One staple to many teens’ morning routine is the morning scroll. To open their eyes and immediately reach for their phones to wake up a little. The predominant app of this morning scroll is TikTok. The end of 2024 brought rumors of TikTok being banned, but there had been similar rumors before but the ban never did happen. However, at 10:30 pm on January 19, 2025 users’ scrolls were interrupted with a message saying that, at the time, TikTok would be offline. For the next 14 hours the app was dark and then the next day the app came back online with another message saying that “Due to President Trump’s efforts” the app would be available in the US once again.

With the ban brought serious concerns that our rights as US citizens might have been breached. The reasoning being that TikTok is a major source of news and income for many Americans, which is very sensible. The only grounds on which the Supreme Court could ban a major communicative app like TikTok is that it posed a significant and imminent threat to national security. Many believe that the government has not actually met that standard. The national security threats consisted of the Chinese government being able to manipulate content and gain access to sensitive user data through the app. Arguably, this was true but other US companies are also passing along our data to the Chinese Government anyway. This leaves many conspiracy theorists to speculate that the government is not actually concerned with protecting national security, but they are trying to silence an app that provides a major source of news from many different perspectives. 

The TikTok ban had been manifesting for a while. In 2020, President Donald Trump  issued an executive order citing TikTok’s ability to capture vast amounts of user data as a significant national security threat. This gave the parent company, ByteDance, a chance to divest its U.S. TikTok operations and user data, but these efforts were put on hold as negotiations with the Biden Administration aimed at a non-divestiture agreement, but did not resolve the government’s concerns. This was due to the fact that ByteDance is subject to Chinese laws that mandates that the company cooperates with Chinese Government Intelligence to access and control private data. 

So, if TikTok really does pose a significant national security threat, why is it back? President Trump promised to sign an executive order following his inauguration the next Monday, January 20, 2025. TikTok said Trump’s promise to save the app allowed the app to open back up for US users even before the expected executive order was signed. The executive order is simply just an extension for the US government and ByteDance to negotiate a way to keep the app available in the United States and find a solution to the national security issues. President Trump says that the solution will likely be to sell to an American owner and make it a “50-50 joint venture” between the two. The issue is, many government officials, from both sides of the aisle, say that the app should not come back unless all ties to China are severed and only then will the national security issues be resolved. After all, the law banning TikTok received a lot of bipartisan support when it was being passed. The only two solutions are to pass another law reversing the first one (which would be extremely difficult because there was vast support for the ban) or to sell to an American owner (which will also prove to be difficult because TikTok has said they have no desire to sell). 

Whether or not TikTok will be permanently banned is still up in the air. There’s a good chance that the overwhelming love and support for the app will continue to delay the ban or get rid of it all together. But there’s also a chance that the US will have to move to another app, with less of an addicting algorithm.