If you’re a TikTok creator, or just a big fan, this weekend was stressful, as TikTok’s status was up and down, “banned” and “saved.” For everyone else, the saga has been confusing and annoying.
Here’s the CliffsNotes version: A Supreme Court ruling on Friday meant that TikTok would be banned in the U.S. starting yesterday. TikTok started blocking access on Saturday. But yesterday, it was restored, for now.
If you’re trying to wrap your head around this chaos, here’s a blow-by-blow:
1. The whole TikTok mess basically started in August of 2020, when then-President Trump said he’d use his “emergency powers” to ban TikTok if it wasn’t sold to a U.S.-based company within 45 days.
Trump said TikTok’s data collection, “threatens to allow the Chinese Communist Party access to Americans’ personal and proprietary information, allowing China to track the locations of federal employees, build dossiers of personal information for blackmail, and conduct corporate espionage.”
2. Nothing came of that, and TikTok sued the Trump administration.
3. Then, Joe Biden became president, and the TikTok issue became lost in Congress, even after a “Wall Street Journal” report said TikTok algorithms were “flooding teens with a torrent of harmful material,” such as videos recommending extreme dieting.
4. In 2022, there were reports that TikTok’s China-based employees have repeatedly accessed the private information of TikTok users, and the FBI warned that Chinese officials could manipulate the app’s algorithm.
5. TikTok tried to dodge the heat by promising to migrate its user data to cloud servers managed by Oracle, which is U.S.-based.
6. Last year, a bipartisan bill to ban TikTok or force its sale to a U.S. company gathered steam in Congress. The House of Representatives passed the ban-or-sell bill, the Senate followed suit, and President Biden signed it into law.
7. TikTok and its Chinese parent company ByteDance sued the U.S. federal government, saying that the law is unconstitutional.
8. The case went to the Supreme Court, and on Friday, the court unanimously upheld the federal law banning TikTok, with ALL nine justices agreeing.
9. The ban was supposed to go into effect yesterday, but TikTok shut down early on Saturday. Many American users got a message saying, “A law banning TikTok has been enacted in the U.S. Unfortunately that means you can’t use TikTok for now.” TikTok was also removed from app stores.
10. Yesterday, TikTok said it was restoring service in the U.S., after Trump intervened. In a message, they said, “We thank President Trump for [allowing] our service providers [to] provide TikTok to over 170 million Americans.”
11. But it’s temporary. Trump is using a clause to grant a 90-day extension before the law goes into effect. He wanted TikTok to be available to broadcast his inauguration, and says that he’s going to use those 90 days to try to “make a deal to protect our national security.”
12. TikTok said that it “will work with Trump on a long-term solution that keeps TikTok in the United States.” It’s unclear exactly when the deadline would be, but it’s probably safe to assume the ban is back on if a deal cannot be reached.
13. It’s unclear why Trump flip-flopped on TikTok, but Biden and Kamala Harris have both been on TikTok as well. So no one was very serious about it.
(AP News / Axios / Fox Business / Fox News / CNN / Wikipedia)
A few other TikTok notes:
1. Elon Musk says he’s been against a TikTok ban “for a long time.” But he also complains that the U.S. is saving TikTok, while X is banned in China.
(China bans American-owned social media apps like Facebook, Reddit, YouTube, and X for national security reasons. Yes, seriously.)
2. When there was talk of TikTok being banned for good, some people were considering moving to the TikTok alternative RedNote. But it’s ALSO based in China, and experts say it poses even greater security risks.
3. This just in: Young adults like TikTok. In a new survey, 73% of 13- to 39-year-olds in the U.S. said they don’t support a TikTok ban.
