The Scene staff
After years of threats and power moves, TikTok and its editing counterpart, CapCut, were finally banned in the United States over concerns of Chinese information-gathering and U.S. security.
Both apps went dark on Jan. 18, 2025, a day earlier than expected. The ban lasted only 14 hours due to President Donald Trump’s action to postpone it. Yet, in a surprising (and suspicious) twist, only TikTok was enabled for those who didn’t delete the app, and now you can’t download either app from the app store.
While strange, one could ask why so many people have been spooked by this. Well, let’s take a deeper look.
Beginning in September 2019, two years after Musical.ly merged with TikTok, the Washington Post reported that, unlike other social media platforms, TikTok avoided discussions on sensitive topics like protests in Hong Kong. Its Chinese-owned parent company, ByteDance, stateded that the platform was for entertainment, not politics. The same year, U.S. politicians began raising concerns about TikTok’s potential to influence the public and possibly threaten national security.
By November 2019, investigations had been launched into TikTok, its acquisition of Musical.ly and other Chinese-owned apps. In December 2019, the Pentagon banned TikTok for all military personnel, removing it from government devices by January 2020. In May 2020, privacy groups accused TikTok of violating child-protection laws in the United States.
By then, ByteDance had hired former Disney executive Kevin Mayer as TikTok’s CEO, hoping to improve the company’s image. Mayer resigned three months later. In July 2020, India banned TikTok and several other Chinese apps after a border conflict with China.
Meanwhile, Trump suggested banning TikTok in retaliation for China’s handling of COVID-19. He signed an executive order to force ByteDance to sell TikTok to an American company, like Microsoft. After negotiations failed, TikTok sued the Trump administration over due-process violations.
Biden became president in 2021, and legal actions against TikTok were put on hold, but concerns didn’t go away. In June 2021, BuzzFeed reported that ByteDance employees had accessed private TikTok user data. Rather than respond to the claims made by BuzzFeed, TikTok said it moved its data to U.S. servers managed by the tech company Oracle. Officials worried China could access U.S. info.
In December 2022, FBI Director Christopher Wray raised alarms about the potential for China to use TikTok’s algorithms to influence public opinion.
Meanwhile, ByteDance fired employees who had accessed data on BuzzFeed journalists. By February 2023, the White House had ordered federal agencies to remove TikTok from all government devices due to security concerns. In March 2023, TikTok’s CEO, Shou Zi Chew, testified before Congress, denying ties between TikTok and the Chinese government. As the year continued, Congress debated a new bill to ban TikTok or force ByteDance to sell it to a U.S. company.
This led to the “ban-or-sell” legislation, passed in the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate in overwhelmingly bipartisan votes and signed by Biden in April.
TikTok sued the government, claiming the law was unconstitutional. Then came June. Despite attempting to ban TikTok multiple times, Trump joined the platform, promoting his presidential campaign, a move mirrored by his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, in July.
Two events took place in December. The first occurred on Dec. 6, when a federal appeals court unanimously upheld the TikTok ban, dismissing TikTok and ByteDance’s challenge to the ban-or-sell legislation. On Dec. 27, Trump, then president-elect, asked the Supreme Court to postpone the ban’s enforcement until his administration could pursue a “political resolution.”
The ban went into effect on Jan. 18, but it was quickly lifted when Trump signed an executive order shortly after his inauguration. It gave TikTok an extra 75 days to comply with the ban-or-sell law, known officially as the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act.
It’s not surprising people viewed the short ban with suspicion, especially since many discussions about Trump and his administration seem to be missing from Facebook, Instagram and TikTok despite the abundance of content regarding these topics. The “#Democrat” tag has also disappeared.
Former TikTok users migrated to RedNote (known as Xiaohongshu in China) in response to TikTok’s questionable nature. While dubbed “Chinese TikTok,” the actual Chinese version is “Douyin” and inaccessible to Americans.
While using RedNote, “TikTok refugees” have encountered many kind-hearted Chinese people and learned about their culture, despite both of our governments’ efforts to keep their people separate. In an ironic twist, the claim that TikTok threatened national security and its short ban has pushed U.S. citizens closer to China than ever before.
And so I ask, how many of you are currently learning Mandarin?