There is a version of this conversation happening in Los Angeles right now, probably in a WeHo coffee shop or on a rushed phone call between a talent handler and their biggest client. It goes something like this: “I need you to think very carefully about what you post on TikTok.” Sometimes it goes further than that.
Hollywood’s publicists — already stretched thin by a contracting industry, fewer projects to promote, and budgets that seem to shrink every quarter — are quietly adding a new item to their list of concerns. It’s not a tabloid story or a feuding co-star. It’s an app sitting on the lock screen of nearly every celebrity phone in America.
The anxiety is not entirely new, but it has sharpened. TikTok’s future in the United States has been unstable for years, cycling through ban threats, political hearings, and deadline extensions that never quite resolved anything. In December 2025, a deal was finally signed to transfer TikTok’s U.S. operations to a joint venture controlled largely by American investors including Oracle and Silver Lake, with ByteDance retaining a smaller stake. The deal was supposed to bring clarity. In some circles, it brought more questions.
For publicists, the concern has never been purely about ownership. It’s about what the platform does with data, and more specifically, what it might do with data tied to high-profile individuals. The fear that personal information from corporate or public-facing devices could be accessed by ByteDance — and potentially by extension, the Chinese government — is not a fringe worry. It’s the same concern that led the BBC to advise its own staff to remove TikTok from work phones back in 2023. It’s the same concern that prompted government bans across the U.S., Canada, and the European Commission. When ByteDance employees were found to have tracked the locations of Western journalists in 2022, the privacy fears became something harder to dismiss.
Publicists operate in a world where their clients’ phones are essentially professional instruments. Emails, contacts, location data, message histories — it’s all on there, and a lot of it is sensitive. A PR handler managing a major actor or musician is not just worried about a hacked iCloud. They’re thinking about the aggregate picture that a data-hungry platform might be building over time.
There’s another dimension to this that doesn’t get discussed as openly. TikTok is also a crisis accelerant. The Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni situation in late 2024 exposed just how fast public opinion can curdle on the platform, and how difficult it is to control a narrative once it’s moving through millions of short-form feeds. Publicists who were already watching that story unfold with some horror — it turned their industry into a villain subplot — are increasingly wary of a platform where the rules of engagement feel genuinely unpredictable.
The irony is almost too neat. TikTok is also one of the most powerful promotional tools those same publicists have available. Young audiences live there. Streaming algorithms respond to what trends there. Telling a client to delete TikTok is a bit like telling them to stop attending parties — professionally, it carries real cost. Most clients aren’t going to do it. And publicists know that.
So the conversation has become more nuanced than “delete the app.” It’s about what’s posted, when, and from which device. It’s about not treating TikTok like a personal diary. It’s about understanding that the platform’s ownership situation, however it eventually resolves, does not make the underlying data questions disappear. A changed investor structure doesn’t rewrite the app’s code.
Hollywood’s image industry is already navigating a difficult moment. Fewer projects, tighter margins, the breakup of several major PR firms that once seemed untouchable. The last thing anyone in that world needs is a client going viral for the wrong reasons on a platform that nobody fully controls yet. The advice being whispered around town isn’t quite “delete TikTok.” It’s closer to: handle it like it’s already evidence.
