The Truth About TikTok Ban: Explained

Currently, the United States' final words are that ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company, divest its U.S. operations by April 5, 2025

What is happening with TikTok is it going to be banned, what’s happening with Donald Trump and the Supreme Court, what’s going to happen on January 19th I want to take this opportunity to talk about the backstory of TikTok where they came from who they are what’s going to happen next and hopefully give you an insight into the inner workings of why all this is even happening.

To begin with, what’s interesting about this is that there’s more beneath the surface than what meets the eye let me explain.

Where did TikTok come from

Where did TikTok come from? Well to do that we need to go back to 2022 and this starts with a parent company called ByteDance, ByteDance is China-owned it started initially in 2012.

Tiktok Ban
Source – www.bytedance.com

ByteDance was a mobile app development company they’ve created a bunch of apps for the Chinese market of them were successful some of them were flops but the interesting thing is in 2016 when they created an app called Douyin and Douyin is what TikTok is today. But then it was for the Chinese market and the unbelievable happened all of a sudden this app Douyin took ByteDance off and shot them off into the stratosphere.

It really appealed to the mass market in China and became extremely popular. Eventually, in 2016 and 2017, this led to them creating an app for the rest of the world ”it’s doing really well in China can we replicate the same success that we had with Douyin with the rest of the world” so basically they set up TikTok operations and it was headquartered in Singapore there’s obviously a bunch of reasons why this is.

There are tax reasons there are also political reasons as get more into the article you will understand. But the first thing first is that TikTok started operating in India it did Super well but ByteDance was ambitious they wanted to dominate and they didn’t want to just dominate in India they wanted to dominate in the US specifically. They couldn’t do that with the current coverage they had with India because there were certain limitations.

How TikTok Went Global: The Musical.ly Acquisition and Its Breakthrough Moment

They didn’t have the global scale so what TikTok did to gain this global coverage was to strategically partner and then potentially merge with a company called Musicly. Musicly was a company that had done super well they were based in Shanghai also a Chinese company and they already had the coverage, especially in the US.

Musicly was an app that allowed people to record videos of themselves singing to popular music videos you know you kind of can you can see where this is going right and this was very strategic on ByteDance part. So they acquired musically for a billion dollars and that allowed them to get access into the US market but also the rest of the world but what happened next?.

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In 2019, TikTok had its big breakthrough at a time when Instagram was dominating, and platforms like Facebook were also growing. TikTok’s rise was revved when Lil Nas X released Old Town Road exclusively on the platform. This exclusivity helped TikTok gain market share and significantly increase its traction in the U.S.

From that point that song was number one for 17 weeks on the Billboard charts and that’s effectively when TikTok takes off. It took off so much that in the following years, TikTok became the world’s most downloaded app you can see in the above image TikTok is beating Instagram for the number of app downloads both on Google and the App Store but here’s where things started to get interesting.

Road To BAN

In October 2019, the U.S. government started to take notice, thinking, “This is interesting there’s a Chinese-owned app gaining significant traction in the U.S. market.” As expected, the U.S. moved to protect its interests and national security by launching a national security probe into TikTok.

The investigation aimed to determine the level of influence the Chinese Communist Party and the Chinese government had over ByteDance, as well as ByteDance’s control over TikTok. The primary concern was that American user data could potentially be accessed and fed back to the Chinese government a big red flag.

So in 2020, Donald Trump considered Banning TikTok because of a whole bunch of COVID-19 issues just because in his mind he’s creating this enemy because he doesn’t like the way China is handling COVID-19 and a whole bunch of other reasons but there’s actually a much more subversive reason. Why does this get more interesting let me explain.

Data Brokers

It’s all about your data now the whole reason this entire thing started was because red flags were raised on Capital. Because we all know that data is new oil and data of myself data of you everyone around us is extremely important. Social media is primarily one giant advertising machine if you think about it.

Your data is extremely precious all of these guys from Facebook to YouTube to TikTok want your data because your data is precious right with that precious data they can do a lot of things they can advertise to you and they can do things that you wouldn’t otherwise expect so basically they want to sell stuff to you but they can only do it with good data so your likes your dislikes your search history your interest your location all that stuff is collected by the social media Giants.

But here’s the kicker the data isn’t just collected by them it’s sold off to other third parties called Data Brokers “Imagine this we, along with you, the readers, have social media profiles and we surf the net. We use these platforms daily, subscribing, scrolling endlessly, and getting lost in the loop of content consumption”.

Whatever it is they have access to all of our data but what people don’t know is that certain parties exist and these are called Data Brokers they basically buy the data from these social media companies and then they sell it onwards to specific parties directly.

