Late adapter? Bob Dylan joins TikTok during its uncertain days

NEW YORK – TikTok might have

gone dark briefly in the United States

over the weekend, but that did not stop one notable new user from joining the app: Bob Dylan.

A verified account for the legendary singer-songwriter, Nobel Prize winner and current subject of a Hollywood biopic appeared on the app last week with a 50-second video montage featuring excerpts from his songs Like A Rolling Stone (1965), Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door (1973) and Hurricane (1975).

Fans were pleased but surprised to see Dylan show up on what could be the app’s final days, given that a law requires TikTok’s owner, Chinese company ByteDance, to either sell the app by Jan 19 or face a ban.

“You’ve got 30 seconds, king,” one commenter said, receiving more than 13,800 likes. Another said: “Bob, TikTok is knocking on heaven’s door.”

Dylan, appearing to get in on the joke, posted a second video on Jan 16. This time, he posted a six-second black-and-white clip of himself appearing at a news conference in the 1960s and saying: “Good God, I must leave right away.”

The 83-year-old is having a moment in Hollywood, thanks in part to A Complete Unknown (2024), a biopic starring French-American actor Timothee Chalamet.

The singer-songwriter has been known to dabble in social media. He joined social platform X, then called Twitter, in 2009, and sometimes posts his random thoughts, reactions to news or promotional materials. There is also an official Dylan Instagram account, on which he posts clips from his extended career and other memorabilia.

His arrival to TikTok in its possible eleventh hour has sparked joy in some fans, with at least one commenter calling on him to save the app.

TikTok flickered back to life in the US on Jan 19

after President-elect Donald Trump said he would issue an executive order to stall a federal ban of the app. The abrupt shift came just hours after major app stores removed the popular social media site and it stopped operating for US users as a federal law took effect on Jan 19.

The ban stems from a 2024 law

that requires app stores and cloud computing providers to stop distributing or hosting TikTok unless it is sold by its Chinese parent company, ByteDance. US lawmakers passed the law over concerns that the Chinese government could use the app, which claims roughly 170 million US users, to gather information about Americans or spread propaganda. NYTIMES