TikTok creators posted tearful farewells and encouraged followers to find them on other less lucrative platforms on Jan. 18, 2025, the day the popular social media app went dark.
For a solid fourteen hours, 170 million Americans had to figure out another way to spend their time, including signing up to learn Mandarin on Duolingo to navigate RedNote, the suggested TikTok replacement.
Then, as quickly as it had disappeared, TikTok reappeared and the nation rejoiced.
This ban was the culmination of a five-year-long dance between the United States federal government and ByteDance, the Chinese company that owns TikTok. The first whispers of a nationwide TikTok ban appeared in 2020 from President Donald Trump. He floated the possibility of a ban to punish China for their handling of COVID-19.
Since then, the app has been the subject of several restrictive executive orders and bans by the Pentagon and both the Trump and Biden administrations.
Finally, in 2024, both houses of Congress passed a law requiring one of two outcomes – either ByteDance would sell TikTok to an American interest, or the app would be nationally banned. The purpose of this legislation was reportedly to protect the data of American citizens from the Chinese government.
Amid all this political grandstanding, some real problems with the app are being ignored. In 2019, TikTok was forced to pay $5.7 million in fines for violating U.S. child privacy laws, a practice which some say continued after the settlement.
NPR’s clever reverse-redaction of court documents reveals the company’s blatant disregard of their users’ mental health in favor of profit. They know the app is addictive and interferes with “essential personal responsibilities.” They know high usage correlates with loss of empathy and increased anxiety, and yet they’ve done nothing substantial to change course.
Even worse, the NPR investigation uncovered an ugly pattern of poor content moderation allowing atrocious material to be posted, seen and popularized. Videos promoting suicide, self-harm, eating disorders and violence have all managed to gain traction, slipping past both AI and human moderation.
TikTok’s moderation is especially abysmal around the sexualization of children; by their own admission, 100% of posts that fetishize minors persist on the app despite being in violation of policies.
Whether a threat to national security exists, there are concrete, inarguable reasons to ban, limit or drastically change TikTok. There are also reasons to allow TikTok to continue, including the welfare of businesses that rely on it and the rights established by the First Amendment.
The law to ban TikTok was passed by Congress, signed by former President Biden and upheld by the Supreme Court. When President Trump came into power and neutralized the law, it raised the question of whether the United States is falling into authoritarianism.
So far, the public’s response has made it clear that if the result is desirable, the lack of due process is not concerning. This could lead to deeper implications in the future if this way of thinking continues.
