The ongoing feud between U.S. officials and TikTok – the Chinese-owned company – continues. But the notorious ban of the social media app seems all the more real now that the deadline is only days away.
The Beijing-based company ByteDance was given a nine-month deadline in April 2024 to find a U.S-approved buyer and sell. By failing to do so, their app will effectively be banned throughout the nation. President Joe Biden had signed his approval of the bill after it was passed by the U.S. Congress, and the Jan. 19, 2025 deadline approaches fast. No agreements have since been met however, and many of the app’s 170 million U.S. users remain anxiously waiting. As well as being a popular social media app and largely entertainment-based, over 7 million of the active U.S. users are small- and mid-sized businesses set to be impacted by the potential loss of a key marketing tool.
The U.S. Justice Department initially called for ByteDance to sell, accusing the company of allegedly having links to the Chinese government. With all its access to data on millions of Americans, they have claimed that TikTok is “a national security threat of immense depth and scale”.
The ban will only stop the availability of the social media platform on all app stores, so rest assured it will not be deleted from your phone. It will however, incur fines of up to $5,000 per user with illegal access to the app for those making it available.
Relevant to this case is President-elect Donald Trump taking office on January 20th, a day after the ban’s deadline. In December 2024, he asked the Supreme Court to delay the ban as he calls for a “political solution”. In this, there seems to be hope for the app.
Regardless, many users, calling themselves “TikTok refugees”, have turned to the Chinese app RedNote in desperation. RedNote, described as a mix of Instagram and TikTok, was Apple’s U.S. App Store’s most downloaded app on Monday. These numbers could indicate that many don’t have very high hopes for the app evading its ban. But nothing is set in stone just yet and all we can do is wait in suspense.
