Olivia Miller-Johnson | ’26 Contributing Writer | omillerjohns@mail.smcvt.edu
On Jan. 18, the popular social media app TikTok went offline in the United States, impacting over 170 million users. Twelve hours later it was back online. So what gives Theuncertainty felt by everyday users like Megan Ouelette, ’28, is not uncommon. “I’m hearing a lot of different things, like, ‘oh it’s this person, this person [who’s responsible].” As the idea of TikTok being removed from US app stores hit the media, confusion about why, who, when, became mainstream.
TIMELINE
The conversation around banning TikTok dates back to 2020, when President Trump created an executive order to push ByteDance, the Chinesebased company that owns TikTok, to sell the app to an American company. This came as a result of data privacy concerns.
Avoiding the sale, TikTok filed a preliminary injunction which was approved. An injunction is a legal procedure approved by a judge that stops an executive order from being implemented. In this case, the injunction effectively stopped the sale
of TikTok.
As former President Biden entered the office in 2021, he too continued the scrutiny over TikTok. Michael Beckerman, head of U.S. Policy at TikTok, testified in Congress, facing questions about where U.S. consumer data was going. TikTok informed officials that Americans’ data is stored in Singapore, and that they do not share the data with the Chinese
government.
In 2022, investigations by the Federal Communication Commission (FCC) reported that data from U.S. TikTok users could be accessed in Beijing, China. FCC Chairman Brendan Carr published a tweet that called on Apple and Microsoft to remove it from their app stores.
By 2023, Congressmembers, both Democrats and Republicans, grew skeptical, and agreed the app should be removed.
Jump to 2024, and Trump reversed his position and publicly stated he does not wish the app to be banned. In the dwindling days of his presidency, Biden signed a bipartisan bill which effectively banned TikTok starting in 2025.
On Jan. 18, 2025, TikTok displayed a message that the app was ‘down’. On Jan. 19, TikTok posted on X that they were back with “assurance to our service providers that they will face no penalties.”
Upon entering the app on the morning of Jan. 19, users faced a greeting displayed over their For You Page. Newly sworn-in President Trump then issued an executive order on Jan. 20, which allowed for TikTok to operate for 75 days as they find a U.S. owner, or face removal.
Everyday users like Willa Giovani ‘26 found this short blackout confusing. “I really don’t know why,when it came back, it praised Trump for bringing it back,” she said of the pop-up banners. Ouellete shared that she “didn’t like the fact that politics were brought into the actual message on the platform.”
WHY NOW
In April 2024, Biden signed the bipartisan bill passed by congress,the Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act. TikTok wouldn’tbe around starting in 2025, shouldTrump enforce it. The Supreme Court saw challenges to the law on Jan. 17 2025, but SCOTUS upheld the constitutionality of the law. They agreed it met the criteria for National Security concerns.
On Jan. 20, Trump issued the Exec- utive Order, a non-enforcement act,which halted the act for the 75 days he specified. President Trump was asked by the media whyhe made this Executive Order, to which he replied “I guess I have a warm spot for it.”
Sebastiaan Gorrisen, assistant professor of Digital Media and Communications, provides some answers as to why. “It is representative of almost a false flag operation; threatening something to happen and then taking credit for not having it happen,” said Gorrisen. “It is causing a problem, and then solving it and patting yourself on the back for it, which is performative and crass, but has proven to work in this particular context.”
As reported by AP News, Trump’s campaign focused on working with conservative influencers. Pew Research’s Fall 2024 study cites the median age of TikTok users to be 18 to 34 years old. Gorrisen sees these facts as “[a] testament to some extent, to him having a better grasp of what younger voters are interested in.” According to Pew Research, approximately 59 percent of adults under 30 use TikTok. “Tiktok could boast that 170 million Americans were using it for an average of 51 minutes a day,” Gorrisen said. “From a pure marketing standpoint, that is an absolute vice-like grip on what is often the most influential sought-after demographic.”
WAIT, WHAT’S THE BIG DEAL?
Pew Research discovered that between March of 2023 and fall of 2024, support for the ban was down from 50 percent to 32 percent. Following the 2023 congressional testimony by Tik Tok CEO Shou Zi Chew about where users data goes, lawmakers debated their opinions. NPR reported a republican representative from Texas, Michael McCaul, expressed his opinion before Congress. “This app is a spy balloon in Americans’ phones,” he said. “[It is] used to surveil and exploit Americans’ personal information.”
In a statement provided to CBS News by Chris Coons, a Delaware democratic senator, he and other representatives learned in private briefings about the “rivers of data [that] are being collected and shared in ways that are not well-aligned with American security interests.”
Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders posted on X in opposition to the Supreme Court’s upholding of TikTok’s ban, “Last year, I voted against the TikTok ban because I feared Congress getting into the business of shutting down media platforms in violation of the 1st Amendment,” he said.
AJ Brown ’27 finds the ban invasive, too. “I think it’s in the process of being banned because it gives people too much freedom of speech, and I think that negatively affects the branding of America,” Brown said.
According to Professor Gorrisen, members of the public, especially those studying media have known for a long time that these social media platforms like TikTok, X, or Meta, share the data on its U.S. users. He points to the Cambridge Analytica scandal as an example. Cambridge Analytica was a data-driven political service that campaigns could hire. Sparking controversy, they bought user data and used it for targeting voters.
“If it’s occurring all throughout the industry, penalizing the one platform that is foreign,
a Chinese company, appears to be scapegoating,” Gorrisen said. “I think that there is a definite undercurrent of xenophobia.”
Gorrisen points to monetary gains for social media competitors as another reason the app has been targeted. “The fact that a Tiktok has such an incredible base of younger consumers is, I think, terrifying to the more established social media players in the United States,” said Gorrisen.
Social Media CEOs publicly donated directly to Trump’s inauguration, and attended the swearing-in ceremony. Mark Zuckerburg of Meta (Instagram, Whatsapp, Facebook), donated $1
million to Trump’s inauguration fund. Elon Musk, who owns X (formerly Twitter), did not donate to the inauguration fund, but did spend $204 million on the Trump Campaign in and Apple also donated to the inauguration fund, according to OpenSecrets.org, an independent,
nonpartisan, nonprofit that publishes data on the public finances of politicians.
Professor Gorrisen sees these donations as clearly connected to technology giants wanting their voices heard by the president. “This feels to me like racketeering,” Gorrisen said. “And we really are almost expected to cheer [it] on because the United States is standing firm against Chinese espionage.”
LOOKING AHEAD
The future of TikTok in the United States, for a moment in time, seemed doomed to end. While it returned the following morning, Gorrisen sees a greater lesson in this saga.
All of the people who create content or even careers on an app can lose it in the snap of a finger, “We can’t think of [social media apps] as always going to be there,” Gorrisen said. He points to Twitter; bought in a single day and had its algorithm change, then its user base.
Professor Gorrisen has studied social media and its cultural impact throughout his academic career. What he takes away most from TikTok’s debate is about social media usage on the whole. “We cannot put all of our metaphorical eggs in a single basket and [not] recognize that at the end of the day, that these are all capitalist enterprises,” he said. “The only rights that we have on most social media platforms are the ones that are specified in the terms and conditions, none of which are ever really read
by most of the people who use those platforms.”
The future’s not set in stone for TikTok. The Executive Order will end on April 5, and without any changes in ownership, it’s likely to be banned. Or Trump could intervene. Or Congress. At this point, uncertainty is the only certainty.