Tiktok became an app back in 2018 after the Chinese company, Bytedance, rebranded the former app Musical.ly. It quickly became a hit, attracting millions of users in the United States alone. Nine years after its creation, TikTok was officially banned.
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as been raising the concern of national security within the United States for five years. According to The Associated Press, U.S. politicians began sounding the alarm on the app’s influence on national security in 2019. Two months after these concerns were raised, the Pentagon ordered all military personnel to remove the application from both personal and government-issued phones. As fears about the potential national security threat posed by ByteDance grew, more regulations began to pass through Congress. In early 2024, the House of Representatives passed the TikTok Ban-or-Sell bill, which would force TikTok’s parent company ByteDance to either sell the American portion of the company to a U.S. agency or face a ban. In retaliation, TikTok and ByteDance sued the federal government, claiming that banning the app would violate the First Amendment and was therefore unconstitutional. This fierce legal battle dragged on for months, and on January 10th, the final verdict was in the hands of the United States Supreme Court. By January 17th, 2025, the Court had made its decision to ban the app. The ban was set to take effect on January 19th, unless an American company purchased the U.S. portion of the app. Merrick Garland, former U.S. Attorney General under the Biden administration, commented, “Authoritarian regimes should not have unfettered access to millions of Americans’ sensitive data. The Court’s decision affirms that this Act protects the national security of the United States in a manner that is consistent with the Constitution.”
On January 18th, when U.S. users opened the app, they were greeted with various warnings. The first warning stated that TikTok would be forced to go dark by January 19th. The second read: “Sorry, TikTok isn’t available right now. A law banning TikTok has been enacted in the U.S. Unfortunately, that means you can’t use TikTok for now.” That night, “170 million users” were forced to close the app, presumably for good.
Sixteen hours after TikTok went dark, the app reopened and welcomed back its American users. During the brief ban, small business owners running their businesses through TikTok Shop were left panicked, as were many American users and influencers. In response, people flocked to the Chinese Instagram-like app, Rednote, to make up for the loss of TikTok. Although TikTok reopened, it was only available to prior users and not to people purchasing new phones.
If someone tried to install the app from the app store on a new device, the download would not process. This issue caused many individuals to sell their old phones on eBay with TikTok preinstalled for a fortune. According to The Columbus Dispatch, an “iPhone 15 Pro Max was recently sold with the app still on it for $20,000.”
Following his inauguration, President Trump issued an executive order intending to suspend the national ban for 75 days to determine the appropriate solution for the restriction. Until then, Tiktok continues to be a ticking time bomb that, with one wrong move, will explode.
