The TikTok ban in the USA has seemingly loomed over users of the app for months now. It had been enough time for a cycle of uproar and quiet to come and go, before returning to uproar once again at the beginning of January. On the 18th, users in America opened the app to a blank screen with text stating: “TikTok isn’t available right now!” Yet, a day later, service was resumed and users flooded back to the app and everything was back to normal. So, why did this happen? Who gained anything from this? What was the point? To put it simply, the answer to all of those questions is President Donald J Trump. (It’ll make sense, bear with me!) Trump is the man who originally proposed the ban all the way back in 2020, fearing TikTok’s parent company ByteDance had political ties with the Chinese Communist Party.
In August of 2020, Trump signed an executive order forcing ByteDance to sell TikTok to an American company, though this was reversed a year later by President Joe Biden’s administration. This decision was then again reversed in 2024 when a bill forcing ByteDance to sell TikTok was approved by Congress and signed into law by Biden. The reason for the more recent concerns were pro-Palestinian bias and alleged security concerns regarding ByteDance. And then the ban was reversed within a day, every American cheered “thank you, Donald Trump” in the streets, no ulterior motive was unveiled, and the world went on merrily.
Obviously, this didn’t happen. Many theories for why Trump would first propose and then revoke the ban have surfaced. Trump changing his mind over the five years since he initially proposed the ban has never been a theory worth considering—the president simply wouldn’t switch up so quickly without a reason. In my opinion, the most believable idea is that Trump wished to be viewed as a saviour by Gen Z TikTok users in order to increase his polling numbers. A flood of people thanking Trump appeared online, with many forgetting that he was the cause of the ban in the first place. You can absolutely argue that his ploy worked out in the end, as he gained supporters and lost nothing with the ban.
At the end of the day, the TikTok ban has always been a political ploy, no matter how you look at it. Banning a social media website because of pure scepticism and alleged political ties is not reason enough. With no evidence ever having surfaced to provide an understandable justification for the decision, it’s clear that the ban was, and always will have been, a sham.