TikTok’s fate in the United States has been turbulent through the past four years. From initial ban attempts in 2020, to attempts at state bans including one passing in Montana in 2024 and most recently the trial and deadline for the app to be sold or shut down, followed by the 75-day delay put in place by Donald Trump following his inauguration.
On January 17th, the Supreme Court unanimously agreed that the ban would be upheld in the United States and on January 18th, the app went dark, simply showing a message to all US TikTok users that the app was banned in their country, before being reinstated the next day as Donald Trump stated that there would be no fine for companies who allowed TikTok to remain up until he was elected. On the 20th of January, Trump then signed an executive order which halted the ban by 75 days, setting the new deadline as April 4th, 2025.
Despite this delay on the ban, Apple and Google have yet to reinstate TikTok on their respective app stores. In both the App Store and Google Play Store, the app is blocked from download, citing the law recently passed as the reason for the app not being added back.
Congress and Donald Trump have both had a long history with TikTok regarding its presence in the federal government as well as the nation as a whole. The first restriction of TikTok in America was when the app was banned from all military phones in January of 2020. In July of the same year, Trump expressed his consideration of banning TikTok in retaliation for China’s alleged mishandling of the outbreak of Covid-19. This was followed up by a “sweeping but vague” executive order which banned American companies from “transaction” with ByteDance, which owns TikTok; A few days later, a second executive order was signed by Trump demanding that ByteDance lose its possessions in the United States within 90 days, but as Joe Biden was elected, these deadlines were extended and eventually forgotten.
The question as to whether or not the new administration and deadline will give enough time to negotiate a sale of TikTok is up in the air, but there appear to be plenty of potential buyers. These include:
- Elon Musk, owner of Tesla and SpaceX as well as head of the Department of Government Efficiency
- Jimmy Donaldson, also known as Mr. Beast, owner of the most subscribed channel on YouTube and over 100 million followers on TikTok
- Kevin O’Leary, Shark Tank investor
- Larry Ellison, Oracle Co-Founder and Trump’s pick
- Microsoft, company that previously tried to purchase TikTok
- Steven Mnuchin, former Secretary of Treasury during Trump’s 2016 presidency
If none of these potential purchasers end up buying Tiktok, and the ban is reaffirmed, TikTok won’t simply disappear from users’ phones; The most simple and probable way the ban will be enforced is by requiring the app to be removed from places such as the Google Play Store and Apple App Store, which is already currently what both Apple and Google have done. While this will not pose an immediate issue, users who still hold the app on their phones will not be able to receive updates, which will lead to their experience becoming more and more buggy until becoming unusable. Having an archived version of TikTok would additionally become a security threat, as any potential weaknesses and exploits in the app could not be patched on phones in areas where the app is not provided, which could lead to hackers flooding the app. So, while the ban can’t wipe TikTok from your phone, the app will slowly become obsolete over time.
Since the ban, many current and former users have flocked to a Chinese app called 小红书 (Xiaohongshu/Little Red Book), which has become known as RedNote. The app is similar to TikTok, with most users being Chinese. The app is more closely tied to the Chinese government, which has led to the site censoring and limiting posts that were considered sensitive to the Chinese Communist Party, such as insults to the current leader, Xi Jinping, as well as discussing strikes, suicides, and anything critical of the CCP, such as Tiananmen Square and the Hong Kong protests.
The future of TikTok is uncertain once again in America, but hopes of the app staying seem to be getting more and more bright, as it seems both consumers and purchasers hoping to keep the app in America.
