The United States of America deleted TikTok late in the evening of 18 January. I was on the train home from The Brutalist. By morning, the app came back! Wow!
For fear of China’s propaganda and data collection, the US government took the unprecedented step of barring 170 million of its residents from using an app they loved and which provided a livelihood to some.
Such news may have not been a surprise had it come from the government of Vladimir Putin in Russia, or from Modi in India. But it is a shock coming from a government formed “by the people, for the people”.
The deadline for parent company ByteDance to announce a sale to a non-Chinese owner, imposed by a bill passed by Congress and signed by Joe Biden last year, passed without intervention from Biden, Congress, or the supreme court. Everyone who had a part in banning TikTok – Donald Trump, Biden, Congress, ByteDance, TikTok and the Chinese government – is trying to disclaim responsibility. You can read more about that game of political football here.
Trump, who originated the idea of a TikTok ban-or-sale, wants to save the app, and he’s loudly thinking about issuing an executive order to do it, but that will have to wait for another day. For now, though, TikTok has vanished from the app stores. It disappeared from my phone for about 14 hours.
Online communities are nomadic; one digital place will never hold them forever.
I am sad to see TikTok banned. I watch videos on the app almost every day. It fills my idle moments. I found jokes there, absurd memes, thoughtful critiques of high and low culture, and hundreds of new songs. The reason I kept returning to the app –why I needed to set screen time limits for it on my iPhone – was the access to types of creativity unfamiliar and exciting to me. I have been watching videos constantly since the app returned, scrolling on borrowed time. It can’t last, can it?
“It genuinely feels like our parents just came in the middle of the school year and said, ‘Yeah, forget all your friends, forget all the hard work you did at this school, you’re going to have to start from scratch,” TikToker @inzlay said in a video of herself crying and bidding farewell to her TikTok following of 24,500. She added: “It sounds dramatic to say I don’t know what I’ll do without TikTok, but I really don’t know who I’m going to be without TikTok. A large part of who I have become in the last six years and a large part of my growth has come from a lot of the stuff I’ve learned off this app. I really hate to say goodbye.”
Americans are rebelling like teenagers in response to the government’s intervention in their digital affairs. More than half a million people have downloaded Xiaohongshu, known in English as RedNote, as the ban looms. I predict this migration will be a flash in the pan, given how unfriendly the app is to users who do not speak Chinese. The app has little by way of an English-language interface; all of its notifications are in Mandarin.
Online communities are nomadic; one digital place will never hold them forever. That perpetual movement causes a continual nostalgia to simmer. Even as we search for new virtual stomping grounds, we wallow in a state of reminiscence for bygone eras. To my age group, Facebook was the place where we lived our high school and college years. We posted photos by the thousands from summer camp and college parties. Twitter was where we spent our formative professional years. It offered a water cooler for journalists to gab en masse, celebrate our minor scoops and share our many opinions.
TikTok offered that feeling of community with strangers. The For You page felt like a discussion of a short list of new topics, memes and songs every day. Instagram, with its features for disappearing and permanent photos and videos, is now the place where my friends post most frequently. I do not know how long that will last. With each evolution, the space my online community occupies has become more public, the posts more like advertisements.
Meanwhile, I remain confused by the logic behind the ban. It confuses me that, for example, DJI, the world’s largest drone maker and a Shenzhen-based company, sees its products proliferate throughout the US with no blowback but a half-hearted prohibition for police departments, which use them in large numbers anyway. It is possible to pay for purchases at CVS in San Francisco with AliPay, the most widely used payment app in China. Both of these companies are subject to the same national security laws that so worry American lawmakers. The Salt Typhoon attacks, which I wrote about a month ago, inspired little legislative response, only treasury department sanctions, while TikTok mobilized both sides of the political aisle in both chambers of the US Congress.
A cyberattack is quite different from an app, but Congress’s responses to national security incursions by China, actual (Salt Typhoon) or potential (TikTok), are comparable to one another. The US endured a severe intrusion on its telecommunications networks; Congress passed no laws. More than half of all Americans downloaded an app that the US government calls a national security nightmare without making public any evidence of manipulation by the Chinese Communist party. Congress sends the app to Tartarus. What now?
The wider TechScape
‘Deeply alarmed’: Washington Post staff request meeting with Jeff Bezos
‘Absolutely heartbreaking’: the dark side of family vlogging
SpaceX’s Starship test flight ends in failure after spacecraft is destroyed
Apple suspends AI-generated news alert service after BBC complaint
US sues Elon Musk for allegedly failing to disclose early Twitter stock purchase
Meta to fire thousands of staff as Zuckerberg warns of ‘intense year’
