TikTok Ban a Big Boost for Meta

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Mar 15, 6:50AM EDT

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TikTok Ban a Big Boost for Meta — © Povozniuk / iStock via Getty Images

If the president signs a bill to ban TikTok from the United States or one that forces a sale to an American company, the biggest beneficiary is Meta Platforms Inc. (NASDAQ: META | META Price Prediction). It owns direct competitors Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and WhatsApp. Instagram, in particular, would lose a huge rival.

Such a ban could be a long way off if parent ByteDance can challenge the law in court. However, even the threat that TikTok could be shuttered may make users change where they spend their social media time. That could erode TikTok’s traffic.

Although accurate figures are hard to come by, Facebook is America’s most-used social media traffic, with a market share of about 77%. Instagram follows that at 56% and TikTok at 45%. However, TikTok may have the largest share of which social media platform people use most based on daily minutes. Total time is sometimes labeled “sessions.”

Meta stock has already had an extraordinary run, up 153% in the past year, while the Nasdaq is 41% higher. If a rival of TikTok’s size is pushed out of the market, Meta stock investors will have another reason to bid up its shares. (See six reasons to avoid Meta Platforms stock.)

About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.