WASHINGTON — Shortly before midnight on Jan. 18, 2025, TikTok’s 170 million users opened the app to see a message informing them that the app was banned in the United States. But the message added: “We are fortunate that President Trump has indicated that he will work with us on a solution to reinstate TikTok once he takes office. Please stay tuned!”
On Jan. 20, newly-inaugurated President Donald Trump signed an executive order to delay the ban’s enforcement for 75 days, which made TikTok available again after about 12 hours.
The executive order marked the culmination of years of political debate over the national security threat posed by TikTok, which is owned by Chinese company ByteDance Ltd., because of all the data it collects from the Americans who use it. But the app’s temporary unavailability exposed how different U.S. users feel about the app and their government’s efforts to regulate it.
David Sun was one of many TikTok users who noticed the message. He has over 12,000 followers on the app, where he combines ideas inspired by his day-to-day life as a Northwestern student and his interest in pop culture. But to him, the message thanking Trump by name felt odd.
“I thought that was just a little bit strange and kind of rubbed me the wrong way, just because it feels like it was all a ruse, in a sense, to provide more support for President Donald Trump,” Sun said.
Trump’s move to delay the TikTok ban’s enforcement is a notable reversal of his 2020 executive order that prohibited certain transactions between people and Tiktok-owner ByteDance or its subsidiaries. (Federal courts stopped the prohibitions before they took effect.) About a week later, Trump also ordered ByteDance to divest all interests and rights in property used to enable TikTok’s existence in the United States, but an agreement was never finalized.
Outside a Senate hearing on Thursday, Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) told Medill News Service that Trump’s stance on TikTok was “ironic.” He said he thinks House Republicans likely would not have voted in April for the ban if Trump had been against the ban like he is now.
“In many ways he lit this whole situation on fire and now is coming with water and saying ‘I’ll put it out.’ So to me, it’s very ironic that this is a House-Republican-and-Donald Trump-caused problem,” Booker said. “And we wouldn’t be in this situation if he had come to his senses earlier and defended the platform.”
In April 2024, Congress enacted the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, which defined any application owned by ByteDance and TikTok as a “foreign adversary controlled application.” Biden signed the bill, forcing TikTok to divest from foreign ownership or face shutdown due to prohibitions on U.S. companies providing hosting and distribution services. The Supreme Court upheld the law. TikTok had 270 days to comply — until Jan. 19, 2025.
Five days before the deadline of Jan. 19 to sell TikTok, Booker and three other lawmakers introduced the Extend the TikTok Deadline Act, which would give TikTok 270 more days to sell. He said he originally voted for the legislation to ban the app because House Republicans included the ban in a “must-pass bill,” a $95 billion package that also provided foreign aid to Ukraine and Israel.
“Many of us on the Senate side who were not in favor of a TikTok ban were forced to vote for it because if that bill failed, it really would have ended the critical resources we needed to deal with humanitarian crises like the one in Sudan,” Booker said.
But he also said while the app’s national security issues and the spreading of hate on its platform were concerning to him, there is currently a bipartisan opportunity to decide the future of the app.
For Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) who also introduced the Extend the TikTok Deadline Act, there was a simple bottom line.
“I’ve always been linear here, in terms of my objectives,” Wyden said. “I want a reputable American buyer. That has been my position from the beginning. Still is.”
Some TikTok users like Nhi Hoang Quach believe that while uncertainty over the app still poses a threat to years of creative work, the ban itself and the political chaos is irrelevant in the long term. Quach has more than 72,000 followers on the app from sharing her piano covers of film music, videos of her American boyfriend speaking in Vietnamese and personal moments. But after previously losing her old account due to algorithm strikes and rebuilding a following, Quach said she believes creators with funny content or content worth seeing will be able to move on to the next app that inevitably surfaces.
“I never believed that it was a real ban,” Quach said. “I just feel like it’s just PR or marketing for his (Trump’s) campaign, or one of his movements to distract everyone from the things that he is actually doing in office right now. It’s just a whole theater show or an act that everybody is trying to put on, and we’re putting up with it. We shouldn’t.”
In the Capitol on Thursday, Wyden told Medill News Service he held many town hall meetings in Oregon and believes there is great support for his objective to secure a reputable American buyer.
“Where we are today is that I continue to have concerns about how the process is conducted,” Wyden said. “For example — this is purely hypothetical — if Donald Trump were to say to China, ‘You’ve got to give this in a deal to Elon Musk,’ with Musk being his big campaign benefactor, I would be very troubled about that kind of concept and possibility of corruption.”
The short period TikTok became unavailable occurred right before Trump’s inauguration and his executive order to delay the ban’s enforcement. To Quach, if threatening the ban was truly enacted primarily for publicity, it still was a “really stupid thing over which to put a lot of people’s livelihoods at risk.”
Still, she had one piece of advice to offer.
“I feel like you should be prepared for everything,” Quach said.
