From Sliema to Silicon Valley: How the US-China TikTok Deal Could Change Malta’s FYP Forever

**TikTok Deal: How a US-China Framework Could Reshape Malta’s FYP**

Sliema influencer Martina Pace woke up yesterday to 300 fewer followers on TikTok.
“At first I panicked—did I shadow-ban myself with too many pastizzi mukbangs?” she laughs, adjusting her ring-light outside Balluta Bay.
Then she read the push-alert: Washington and Beijing had sketched a preliminary “framework” that could keep the video app alive in the United States, provided parent company ByteDance allows third-party audits of its famed recommendation algorithm.

For Malta’s 500,000 residents—80 % of whom open TikTok at least once a day, according to Malta Communications Authority data released last March—the distant diplomatic dance has surprisingly local ripple effects. Pace, 22, is part of a micro-economy that has flourished since 2020: Maltese creators who earn anywhere from €200 to €4,000 a month through brand tie-ins, live-stream “gifts” and affiliate codes for everything from Gozo honey to iGaming welcome bonuses.

“If the US forces ByteDance to wall off code or sell stakes, the advertising pool shrinks globally,” explains Dr. Rebecca Vella, digital-policy lecturer at the University of Malta. “Brands that budget in dollars often benchmark CPMs for smaller markets like ours. Less competition means lower revenue per thousand views for Maltese creators.”

Yet the stakes go deeper than euros. Over the past three years TikTok has become a virtual festa, a noisy online counterpart to the village fireworks that light up summer nights. Hashtags like #MaltaTikTok (#MaltaTok sounds too much like “maltatokk”—Maltese for “hammer blow”) have clocked 1.3 billion views, eclipsing Instagram’s Malta geotag by nearly triple. Traditional festa brass bands remix sea-shanties for 15-second clips; nannas in Għarb stitch 60-year-old qassatat recipes into split-screen duets with teenagers in California.

“For the diaspora, it’s a lifeline,” says Clayton Micallef, who runs the Facebook group “Maltese Abroad—Keep Us Posted” (42 k members). “My cousin in Melbourne saw our nan making imqaret on TikTok and cried. She booked a flight within the hour.”

Tourism Malta, the national promotional agency, quietly tripled its TikTok ad spend in 2023, targeting 18- to 34-year-olds in Germany, France and the UK with 9-second clips of Comino’s Blue Lagoon set to techno-festa beats. The campaign correlated with a 17 % spike in shoulder-season bookings, according to Air Malta passenger manifests reviewed by this newspaper. A fragmented US deal could throttle that funnel.

“Algorithms are tuned on aggregate data,” notes Johann Grech, the film commissioner who moonlights as a social-media strategist. “If the US segment is carved out, the remaining global feed might favour Asian or pan-European content, nudging Malta clips further down the queue.”

Opposition spokesperson for economy and digital affairs, Ivan Castillo, pressed the government in parliament Monday evening to draft a “Maltese back-up plan” should TikTok splinter. “We cannot outsource our digital heritage to super-power boardrooms,” he declared.
In reply, Minister for the Economy Silvio Schembri said Malta will “monitor developments” but stressed “no immediate regulatory action is required,” pointing out that TikTok’s EU data already sits in Irish servers subject to GDPR.

Meanwhile, creators aren’t waiting. Pace and 30 other Maltese TikTokers formed a cooperative last month, pooling contact lists so they can pitch brands collectively on Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts if TikTok’s reach falters. They met at Café du Brazil in Valletta, laptops open to spreadsheets, almond-milk lattes sweating in the sun.

Still, the intangible loss worries users like 67-year-old Raymond Zahra of Żejtun, whose #FishermenOfMalta series documents pre-dawn lampuki catches. “I don’t care about money—I want the world to see our sea,” he says, mending nets on the quay. “If TikTok changes, will anyone still find us?”

Washington and Beijing have given themselves until after the US election to ink final terms. Back in Sliema, Martina Pace posts a new clip: her waving a tiny Maltese flag super-imposed on a spinning globe. The caption reads, “Whatever happens, we’re still here—one island, 17 villages, endless stories.” She hits upload, tags #ForYou—but whose “you” will still be watching, she wonders, once the super-powers decide the fate of an app that somehow made a whole archipelago feel both smaller and larger than life.