For around 12 hours late Saturday night into Sunday morning, TikTok was unavailable to people in the United States due to the country’s Supreme Court ruling that shut down the Chinese social media platform on Jan. 18 and 19.
The ban was quickly reversed due to an executive order from Donald Trump before he was inaugurated on Jan. 20.
The order protected the app from a ban for another 75-days.
The Supreme Court enacted the ban due to concerns of TikTok threatening national security due to Chinese laws which enforces organizations to cooperate with intelligence gathering.
The decision stirred plenty of controversy amongst people who were impacted.
Grace Garrett is a fourth-year student at St. Thomas University from Philadelphia who has amassed over 5,300 followers and 1.1 million likes on their TikTok account.
They were caught off guard by the ban, which they described as a “big political theatre move.”
“I kind of thought it would be a facade the whole time, I never really expected it to be a full ban,” said Garrett. “The biggest thing was the notice that we got with the ban, it was just so weird and unsettling.”
The notification Garrett mentions cited that President Trump would be working to reinstate the platform. Following the reversal of the ban, the app said they were back “as a result of President Trump’s efforts.”
Jamie Gillies, STU’s coordinator of communications and public policy, said the potential impact the platform shutting down could have on Trump’s administration isn’t worth the risk.
“There are 170 million people in America on TikTok, there is a political consequence if you take that away from them,” said Gillies. “There’s this pause here to see if there can be some sort of, quote-unquote, American solution to this.”
“Trying to ban something that 170 million people use every day will probably not go well,” he said.
Trump has said he wants ByteDance, TikTok’s Chinese parent company, to sell 50 per cent of the social media platform to a stakeholder in the U.S. over the course of the 75-day extension in order to the app to continue being available in the country.
The odds of this happening at a global scale are low according to Gillies, as the app is “far too valuable” internationally for the owners of the company to sell 50 per cent of the global app.
He believes an American subsidiary of the app that uses U.S. servers would be ByteDance’s preferred conclusion to this feud.
Gillies said this situation has the potential of “testing the limits” of citizens freedom of speech.
“This could lead to court cases of the definition of what [freedom of speech] is and whether an administration can even do this or not,” said Gillies.
Using TikTok for predominantly sharing their art, Garrett emphasized the sense of community which is found on the social media platform and while they would move on if the app shuts down, they understand the impact the platform has on its users.
“I’m not as attached to it as much as some people are so it wasn’t as effective on me, but I can see how [the ban] would be pretty harmful for certain people,” said Garrett.
