For influencer Erika Thompson, TikTok is the most powerful social media platform that allows her 11 million followers to connect with her lifelong passion: bees.

The platform’s losses in the United States will more likely result in “substantial” financial harm to Texas beekeeper Ms. Thompson after the Supreme Court upheld an injunction set to be issued next week, but it is also an educational tool.

“There are a lot of other people on the platform who provide educational content or informational content,” she told the BBC. “That’s the biggest loss, aside from the financial aspect, what we should be focusing on is the loss that we as a society — the people who use TikTok — are definitely going to feel.”

About 170 million Americans use the app and website. The platform will shut down in the United States on Sunday unless its Chinese parent ByteDance sells it or there is intervention from the executive branch.

Last year, both Democratic and Republican lawmakers voted to ban the video-sharing app over concerns about its ties to the Chinese government and concerns it was a national security risk.

TikTok has repeatedly said it does not share information with Beijing.

But users and content creators say social media platforms have grown into fixtures in society and have helped ordinary users attract the attention of millions of fans. It has quickly become the social media channel of choice for some and a primary source of income for others.

Now they’re worried about what will happen if the ban isn’t stopped.

Creators who make a living from social media apps have told the BBC that TikTok is a superior platform.

This was the case for Ms. Tomspoon, whose first TikTok video received more than 50 million views within 24 hours of being posted.

“I haven’t experienced the same success on other platforms,” she said. “For example, I could post the exact same video on Instagram but the message I receive would be nothing close to an engagement.”

Ross Smith, who shares hilarious videos of his 98-year-old grandmother on TikTok to his more than 24 million followers, calls TikTok one of the few platforms where it’s easy to become a creator.

On TikTok, “you can find success overnight,” he said.

Smith told the BBC that other platforms trying to copy TikTok’s short scrolling format have not been successful. Ms. Thompson agreed.

“I rarely hear about someone going viral on Instagram, or someone being sensational on Instagram, but those are words you hear a lot on TikTok,” Ms. Thompson said.

Codey James, a fashion influencer with tens of thousands of followers on TikTok, told the BBC that audiences don’t necessarily move from one platform to another.

“I know a guy who has hundreds of thousands of followers on TikTok but maybe 10,000 followers on Instagram,” James told the BBC.

Many content creators survive on the income they earn on TikTok.

Some told the BBC that without the platform, their lives would be drastically different.

Fashion designer and artist Nicole Bloomgarden told the BBC that when brands and companies want advertising content from creators, they want those creators to post on TikTok.

“Indirectly, TikTok is the majority of my income because all brands want their products to be promoted on the app,” Ms. Bloomgarden said.

It’s unclear whether the most lucrative source of income for creators is TikTok, but many told the BBC it accounts for a large portion of their income.

2022 Survey from Creator-Focused Startups link treefound that approximately 12% of full-time creators earn more than $50,000 per year through social media platforms.

The survey of 9,500 people found that about 46% said they earned less than $1,000.

This isn’t the first time a major social media platform has disappeared.

In 2017, Vine, a platform where users could share video clips up to six seconds long, shut down.

For creators at the time, this was a shock.

Q Park is a content creator with 37.7 million followers on TikTok.

He spent years building a following on Vine (the only platform he was using at the time), and when it disappeared, he says “it felt like my whole business was down.”

But in some ways, it was good for him. This forced him to learn how to create different content for different audiences.

“That experience taught me that if you are confident in your ability to create content, you will build a following elsewhere,” Mr Park told the BBC.

As the ban looms, some creators are flocking to another Chinese platform, red note – A competitor to TikTok popular with young people in China, Taiwan and other Mandarin-speaking populations.

RedNote was the most downloaded app on Apple’s U.S. App Store earlier this week.

While some creators are diversifying their publishing locations in hopes of growing audiences elsewhere, others are hoping the ban won’t materialize.

“TikTok is a beast,” Parker said. “Part of me thinks it might be too big to fail.”

“It’s going to recover somehow, the economy is just too big right now.”

Additional reporting by Grace Dean and Natalie Jimenez.