The popular app TikTok, has been a topic of discussion for years with the question of whether or not it should be banned. TikTok has escaped the heat every other year, but this time, it wasn’t sliding by so easily. TikTok, the popular short-formed social media app, started in 2017 and it similarly reflects previous apps like Vine and Musical.ly. TikTok has proven to be an outlet for many different creators over the past few years and has become an influential media platform in our society. The app first became popular in late spring of 2019 for dancing, but during the COVID-19 pandemic, it gained more popularity and topics diversified.
This is not the first time that TikTok being banned has been the topic of conversation; in July of 2020 when India banned TikTok, other countries started to realize the security threats that the app may pose and took steps to ban it as well. This occurred in the August of 2021 and June of 2022. Since then, the topic of the ban has reoccurred every year from 2020 to now 2025.
During the week of the ban, a bill was introduced to the U.S. Congress by Senator Ed Markey that would delay the ban by 270 days. Despite his efforts, this bill did not get enforced due to one Congress member’s disagreement to the plan. This meant that when January 19th came around, TikTok would no longer be accessible to people inside the United States.
The app ended up shutting down on the 18th at 10:30pm, along with other ByteDance apps like CapCut and Lemon8. Before TikTok was shut down, many users found the app was lagging, glitching, and not allowing users to post videos. When 10:30pm came around, the app did not kick out users; it simply would not let users scroll, and a message would pop up on the screen saying that the app was shut down. During this time, TikTok was also removed from all app stores.
The ByteDance apps were brought back the afternoon of the 19th, but Americans still couldn’t download TikTok or any other ByteDance appliances. This meant that people could only go on the app and use it as normal if they already had it downloaded prior to the ban. This left many more people panicking and deleting TikTok after it was temporarily banned.
The response of this ban seemed to be that there are much bigger issues to be focused on than TikTok and that the government needs to prioritize other conflicts. Overall, the TikTok ban seemed to put many Americans into a spiral, and although the app is back now, the fate of TikTok is still uncertain.
