Image: TikTok splash screen iOS via Solen Feyissa (Unsplash)
The day before the TikTok ban, I watched a concerning amount of videos of content creators tearfully saying goodbye to their audience and letting them know where to find them. Celebrities revealed their secrets, and people I followed revealed that they’d been either hiding or lying about things for years. Small business owners feared that their source of income would be taken away and that their livelihoods would never recover after what they saw as the government ruining their lives. I closed the app at about 10 p.m., fully expecting the ban to be permanent.
I was desolate, and not just because I am — admittedly — chronically online. I was worried about what this would mean for our government. I remember various parents and friends telling me to be grateful for the United States, as they didn’t ban social media apps like Russia and China and, formerly, Tunisia. We called those countries what they were: controlling at best and dictatorships at worst. Now, the U.S.was joining that list.
When I woke up, I opened TikTok to see what had transpired. I was then greeted with a message. Sure enough, TikTok was supposedly forced to go dark. I see the sentence, “We are fortunate that President Trump has indicated that he will work with us on a solution to reinstate TikTok once he takes office,” and I actually wanted to scream. My immediate thought was, “I have never heard this amount of sucking up in my life.”
Later that day, I saw on X that TikTok was usable again, after only half a day of being banned. I am then greeted with this message:
“In agreement with our service providers, TikTok is in the process of restoring service. We thank President Trump for providing the necessary clarity and assurance to our service providers that they will face no penalties providing TikTok to over 170 million Americans…. We will work with President Trump on a long-term solution that keeps TikTok in the United States.”
I was admittedly surprised that Shou Chew, who had been victim to xenophobic comments by the U.S. government and had a company that was being unfairly targeted and accused of being a threat to national security was now being seen making videos thanking Trump and siding with the U.S. government. I like to see the good in people, and I wanted to see at least one CEO who didn’t sacrifice his own morals for money and fame. I had respect for Chew prior to this stunt. He, after all, created an app that prioritized free speech and discourse in a way apps owned by Meta do not.
The day the ban was enacted and repealed was one of the most surreal days of my life. Creators awkwardly went back to the app after either crying their eyes out or revealing one of their most embarrassing secrets. People could tell something was off, especially after Chew’s message praising President Trump — one of the most powerful political endorsements I have seen in my lifetime. Many have pointed out that this endorsement on an app that many children spend their days on could easily swing them to the side of conservatism even if they didn’t know much about politics in the first place. It was disconcerting to see such a power play being used to indoctrinate the youth in the one way people could reach them.
And then people started noticing the apparent censorship starting to appear on the app. It had already existed to some extent for quite some time, with words such as “lesbian” and “die/kill” being censored, with people having to invent new terms such as “unalive” in order to appease the algorithm. But what began to happen after the ban was unlike anything that had been seen before. Many people began having problems posting left-leaning political content on the app, and some phrases such as “Free Palestine” and “Free Luigi” came up as unavailable upon searching. And after Trump made comments alluding to rigging the election, this was censored on TikTok as well.
However, some have pointed out that to say only leftist content was being censored would be disinformation. A user on Reddit noted he “was able to search for words like fascist and do see vids very critical of the govt and Trump and Musk.”
Similar initiatives have been reported to happen on Instagram, an app owned by Meta, where reproductive rights organizations have faced silencing and fact checkers have been replaced with a “community notes” system, as a way to further misinformation and disinformation. Such cases have been occurring as early as 2024, albeit in countries in the Global South.
I cannot write about the TikTok ban without writing about Rednote, which could be an article on its own. In light of the impending ban, millions of Americans flocked to the Chinese social media app in order to show the U.S.government who they were dealing with. This resulted in measures being taken to make the app more accessible to foreigners, and the Americans and Chinese netizens bonding and sharing information about each other’s cultures. It seems that Americans really did want to make an effort to learn about China, with users learning Mandarin on Duolingo surging around the time people joined the app. Reportedly, many Chinese were outraged and surprised about how Americans were treated by their government, and the Americans were surprised at how they were, in part, lied to about China, and how in love the Chinese were with accused assassin Luigi Mangione. Who would have thought that it would take the government meddling with Americans for them to finally unlearn their Sinophobia and break the cycle?
Of course, there are caveats to this. Many Chinese are feeling very uncomfortable with how much of a spectacle they are being treated as by the American “refugees.” Additionally, because Rednote is a functionally different app than TikTok and was censoring discourse on a larger scale, particularly when it came to topics such as the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre and Chinese Communist Party’s treatment of Uyghurs. I do not disagree that China has positives in its government, and the middle class certainly has a better quality of life than ours does. But just like every other country, it has flaws, and I think people should read a book.
So, where do we go from here? What are we even supposed to think? Regardless of how one feels, the TikTok ban was a step against free speech and the First Amendment that used China stealing our data as an excuse, as if the U.S. isn’t stealing our data anyway! The Democratic Party utterly failed us, going through with the Republican-backed ban despite the public being very much against it, and then letting the Republican Party take the credit for saving it, thereby indoctrinating a bunch of impressionable children! Many wouldn’t be surprised if the Democratic Party never won their audience back again, though that all depends on the success of the current administration. Either way, it is both incompetence and manipulation that are turning people away from the party, and it is a reassurance that they aren’t actively participating in the oligarchy as much as the other.
At the end of the day, we have bigger fish to fry under this administration and no time to waste. We must fight tyranny when we see it, or TikTok will be the least valuable thing we have lost!
Emily Rutz is a first-year English major. ER1034711@wcupa.edu