Summary
TikTok became unavailable in the U.S. on January 20, 2025, after a federal ban targeting Chinese-owned ByteDance took effect.
Apple and Google removed TikTok and other ByteDance apps like CapCut and Lemon8 from their stores, and users saw a message stating the app was no longer accessible.
The law, signed by President Biden and upheld by the Supreme Court, requires ByteDance to sell TikTok or face shutdown.
Trump may grant a 90-day extension, but no buyers have emerged.
The ban sparked debates on censorship, free speech, and national security.
Delisting is not a ban though, and who’s going to force a Chinese company to pay fines levied by America? Delisting is the most they could do, use a VPN or sideloading and boom, you’d have tiktok again.
Yeah, but how many people know how to do that?
Not as many people as there are on there now for sure, but likely enough to tell a good portion of the rest how to do it. Russian and Chinese netizens are intricately familiar with VPN’s and networking because their governments create environments where they need to be, people cite this when they talk about how so many prolific hackers come from those countries since from the beginning they’ve needed to circumvent security to surf the web. I wouldn’t bet against something similar happening here if the conditions were right, maybe not to the same extent, but I’d imagine we’d be surprised how many do make it over that barrier.
I dunno. Getting people to “choose their instance” on Mastodon seems to be something insurmountable for a lot of people.
I was thinking about that too and I think the motivation is jussst barely different enough thanks to FOMO. Mastodon just doesn’t have the same amount of content as TikTok, especially to those already on TT. If Americans who used to use the app see the creators they used to follow bypassing the ban, they will feel like they’re missing something if they don’t, as opposed to what awaited them behind the hurdles of the fediverse was all unknown to them with little FOMO unless they already knew people on here. I could absolutely be wrong, but seeing Americans run to redbook tells me at least some of them are fighting, maybe aimlessly so, but still trying.
All cogent points, for sure. I bet some significant percentage of people would make the effort given what you say - to get at the content - but if there is one thing that has been driven home for me as someone who works in IT, is that users can be very lazy as a general rule, and it still surprises me just how little basic troubleshooting most people will engage in before giving up.
But I guess all this is moot because donvict was apparently paid off and he is saying he’ll let them operate in the U.S. I suppose that will stay true as long as they keep paying him and his cronies protection money.
I feel like now were in the reverse of that hypothetical, instead of a blocked tiktok trying to be accessed by those with FOMO, we see a even more sketchy tiktok where some users are trying to find ways to leave it and not fall victim to the FOMO. Been happily surprised hearing some of the younger people I know very very skeptical now that Trump has his hands in it.
They have must have assets in the US, as they have 7,000 US employees. So they could easily just go after those.
You’re right and the US can snatch those for sure but let’s say Tiktok wasn’t planning on bribing Trump and instead decided to be non compliant and force the US to execute the ban somehow. Other than Servers and Real estate, I’d imagine all liquid would be long gone into China and the continued data from users would outweigh the cost of those seized assets, even with many users not being able to manage the technological hurdle of loading a delisted app