highly prized algorithm that is remarkably good at keeping users hooked on it showing them content based on their interests, which is also known as the 'interest graph'. None of TikTok's competitors have managed to create as good an algorithm as they have done to-date in this respect.