TikTok has had a rough few days after the app was temporarily banned last Saturday but was almost immediately unbanned the next day. Senior J.R. Caine said, “It’s really whatever, I wasn’t super attached to it.” As one of the first orders of his presidency, Donald Trump ordered the federal government to wait until April 5, 2025, to allow TikTok’s Chinese parent company ByteDance to sell a majority stake in TikTok, reach a deal with Trump, or sell the app to an American owner. In interviews, Trump stated during a speech on January 21 that the U.S. is entitled to get 50% of TikTok and warned China against trying to block any deal made by him saying he would consider that an act of “hostility” and “put tariffs of 25%, 30%, 50%, even 100%.”
The ban on TikTok has affected many Americans in a wide variety of ways, from losing a time suck to losing a source of income. According to NBC, “Almost two million creators in the United States would suffer almost $300 million in lost earnings.” 170 million creators and businesses rely on the platform as a primary source of income or to advertise themselves. The permanent or extended ban after the seventy-five-day delay Trump provided could cause many people and businesses to fall into financial trouble. This money problem isn’t just with people and businesses though, it’s also impacting two of the biggest corporations in the world: Alphabet, the corporation that owns Google with a total asset count of $402.4 billion, and Apple with a total asset count of $364.98 billion. Senator Tom Cotton, R-Ark., who chairs the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, warned that “any company that hosts, distributes, services or otherwise facilitates communist-controlled TikTok could face hundreds of billions of dollars of ruinous liability” according to CNN.
The ban has also sparked protests of various forms among the American public. Many Americans are moving to the Chinese-owned Xiaohongshu or RedNote. The app largely reflects TikTok in its appearance and usage but that’s not the primary reason behind the move. An estimated half a million users moved over to spite the U.S. government essentially saying through actions, “If you ban one app we’ll just move onto another just like it.” There have been more extreme actions taken because of the TikTok ban. The New York Post reports that “A Wisconsin teen set fire to a local Republican congressman’s office Sunday in an alleged rage over the TikTok ban, authorities say.” The teen was apprehended but no injuries were reported at the location of the fire.
