In April of 2024, President Biden signed a bill into law that required ByteDance, the owner of TikTok, to sell it to a United States based company by Jan. 19 or it would no longer be accessible to its U.S. users.
Unfortunately ByteDance has declared that it will not be sold, leading to the conclusion that TikTok will be unusable by people based in the U.S.
This may not be true though, as this bill would not ban the continued use of TikTok, only updates and new downloads. This would mean that the app would get slower and slower due to the lack of technical upkeep. However, appeals are occurring as we speak to determine the future of the app.
TikTok spokesperson, Michael Hughes, states that this is an important constitutional issue, and the right to free speech is something he will fight for, especially as it relates to TikTok. This is because TikTok is more than just an app to many people. There are more than 100,000 influencers on TikTok, many of whom get their sole income from the app. In fact, SMB investments in paid advertising and marketing on TikTok drove nearly $15 billion in revenue in the US in 2023 according to TikTok.
Looking past the legality of this issue, TikTok has become a culturally and economically important part of our lives, and banning it will have a huge impact. TikTok has over 1 billion monthly active users globally, with 150 million in the United States alone. The amount of culturally important moments and even political implications it has produced is astronomical. As we can even see just from this past election, both candidates were extremely active, using the platform to promote their agendas and images to the younger generation.
Ultimately, we can see that this proposed threat of national security is being taken extremely seriously by the government, but the way they are addressing it will have implications.
As of Dec. 17, 2024, TikTok will get banned unless a legislation gets passed to stop it. What this will mean for our country, nobody knows for certain. All we know is that a large part of not just pop culture, but also the economy and job market will be taking a huge hit, and there will be dramatic impacts.
