2025 TikTok Whiplash

Brielle Loveland
Staff Writer
 TikTok faced the threat of a ban in the United states, where over 170 million United States users supposably will lose access on January 19th, 2025. The TikTok ban has been a continuous issue in recent years with significant political, social, and economic implications. In 2020,the Trump administration had concerns over national security and data privacy, arguing that TikTok, owned by the Chinese company ByteDance, could potentially share user data with the Chinese government showing a threat to the US National Security. This sparked the debate on the balance between National Security and freedom of expression. The Supreme Court recently brought up the decision to weigh in on the tiktok ban; this was a movement on the ongoing idea from 2020. Ultimately, they decided to block the ban citing insignificant evidence of an intermediate threat to National Security and expressed concerns over the potential violation of First Amendment rights. 
  The Supreme court brought up the issue again and brought in the CEO of the company, and he decided to just temporarily ban the app until Trump entered office to “save TikTok.” Many users online were upset about this decision and stated that it was a violation of their first amendment  rights. Others were just upset that they were not going to be able to use the app in general, while some users genuinely did not care at all. 
  UPDATE: On January 19th, the app sent a notification declaring a temporary ban around 8:00 p.m. That night the app was unable to be used. On January 20th, about 12 to 15 hours later the app was made accessible by American users. Many people have experienced that if they have deleted the app they will not be able to find TikTok in the app store, due to unknown reasons this caused a multitude of people to start selling their old phones that still have tik tok installed and putting them on ebay and other websites.

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