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The Supreme Court announced Friday that it will allow the TikTok ban to go into effect, as some politicians — you know, the people who pushed for the ban in the first place — suddenly scramble to delay it. Access to the app could be fully restricted in the United States on January 19 unless TikTok’s owner, Chinese company ByteDance, agrees to sell its U.S. arm to a buyer approved by the U.S. government.
Users are, to put it mildly, pissed. As Teen Vogue has reported, young people don’t buy Congress’ argument that the Chinese government could use the app to gain access to sensitive user data. After all, U.S. companies sweep up huge amounts of user data all the time. And TikTok is a vital source of news and entertainment for millions of young Americans, as well as an organizing hub and a source of income for creators.
As the ban draws closer, users are blasting their elected officials for having totally out-of-whack priorities.
Several made sure to get a jab in at Meta, Mark Zuckerberg’s behemoth that reportedly planted the seeds to set this ban in action. 404 Media’s Jason Koebler reports that Zuck has dreamed of this moment: “[The TikTok ban] would be U.S. intervention against the most credible competitor Meta has seen in years, and U.S. intervention to kill a superior product to the benefit of an American company.”
One video spliced midwest emo guitars over someone saying straight-to-camera, “But, but China stealing your data! I don't care. I would drop-ship my DNA to the front door of the Chinese Communist Party before I watch an Instagram reel.” Another TikTok, with over 100,000 likes, made fun of the fact that people would rather read a book or “work on their mental health” then go back to Instagram.
Indeed, some users have recently rushed to Chinese-owned short-form video app Xiaohongshu, or RedNote, directly gifting their user data, out of spite for the ban and “as a general f*ck-you to the American ruling class,” as Matt Novak opined for Gizmodo. One TikTok, with over 250,000 likes, explained how to try to hurt the pockets of billionaires like Zuck by making it harder for platforms to accrue revenue off your data.
The opposition to Meta’s TikTok clone Reels isn’t just about the politics of its parent company — it’s also that, many users say, the user experience is just junky. But trust, the politics are part of it: The company recently announced changes to its user policies, including allowing users to suggest that being LGBTQ+ is “mental illness” and loosened restrictions around topics like immigration — a move that 404 says is “laying the narrative groundwork” for Trump’s mass deportation plans. More significantly, as creator Imani Barbarin says in a TikTok with nearly a million likes, “Everybody has my data.” As I’ve explained previously, the data privacy concerns attributed to TikTok, in part used to justify the ban, are prevalent across all social media conglomerates.
The timing of all of these developments has particular political resonance, as the second Trump administration begins the day after the ban goes into effect. Journalists, librarians, educators and activists are already anticipating a new wave of censorship come January 20, 2025. After all, politicians like Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) openly admitted they took the TikTok ban more seriously after realizing the app was a key platform for pro-Palestine sentiment. Given all the serious existential and material quandaries facing Americans, why are politicians so willing to get rid of a platform that helped people stay informed, gave them a source of income — or just provided them with extremely silly trends or memes?
As one creator posted, “You can’t take away the circus when people can’t afford bread. We don’t have healthcare, we don’t have affordable housing, we can’t afford groceries… and your move is to get rid of the one free piece of entertainment, joy and distraction we have left?”
In one popular post captioned “just start deactivating your meta/x accounts,” a user vented, “Forget the medical industry or the fact that they haven’t done anything to solve school shootings… [politicians are] using a Sinophobic notion of national security to try and convince you that your data is in safer hands with Musk or Zuckerberg or whoever.” (The user has seemingly moved to Red Note.)
Roughly six in 10 teenagers say they use TikTok regularly, according to Pew Research Center. According to Pew, public support for the ban has steadily declined over time, and last summer was at 32%. Last fall, Pew found that about 4 in 10 young adults regularly got their news on the platform, as well as 17% of all adults.
If a ban goes into effect this weekend, if the videos are eventually all taken down and removed, it’s difficult, if not impossible, to quantify the loss of art and culture that’s been grown and cultivated on the app — the bizarre, the quirky, the original and innovative. There’s one user whose content has been fed to me several times over the years via the mysterious algorithm, who posted about the potential of the lights going dim on a stage that has utterly skewed our sense of digital scale.
“Billionaires control the world and still don’t have enough. They want more,” they wrote over a video of them dancing with a bald eagle (I can’t explain this in a way that makes sense, sorry). “This isn’t about DATA. They don’t want us to realize we can organize and exercise our rights. We hold power and I’m not giving up without a fight.” (By this point, an animated alligator — I think — is two-stepping.) “It’s not over, it’s only the beginning,” the captions continue. “If they think a TikTok ban will stop us, they don’t understand.”
