The day of the TikTok ban has finally come and passed rather dramatically. On Jan. 18, the app was unusable for a few hours before the official ban was set to take place the next day, causing mass panic from its users. On Jan. 19, the app was back online.
Users were greeted by a message from the app thanking its users for their patience and citing President Trump’s effort as the reason why TikTok was back working. Yes. President Trump was touted as the savior of TikTok by the app itself.
The app is no longer on any app stores in the U.S., which is consistent with the federal law to ban the app. On Jan. 17, the Supreme Court unanimously maintained the ban, citing national security concerns since TikTok is owned by a China-based company, Bytedance.
On Jan. 20, President Trump signed an executive order to keep the ban unenforced for 75 more days. Trump is looking for a U.S. buyer to have at least 50% control of the app. Judging by who was sitting on the front row of Trump’s inauguration, Trump might already have a few candidates.
I will admit, I’m not quite convinced of the “security” risk that TikTok, the largely child-populated dancing app, poses to our country’s national security. I will also admit that I know nothing about China’s actual dealings with U.S. data, besides halfway listening to the China-focused episodes of “60 Minutes” that my mom watches.
Does China really want to know that I like the Dior Saddle bag or what movies I am interested in? I do not know. Is there more information that I am missing? Naturally. Either way, the federal law deciders have decided! The fate of TikTok is left to the billionaire buddies of Trump, and there is nothing I can do about it.
My original idea for this article was to go over the positives and negatives of the app being deleted. Now, upon Trump’s apparent goal to “save” the app that he wanted to ban in the first place, and have it sold to some billionaire, I have decided to change the reason for my positives and negatives list. I will be weighing the positives and negatives of keeping or deleting the app, if it happens to be saved.
My first positive for keeping the app is, obviously, the continued access to the community of TikTok. The music, the art, the books, the advice, the people and all the other wonderful things that the app has given me will stay in my possession. A negative is that I do not know if I can voluntarily shut myself out. It really is like another world and deleting the app would effectively shut me out of new trends, memes and viral moments.
Another positive is if I delete the app after it is removed from the app store, then I can be freed from the shackles of TikTok purgatory. Too much of anything, even a good thing, can be bad and TikTok has proven to be bad for me as it relates to my productivity. I can not focus on my work for more than 20 minutes without itching for TikTok. I have to hide my phone out of my eyesight just so I do not have the urge to look at it.
I waste so much time on TikTok that before the threat of a ban, I have often thought about deleting the app anyway. It is like a vacuum that just sucks me in and does not let me leave until my eyes are sore. Because of the new year, I have tried to make an attempt at being more productive and in the few hours that the app was not working, I actually got work done.
But what the survival of TikTok on my phone really depends on is the potential buyer of the app. Will Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg get it? Will Jeff Bezos? It matters to me. I think I would rather delete the app than be subjected to any unwarranted changes by owners I do not like. I do not want to be there to see the app I hold so dear become unrecognizable.
In the days when the TikTok ban was first brought up, I thought I could part with the app. It is just an app, right? Wrong. TikTok can not just be an app. I did not believe in its importance before, but if the government wants to get involved, then something else has to be going on. Even though the positives of having TikTok are very important to me, the negatives might become more important if the wrong person buys it.
Either way, I will savor my last days with TikTok as I have known it before everything changes.