When Tiktok was banned the night of Jan. 18, users were surprised the plan was followed through. Bans had been moved back through the years, leaving many skeptical the the ban would happen.
The threat of ban seemed trivial, as this is certainly not the first time this news story arose. In December 2019, a Tiktok ban was issued for all U.S. military personnel. The next year, India banned TikTok and President Donald Trump said he would follow suit for China mishandling the Covid-19 pandemic. Trump signed the 2020 executive order banning the TikTok platform if it was not sold by the Chinese company Byte-Dance. When President Joe Biden came into office, he postponed Trump’s plan for TikTok. In 2023, there was a six-hour congressional hearing when U.S. Legislators interrogated TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew who attempted to push off allegations of the app being used as a tool of the Chinese government.
In 2024, Biden signed the Ban-or-Sell Bill, which prompted TikTok and its Chinese parent company ByteDance to sue the U.S. federal government and challenge the law, claiming it was unconstitutional and against the first amendment. In December 2024, the Supreme Court ruled against Tiktok.
When TikTok’s ban was lifted on Jan. 19, CEO Chew announced that President Trump was working with TikTok to bring it back. This sparked questions, considering Trump was the one to initiate the bill banning TikTok in his first term. The complete 360° is confusing.
The U.S. government has cried wolf more than once, no wonder users expected the app’s revival. The “fake-out” of the TikTok ban led content creators to expose secrets that gained them their influence preemptively.
Others never feared a ban would reach reality. The app has been removed from Google Applications as well as the Apple Play Store. For those who never deleted TikTok, the app is still cut from critical software updates, meaning the app will stop updating and eventually crash.
“I deleted TikTok as soon as the ban came through,” senior Cade Beck said. “Now I can’t redownload it”.
This represents the first time in U.S. history that the government has outlawed a widely popular social media network.
The basis of the ban was fear of data collection and privacy theft. In the 2023 Supreme Court case, legislators harassed CEO Chew on this stance, who addressed concerned questions by stating that the app’s policy is not any different from the majority of major companies. The court was alarmed when the app’s terms of service used face recognition and identification, however, upon enlightenment from Chew, the court recieved an explanation on how filters work. They need to see and analyze shapes and faces on the screen to generate filters, or images, on your face. Past facial recognition and data are then deleted.
In the terms-of-service agreement and privacy policy, last updated Aug. 19. 2024, TikTok says the only time data privacy is disclosed is under infringement of other agreements, such as ignoring community guidelines.
Videos that are posted publicly, meaning anyone can view them, are saved by the app. For people who say that their “phones are listening,” it’s true. All apps use data across other apps and web searches on your device to curate content for its users. This is not a scary “Chinese” associated app feature. These are agreed to in the TikTok Privacy Policy and are used to curate a content algorithm. In the U.S. application, Facebook, the privacy policy and terms and agreements are nearly identical to that of TikTok.
“We use information we collect to provide a personalized experience to you, including ads, along with the other purposes we explain in detail below,” the Meta Privacy Policy states. “For some of these purposes, we use information across our Products and across your devices. The information we use for these purposes is automatically processed by our systems. But in some cases, we also use manual review to access and review your information.”
The solution is simple; if you don’t want your information collected, don’t get the app. Don’t sign the terms and agreement policy. On military devices, a safety measure to avoid social media applications makes sense. For the regular person, however, there is typically no data to hide. If you do, don’t get the app—or any social media app for that matter. Do we only care about TikTok because of who owns it and where the information goes?
“Whatever information TikTok is collecting about me, they can have,” junior Hadassah Hanson said. “It’s the same policy as Instagram anyway.”
These apps are more than just content; they are small businesses and communities that have been growing since 2014 when the platform was known as musical.ly.
Gazette reporter Bryan Busch, wrote the article “State of Mind: Is TikTok Worth the Time,” stating that we should focus our efforts on small businesses and local communities, not an app.
Busch, and many others, do not realize that until the “Support Local” movement is implemented worldwide, individuals cannot survive without the help of international platforms–these businesses cannot withstand moving off TikTok. Coexisting on the app, communities that have formed cannot be replicated on another platform.
jarron weber • Feb 20, 2025 at 10:01 am
i think this is great