When all the data are being sold off to these data Brokers here’s the thing who are the piers in this case who are the purchasers well obviously there are the companies right the companies want to get this data they want to learn more about you and then basically feed that back into the algorithm and then Target you even more. But did you know that the government is also a purchaser of this data well you know just like your likes and dislikes they also know what political biases you have.

Are you Republican are you Democrat are you left-leaning are you Progressive are you liberal and in order to do that they can use that to influence policies to influence votes so this is where the data is being sold off to these guys now what happens here is that now we have the whole machine coming back full circle so all of these companies and governments who are buying this data then create targeted advertising back to you guys.

As I said earlier it’s just a giant advertising machine and they are using content as the guise of that. Generally speaking, buying data from these social media companies is perfectly okay you know, it’s legal but the reason why it’s so unique on TikTok’s part is this. You know you kind of already know because TikTok is Chinese owned and so Congress and the US Government were like no no no no no.

I don’t think so you know you’re Chinese-owned because effectively as I said before ByteDance the owner of TikTok can take this data and sell it onward to the Chinese government and that’s the last thing the US government wants. Right now there have been investigations into this but nothing has been proven it is possible so I just want to make it clear. It is possible but it’s never been proven and so far TikTok has done everything that it can to make sure that this doesn’t happen.

Trump Executive Order

In August 2020 Trump issued an executive order to TikTok to divest itself or get banned divesting means it needs to sell off all of its assets to an us-based company there were talks of Microsoft and Oracle being in the play to buy TikTok but nothing came to fruition So eventually Biden comes in 2021 being the new sitting president and he takes office but then all of this stuff that just happened about banning and divesting TikTok gets all dissolved so effectively nothing happened.

Ban or Sell

Between 2021 and 2023 it’s just silence you know there are a few things that happened in between but nothing significant and TikTok is just continuing to grow and grow and grow right until 2024 in 2024 the bill to ban TikTok gathers Traction in Congress so the call for TikTok ban or sell Bill begin again.

There’s two ways this could happen it either gets banned from all the app stores or as I said before gets sold to a US entity so the bill gets passed in the house the Senate and gets signed by Biden and then now it’s given a time frame of up until January 19th, 2025 to figure out what that ultimate decision is but here’s the thing about that TikTok ban or sale bill.

You’ve got one side that has been banned from App Stores and the other one is selling to a US entity well here’s the case you can’t force users to remove the app from their phone it’s against the Constitution and it’s an infringement on people’s freedoms so what the ban bill says is ”hey we’ll allow you to keep the app on your phone but we’ll ban the app from being further downloaded”.

So all those already installed on your phone is good but if you want to download you can’t it means it’s no longer installed on App Stores which also means that the app will never get further updates and then it stagnates and that’s bad bad news for TikTok.

Final Decision

Here we are January 12th, 2025 writing this article and we only have 7 days left until a decision is made on what is going to happen to TikTok now here’s the crazy thing There are two parties to this the ban party which is all the politicians involved and the bureaucrats there’s also the safe party which is you know the influencers and all the users who want to use TikTok.

But this guy back in 2020 his first term as president said hey I don’t like TikTok it’s ruining a country it’s getting access to all of our user’s data and he could be sold to the Chinese government so he was in the camp of banning TikTok. But now all of a sudden he’s like ”hey I like TikTok it’s great you know I’m getting a lot of followers” so there’s a lot of like Ping ponging back and forth between Trump on what he wants and so far I think he wants TikTok to stay.

Incoming US president Donald Trump is now trying to stop a ban on social media giant TikTok Trump was in favor of the ban ordered to stop the Chinese owners from having influence in America but that was before the election campaign when TikTok appeared to help him substantially the president is now on TikTok ‘‘it’s my honor I’m going to save TikTok” he has now petitioned the US Supreme Court to pursue a negotiated resolution.

Honestly, you know I don’t know what’s going on I think it’s just a waste of taxpayers’ money to be honest there’s a lot of political gymnastics that’s going on and I think there are more important things to focus on like efficiency and government debt and much much more.

Important things to the country at the end of this is that look we’ll wait and see what happens but I think that it’s going to be interesting to see it sounds like TikTok has done their part and they’ve followed rules to the tea but again this is just a whole bunch of back and forth between uh he said and she said and we’ll wait and see what happen.

Current Future Of TikTok In the United States

This segment was recently added to this article by Dada Rowland, on February 1, 2025, based on the latest sources, as a revised edition to reflect TikTok’s current status in the United States. As of February 1, 2025, TikTok is still accessible in the US though on January 18 2025 TikTok shut its service due to the ban that took effect on January 19, 2025.

Currently, the United States’ final words are that ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company, divest its U.S. operations by April 5, 2025, to address national security concerns. If ByteDance fails to comply, a permanent ban may be enforced.