On the night of January 18, at around 10 p.m., TikTok users were greeted with a dystopian final message to the U.S citizens:
“We regret that a U.S. law banning TikTok will take effect on January 19 and force us to make our services temporarily unavailable. We’re working to restore our service in the U.S. as soon as possible, and we appreciate your support. Please stay tuned.”
It appeared that TikTok had officially been banned.
However, about 12 hours later, access to TikTok in the United States was restored with a new pop-up message greeting users, praising then-president-elect Donald Trump.
“Welcome back! Thanks for your patience and support,” the message read. “As a result of President Trump’s efforts, TikTok is back in the U.S.!.”
Since then the company CEO has spoken positively about how he hopes President Trump would protect the app from enforcement of the law passed by Congress in the spring of 2024. The law forces TikTok’s Chinese parent company, ByteDance, to sell its stake in the app or be cut off from the U.S. market. Despite this, TikTok is currently not on any of the app stores because of concern by these companies they could suffer large fines.
But Trump caused the end of TikTok just as much as he tried to take credit for saving it. Since 2020, there has been a constant lingering fear of TikTok being banned. This ban has loomed over the United States for a while. However, now that it has officially happened, the one man who proposed this ban is now turning it on its head, trying to appeal more to the youth.
During Donald Trump’s first term, he declared the ban necessary for the safety of the American people. He claimed that the Chinese government was stealing American user data, and selling it to the Chinese communist party, leaving the U.S. vulnerable to Chinese spies.
Consequently, to try and combat this he signed an executive order in August of 2020 to ban it. However, this executive order was blocked by the courts, saving TikTok addicts for another few years.
Someone must have told Trump that TikTok users love him because he claimed in a December press conference that he now has a warm spot in his heart for TikTok because he allegedly won the youth vote by 34 points.
Despite his claim that he won the youth vote, several exit polls show that Vice President Kamala Harris won 51 to 54 percent of voters under 30, leading Mr. Trump among those voters by 4 to 12 points.
There have always been a lot of negative opinions about Trump spread on TikTok, so it would make sense if he supports a ban. Considering how much time he spends posting on his own social media app Truth Social, he is likely not aware of what happens on TikTok.
Many people from Akins have said that TikTok is how they get informed on important matters happening in places you would probably never see coverage for. Younger generations don’t typically receive the majority of their news from TV or newspapers. The proposal to ban the app made it look like he was trying to violate the rights of the young people who dominate the user base of the app. Unfortunately, oftentimes the younger generations are easily influenced by things in short-form content apps like TikTok or Instagram reels. If they see that their favorite app is promised to be restored, then their opinions may change without giving much thought to what else Trump might want to do with his new power.
To further push the chances of youth siding with him, he started making posts on the app before the election, with captions going along the lines of “Why would I ban TikTok?”, when just 4 years ago he was hellbent on getting rid of the app, claiming it was spyware, made by the Chinese communist party to brainwash young Americans.
Now it seems Trump has fallen back on his words. To try and keep the app, he signed an executive order that gives ByteDance 75 days to sell to an American owner to comply with the law that Congress passed. This all seems like he was trying to do anything to turn the negative dialogue among the younger and middle-aged users of the app away from him and into a more positive light.
While Trump seems to relish the idea of being the person who “saved TikTok” it might be him who ultimately gets played by the TikTok CEO who attended Trump’s inauguration.
By shutting down the app for a short time, TikTok gave its regular users a taste of what their lives would be like without the app. And it created a brief standoff that Trump could use to make himself appear to be the savior if only for a short period.
Now that TikTok has somewhat returned, people did praise him for restoring the app, saying that we should be grateful that we elected him. The other half did not praise Trump. Conspiracies and stories are still pouring into people’s TikTok feeds. Thousands of videos of concerned people from all across the country and world, worried about the state of America and where it’s headed. After all, our government just took a big step into seeing what they can get away with.
It’s ironic that fear that TikTok could be used for propaganda purposes against the American public seems to have now come true in the form of push notifications to users to praise Trump. TikTok’s leaders were smart to take themselves offline for a brief time and then praise Trump for allegedly working to save the app. The question is who is getting played by TikTok — Trump, the American people or both?
