Why Our Artists Are Leaving TikTok
The Clock Is Tick-Tok-ing
It’s no secret that for the past five years or so, TikTok has been crowned the “engine of discovery” among marketers & artists alike. It’s also no secret that we’re all getting tired. Artists and creators lament decreased viewership and never-ending pressure to post. Users are bombarded with ads while scrolling and missing the total personalization that used to make their feed feel like a extension of their brain. We’re all feeling the effects of over-consuming short-form video on our attention and nervous system, looking for ways to jump ship without losing the expansion potential that made TikTok so seductive in the first place. So, naturally, when users opened the app on Thursday, January 22 to a startling privacy policy update introduced under U.S. ownership, it felt like the right time for a lot of us to to just that.
The updated policy brings up two primary concerns: precise geolocation tracking and increased data collection from user content. Under the new ownership by digital security partner Oracle, private equity firm Silver Lake and Abu Dhabi-based investment firm MGX, TikTok’s geolocation capabilities have moved from city and region to street address and apartment floor. While TikTok has always collected sensitive information, the new policy openly states that it will log users’ racial or ethnic origin, national origin, religious beliefs, mental health diagnosis, physical health diagnosis, sexual life, sexual orientation, status as transgender or nonbinary, citizenship status, immigration status, financial information, and government-issued identification numbers. According to CBS, “the company now states that it ‘processes such sensitive personal information in accordance with applicable law.’ The earlier policy framed this more narrowly, saying it used sensitive information only when needed to run the service or to comply with legal requirements — for example, using payment details to process a purchase or a driver's license to verify a user's identity.”
To many, the Trump administration’s previous TikTok ban due to stated concerns over U.S. data privacy while the app was under Chinese ownership feels sharply hypocritical in the wake of this update. In addition to data privacy, censorship has been a growing concern for users of the app since the initial ban and reinstatement, coming to a head with this new development. Users have complained that their feeds have been bombarded with “AI slop” and hyper-generic content where they used to find higher specificity, and most pertinently, “political” content — or at least that which is deemed political under Trump. Public figures have fled the app after content speaking out against ICE raids has seemingly been suppressed. Comedian Meg Stalter recently shared a video with such a sentiment on Instagram, where it was reposted over 12,000 times.
However, she told CNN that on TikTok, “she had attempted to upload the video to TikTok several times with no success, then had given up and deleted her TikTok account entirely, believing her content was being censored because it was about ICE.” Her experience echoes that of many of our clients: Even prior to January 22, many users - including artists and team members at Invasion Group - bumped up against recurring reports and video removals due to inaccurately stated policy violations. Educational Black History Month videos were mass reported for alcohol and substance abuse, content about gender-based violence were flagged for eating disorders and body image, and in the past, moderators were encouraged to suppress content from users deemed “ugly” or “abnormal.” These issues seem to impact people of color and queer folks most directly, with many users reporting impasses with TikTok’s censorship as early as 2020. It’s no wonder the app is feeling less vibrant, less engaging, and less human to users who’ve been there since the beginning.
The Question of Social Media
For artists in particular, the ability to market one’s own work on one’s own terms is… well, everything. Now that one of our major promotional tools is increasingly working against us, how do we respond? How do we prioritize safety, both for our fans and ourselves? How do we keep discovery potential alive? How do we nurture community in a digital landscape that is becoming more hostile to humans by the day?
On the Digital Marketing team at Invasion Group, we’ve been ceaselessly discussing and brainstorming. After batting around every possible variation of angst and reorientation, we all came to the same conclusion: digital marketing is a means to an end. Too often, it has been treated like an end in itself.
Since its conception, social media has granted us incredible access to one another’s hearts and minds, and these increasing ill-intentioned roadblocks are a testament to its power. However, a digital presence is not a person. A view is not a ticket. A following is not necessarily a live, interconnected, human community.
As marketers and as artists, our ultimate goal is to utilize the digital tools available to us to drive the real-life connections for which music is made. Chief among the beauties of the early social media landscape was its ability to connect folks on the basis of incredibly niche interests and experiences with intricate keyword algorithms, networks of real mutuals and reliable chronology. In its heyday, Tumblr exemplified the power of the internet as a place one could go to discover new things on purpose, acting on our own whims and researching the shared interests of our friends. For a time, TikTok felt the same. Now, not so much.
We don’t believe that the giants of Meta and TikTok are acting with that real-life connection front-of-mind, let alone our safety and sovereignty. We do believe that by releasing our obligation to be overly engaged with these platforms, we make space for digital and IRL community building that allows us to express with quality, care and substance, rather than perpetually shortening, compressing, tightening, censoring, and diminishing into bites of bites of bites.
Tell Us: What’s Next?
Long-form text platforms like Substack and image-forward hybrid engines like Pinterest and Tumblr have emerged in the conversation as natural places to land. The importance of the newsletter feels more relevant than ever. YouTube videos over 10 minutes feel like a refuge. All of this is to say: we have options. We have the opportunity to decisively pivot and nourish the spaces we actually like to inhabit. We have the chance to do something way cooler than TikTok. As marketers, that feels pretty punk rock to admit.
This isn’t a pivot any of us can make in a vacuum, so we want to hear from you. To discuss all things TikTok, privacy, content and community-building in this particular cultural moment, we’re holding a town hall — and we invite you to join us.
We want to hear it all: your burning questions, user observations, big ideas and hopes for the future. If marketing is the means, exchange is the end. Let’s expedite that process, shall we?
Register here for this open discussion with Invasion Digital Marketing team members and artists Thursday March 5, 2026 at 12:00pm CT.
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Citations:
https://www.cnn.com/2026/01/26/tech/tiktok-ice-censorship-glitch-cec
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/tiktok-new-terms-of-service-privacy-geolocation-personal-information/
https://theintercept.com/2020/03/16/tiktok-app-moderators-users-discrimination/