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TikTok, Time is Running Out

Elana Hastie

Staff Writer

On Jan. 19, TikTok was banned from operating in the United States unless sold to an American company. The idea of a ban, originally introduced by the Trump administration during his first term, was fully realized in April 2024 when Congress passed and president Biden signed a ban into law.

 

According to AP News, TikTok has been around for ten years. The app was founded by Alex Zhu and Luyu Yang from Shanghai, China. First emerging on the App Store in America as Music.ly in 2015, the app was a means for teens to lip sync along with their favorite songs. However, the Chinese company Byte Dance acquired Music.ly in 2017 and merged it with the iconic app now known as TikTok. This merge changed the state of social media forever with the introduction and popularization of the short-form media algorithm.

 

“I started using TikTok in 2017 when I was 13, I thought it was something different and new” said Ferne Koorne, sonography and fine arts major. For some college students, this app is a part of their social sphere, and their understanding of pop culture as a whole.

 

“It keeps me updated on what’s new and popular” stated Finn Culver, who’s a voice major. They also mention TikTok as a creative outlet, “I post a lot of my art stuff on it.”

 

The app features an endless stream of recipes, memes, dance challenges, emerging musical artists, muk-bangs and fan edits.

 

“I love how there’s a community for everything, literally everything, even niche topics,” said Gabrielle Henderson. For how wide reaching TikTok can be, such unmitigated access to exposure can lead to misinformation. “The accessibility of it is one of the best and worst parts of TikTok … lots of people flooding in when they don’t know what they’re talking about,” said Hednerson.

 

While misinformation remains a hot topic, the app has been caught discreetly shadow-banning content. Instead of outright deleting or removing an account’s access to a platform, shadowing-banning is a term used to refer to when a creator or piece of content gets far less exposure than what would typically be expected. Because of this, creators on TikTok often have to be creative with their wording to get full exposure. Posts are rife with terms such as “Unalive” instead of die or kill, or “Seggs and Corn” instead of sex or porn. Free speech isn’t outright denied, but hushed.

 

In 2019 the Washington Post reported that Pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong were well underway and being posted online to several different platforms. However the coverage on TikTok was almost nonexistent. Representatives for TikTok countered, assuring that content moderation is handled on American soil and stating that the application is meant for personal amusement, not politics

 

Furthermore, the app is littered with harmful content, including pushing extreme diet trends onto impressionable young audiences. TikTok addressed this in 2022, by adjusting their rule book after the Wall Street Journal released a report on the issue. However some worry about the long term effects the app has on children who’ve grown up with it. “These kids have no desire or capability to lead themselves through something or figure it out themselves, that will be detrimental to our society,” said student Ferne Koorne.

 

This being said, millions of people have found success through the platform. Ushering forth a wave of new creators capable of breaking the proverbial entertainment “glass ceiling,” namely artists like Lil Nas X, Doechii, and Chappell Roan. This platform made it possible for talented artists from every caliber to reach audiences previously unheard of.

 

This doesn’t merely apply to musical artists. In the age of mega corporations choking out their competitors, the TikTok shop offers an innovative storefront for small businesses. According to fitsmallbusiness.com, the e-commerce platform boasts 31,000 American businesses in 2023 alone. Offering a means of advertisement for small businesses without breaking the bank.

 

In Feb. 2024 Tiktok’s CEO, Shou Zi Chew, testified before Congress over worries of Chinese military influence on the company.

 

“It was really cringe watching this guy have to double down and say ‘I’m Singaporean I’m not a member of the communist party’ it really reveals a lot about the shortcomings in terms of our [American’s] racial ideas,” said biology major Alex Rous.

 

The government cites China owning the app as a means of influencing the younger generation of Americans, claiming that it creates distrust in their nation, making the ban an issue of national security. However, many users push back against the Government, claiming that the banning of the app itself is an infringement on the first amendment rights of free speech.

 

However, on Jan. 19, the ban backfired however in a remarkable way. The Chinese Government owned app Xiohongshu, translated to RedNote in English, was the #1 charting app on the iOS App Store in the United States. This signalled a mass exodus of American TikTok users flocking to the new “RedNote.” This has resulted in a massive cultural exchange between the average American and Chinese netizens.

 

 A flurry of Chinese creators began offering beginner’s Mandarin lessons on their pages, only for the exchange of a simple “pet tax.” Requesting that the “TikTok refugees” post cute pictures of their pets. American users plug their comments into google translate so their new Chinese peers may understand their comments. The possible ban led to a curious merging of average citizens living in two global superpowers steeped in propaganda against each other. Yet, the change didn’t last long.

 

American TikTok users received a “Welcome Back” message on the app after a 12 hour ban. The message thanked President Trump for his efforts returning the app to Americans, despite Trump introducing the idea of a ban in the first place in 2020. President Trump extended the unban for 75 days, leaving some students to speculate his plan.

 

 “I feel like we’re in a test run” Henderson said. Koorne agreed, “I think he wants to see how we behave with this … they think it’s [TikTok] too community based, too many people coming together, too much information being shared that we don’t want to be shared.”

 

There’s still much to be apprehensive about with this sudden shift in the social media landscape. Privacy concerns and misinformation are global and homegrown issues. It’s up to users to stay vigilant and think critically about the content consumed online. There’s also the pervasive threat that short-form algorithms have on the human psyche. One could say TikTok is not an ideal form of media consumption. There’s much to consider about the consequences of these multi-billion dollar companies tailoring these feeds to be as addictive as possible. Capitalism online can be endemic, with users' data being free for all among companies worldwide.

 

In his farewell address to the nation, former President Joe Biden warned of the technological oligarchy seeking to undermine American democracy. Attention is seemingly a new form of currency, perhaps the best way to fight these tech giants is not to jump online and interact, but rather to log off.

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