What Happened with the U.S. TikTok Ban?

It’s on everyone’s phones, it’s the starting point of every trend, and it’s constantly under attack. TikTok is currently one of the most popular social media apps available, especially among Gen Z. It’s also one of the more controversial ones. Despite the fun dances and trends it gives us, the app has been threatened numerous times with varying charges and accusations. These lead to the rumours that it was going to be banned in the United States earlier this year. But then it wasn’t. 

The turbulent standing of TikTok in the United States goes back further than you might think. 

TikTok was originally founded by Chinese-owned company ByteDance in 2016. It was designed as a foreign version of the app Douyin, a similar video-sharing platform for Chinese audiences. Early in TikTok’s youth, however, it was already facing controversy. In 2019, TikTok was charged with violating United States child-privacy laws, and forced to pay a 5.7 million dollar fine. In November of the same year, the US began its federal investigations of the app as a potential threat to national security. By this point, TikTok had become one of the most downloaded apps globally.

It wasn’t until 2020 that banning TikTok was in discussion. In July of 2020, India banned TikTok and other Chinese apps for national security reasons. This ban meant that Tiktok had lost its largest foreign market outside of China. The same year, U.S. President Donald Trump issued an executive order banning American companies from dealing transactions with ByteDance, which resulted in TikTok suing the Trump administration. ByteDance insisted that TikTok didn’t store U.S. user information in China and that it was not any more intrusive than apps owned by Facebook or Google. 

The Trump administration continued their efforts to sell TikTok to an American-owned company up to the end of 2020, when U.S. President Joe Biden was elected. In 2021, the Biden administration postponed and eventually ended the legal cases against TikTok. TikTok would be relatively safe in the next few years, though this didn’t spare the app from criticism. 

Despite the app’s youth, harmful material had become rampant on TikTok. This was especially true for the promotion of eating disorders. Several reports discovered that the TikTok algorithms had been pushing rapid weight loss trends and self-harm material that would be especially damaging to the younger audiences that use the app. Moreover, the app continued to face accusations of accessing private user data. 

Talks of banning TikTok came about again in March of 2024, when the U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill to ban TikTok unless it was sold to a U.S. company. This ban would force Apple and Google to remove TikTok from their app stores in the U.S. In early January of 2025, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the law and set the ban for January 19th. 

However, in a surprising twist, U.S. President Donald Trump signed an executive order delaying the ban for 75 days. Nevertheless, the conditions remain the same: TikTok has to sell to an American company. In total, TikTok was banned for about 12 hours in the United States before being re-opened. But this rescue doesn’t necessarily mean TikTok is safe yet. Whether or not it will be sold to an American company, or be banned again, is really up in the air as of now. Another possibility is that there will be a partial ban. Countries like Australia, Canada, Norway, and the United Kingdom have banned TikTok from all government devices for fears of national security and foreign intrusion. However, the app is still used by the general populace of these countries. 

There’s no denying the influence TikTok has on our lives. For many of us, it may be our primary news and media source. However, it goes without saying that we should always stay updated on the app’s standing and security. We’ll see how this possible ban is dealt with in the near future.

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