TIKTOK ON THE CLOCK: IS THE BAN COMING?

THE TIKTOK LOGO; GRAPHIC BY LOUISE ANKNE

(The following text was written before January 18, 2025)

Talk of TikTok getting banned sometime this month has been ongoing, but not many people know that the conversation about the banishment of our beloved TikTok has been happening for over half a decade. In 2020, the then-president of the United States, Donald Trump, announced that he was considering shutting down the Chinese social media platform TikTok because he viewed it as a national security threat. Disapproval and significant controversy greeted the announcement. As a result, the TikTok owner, ByteDance, who was originally going to sell a small part of TikTok to an American company, agreed to divest TikTok to avoid the ban of the app in the United States and other countries that were also considering banning the app due to safety concerns.

TikTok later announced that it was planning to challenge the U.S. government restrictions on transactions with American companies. On August 24, 2020, TikTok filed a lawsuit against Trump's administration, stating that the order was aimed at helping Trump get re-elected by using protectionist trade policies against China. Around the same time, TikTok's U.S. technical program manager, Patrick Ryan, filed a lawsuit against Trump and Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross. After a lot of back-and-forth discussions, TikTok ultimately avoided being banned.

Returning to the present, we are facing the same issue. So why are they trying to ban TikTok again? Sometime last year, Congress passed a law forcing TikTok to sell to an American company or face a ban. They claim that ByteDance's connections to China pose a security threat and that TikTok user data might be shared with China.

When will TikTok get banned? If TikTok does not sell to an American company by Sunday, January 19th, the app will be permanently banned. What will that look like if TikTok gets banned? Well, I can tell you that if you already have the app downloaded, it’s not going to disappear from your phone. What will happen is that TikTok will be removed from the app store, so no new users will be able to download it. Though that might sound like somewhat good news, TikTok releases updates approximately every two weeks to fix lags and overall issues. Without those updates, the version of TikTok you have downloaded will remain but will likely face lots of problems and lags and will eventually crash, leading to the inevitable loss of TikTok.

On January 18th, late in the afternoon, TikTok went dark and was removed from app stores. TikTok was back up and running the next morning, announcing that thanks to Trump, TikTok is back in the U.S. On January 20th, President Donald Trump signed an executive order to delay the TikTok ban by 75 days, giving it time to sell to an American company and avoid the ban permanently. However, the chances of that happening are slim since TikTok has stated on multiple occasions that they will not sell to an American company. With TikTok still unavailable in app stores, we are unsure of what the future holds for the social media app.