How this boomer realised TikTok’s power through ‘The Digger Girl’ – Marc Champion

Key points.TikTok empowers women like Amy Underwood in male-dominated fields.A ban risks income and advocacy for creators worldwide.US audience is key due to higher ad revenue potential..Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox at 5:30am weekdays. Register here..The seventh BizNews Conference, BNC#7, is to be held in Hermanus from March 11 to 13, 2025. The 2025 BizNews Conference is designed to provide an excellent opportunity for members of the BizNews community to interact directly with the keynote speakers, old (and new) friends from previous BNC events – and to interact with members of the BizNews team. Register for BNC#7 here..If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here..By Marc Champion___STEADY_PAYWALL___.When I heard the US was considering a ban on Tiktok, my first thought was: Fine with me. I'm a boomer. Whatever security threat TikTok's Chinese ownership does or doesn't pose, the platform had always seemed the most shallow, time-eating, nonsense-creating, generation-wasting extreme of a problematic social media universe. Then I thought about The Digger Girl.Amy Underwood lives in the western highlands of Scotland and works for her father, John, operating excavators (diggers, as they're called in the UK) and other heavy machinery for ground works. On a reconstruction project that my wife and I and some friends are doing, they've been the rock that gives us hope. They ask a fair price and get the job done – no small thing when you have to dig a mile-long connection to the water main.But Amy's also a Tiktok celebrity who says she'd be hit hard by any US ban. She has just shy of 400,000 followers, an audience built since her first post in 2020 (of her operating an excavator) went viral. Now she lip syncs to music while pulling slime from sewage pipes, dances on gravel piles and generally mixes goofy TikTok fare with her using and maintaining her machines. .She also has her say. In a video shot from her orange, purple and pink digger as she worked on our property, she took aim at the tokenist use of women workers in the notoriously male-dominated construction industry.TikTok has given her a business, even as she goes on working with her father. Just as important, the exposure has allowed her to pursue the cause she cares most about – getting women into construction. The social media platform is also, through the sponsorships it encourages, taking her places that would have been unthinkable while working an excavator in rural Scotland for minimum wage..Losing US TikTok followers would be a major blow to that business, even though they make up just 11% of Underwood's audience, she told me this week while in London – her first ever trip to the UK's capital – to meet her agent and a publisher. That's because the sheer scale of the US market means advertisers there pay more, making each American subscriber more valuable than their UK equivalent. You also need to be present to attract US companies as sponsors, says Underwood.Read more: 🔒 TikTok goes dark in US amid ban, Trump teases possible lifeline.Her agent, Dan Smith, now handles the social media businesses of 30 UK-based digger drivers, mechanics, welders and others and says the US market is critical. Increasingly, he says he tells clients to prioritize YouTube because it has a higher proportion of US users. Underwood's on YouTube, too, and has 800,000 followers in total across all social media platforms. But TikTok remains her bedrock.So this is what we stand to lose in a world decoupling under the pressure of great power competition: A Chinese-owned social media platform that generates American interest in the world outside, while creating income for a 30-year-old mother of two in Scotland so she can encourage young women on at least two continents to work in construction.."I want the younger generations, especially girls, to look at me and see that what you can actually do in the construction industry," she told me. She's also working on a children's book that will tell her own story, encouraging more primary school-age girls to realize construction's an industry they can join, too.At the same time, Underwood's been able to expand her own horizons in ways that wouldn't otherwise have been conceivable. Terratech Group AB's Steelwrist, which produces rotating buckets for excavators, took her to its headquarters in Sweden; Scania AB, to Norway to drive machines on snow and ice. Her longest relationship is with a unit of HD Hyundai, the South Korean conglomerate that also makes construction machinery. They've sent her to expos from Germany and Belgium to Las Vegas, to test new products and drive for demonstrations. Of course, US President Donald Trump has now called for a 75-day delay of the TikTok ban, after a US Supreme Court deadline for China's Bytedance to divest the platform's American business passed, on Jan. 19. And as China recently said it was open to a sale – with Elon Musk in the running to buy it – a US shutdown of TikTok looks unlikely at this point.Given Musk's huge commercial interests in China, and his record of encouraging the spread of disinformation since buying X (formerly Twitter), I'm not sure how much of an improvement such a shift in ownership would be. But any sale would allow people like The Digger Girl to continue — together, sadly, with those who earn more than any engineering graduate can hope to, by spreading bile or just making stuff up from the indolence of their couches..Read also:.BN Briefing: 2018's $5 bet yields $750m; Arrest warrant for Bristow; Musk for TikTok🔒 Musk's TikTok takeover won't save it: Catherine Thorbecke🔒 Chinese officials consider sale of TikTok US to Elon Musk as one possible option.© 2025 Bloomberg L.P.

How this boomer realised TikTok’s power through ‘The Digger Girl’ – Marc Champion

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