What Is Going on with the TikTok Ban Going into Effect, And Then Not?

As many know, on Saturday night, January 18, through Sunday morning, January 19, TikTok went “dark” and was not accessible to American users. To those who rely on the application to make a living, sell products for a little extra money on the side, or just relax after a busy day at work, the uncertainty surrounding this event seemed hopeless and devastating. Roughly half of the United States’ population (170 million) uses the platform on a regular basis to express themselves and hear perspectives that help them understand the world. The Supreme Court on Friday, January 17, unanimously joined Congress (legislature branch) and President Joe Biden (executive branch) in violating the will of the people and their First Amendment (free speech) rights. The prohibition could only be avoided if TikTok’s owners agreed to have their Fifth Amendment rights violated by being forced to sell their American operations to investors that the government deemed worthy of such legalized theft.

When Senator Ed Markey (backed by Senators Ron Wyden and Cory Booker and House Representative Ro Khanna, and Senator Rand Paul urged the Supreme Court to reverse the lower courts’ decisions to uphold the ban) introduced a 270-day extension for TikTok, it was Senator Tom Cotton who stood in the way and gave a giant middle finger to the American people (the extension required an unanimous vote). When TikTok’s service was restored to Americans during the day on January 19, CEO Shou Zi Chew (to the ignorant Senator Tom Cotton, he is Singaporean, not Chinese) praised Donald Trump (even attending his inauguration) for pledging to freeze the law (for ninety days) that could have made the platform stay dark permanently.

Some speculate that there were some dirty deeds and corruption occurring between Trump and Shou, but at this time, it is unclear what transpired. It is a bit strange how even though outgoing President Biden decided not to enforce the law and let incoming President Trump make that decision, TikTok still shut off and then returned the next day with the “Trump is savior” message. For those still suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS), the answer is that President Trump is working behind the scenes to consolidate social media platforms in order for his new fascist regime to make information available from only one source. After all, Trump did propose that the United States enter into an agreement with TikTok to own half of the platform, but it is unclear whether he wants the government to own that half (in a corporatist arrangement) or whether an American investor, such as Mark Zuckerberg, Kevin O’Leary, or James Stephen Donaldson (MrBeast), would gain such a stake.

Forcing TikTok into a business arrangement where it must sell off some of its assets could cause pro-American government viewpoints to saturate the platform and render it useless for people trying to wake up to reality and understand the world outside of government propaganda. Censorship on the application could become unbearable and far worse than it currently is. Unfortunately, those inflicted with TDS simply think that a business arrangement is unacceptable because the platform will then become a right-wing beacon and flow with “fascist” messages, but they miss the point. The consolidation of information, censorship, and the spreading of government propaganda are terrible concepts for everyone in the United States, not just for liberals, and not just because Trump would benefit in the short term. We need to look at the bigger picture, as Trump will remain in office for the next four years, but a liberal or conservative president could come in next and make the platform favorable to his or her ideas based off of the precedents set. The principle should be that free speech is the goal, and we want Americans to be able to communicate freely to each other and share ideas that help them grow and understand the negative aspects of what our government is doing domestically and internationally. Unfortunately, TDS sufferers cannot see past their anti-Trump blinders.

So, why did TikTok go “dark” on Saturday night if there were already guarantees that the law banning it would not be enforced right away? Some suggest that this is because TikTok is selling part of its business to Meta and Mark Zuckerberg. In this scenario, the company needed to shut off its servers temporarily so that the data could be transferred from its Oracle servers in Texas and Virginia (notice that the data was already being stored in the United States and not in China) to Meta’s servers.

A peculiar shut down of the platform is not the only reason why people believe this, however. Apparently, TikTok now allows you to sync your account with Facebook, and Facebook has created a TikTok account. This is not strong evidence, as apparently, these happenings have been the case for the last couple years. People are saying that they can see advertisements for Instagram on TikTok, though this has not been verified. Some have also observed that Shou’s profile no longer suggests that he is the CEO, and if you go into the “Terms and Policies” under the “Settings and Privacy” option and select “Open Source Software Notices,” Facebook is listed as part of the “BSD 3-clause ‘New’ or ‘Revised’ License” (I cannot verify if this was the case prior to January 18). If such an acquisition or merger were to occur, it would be harmful to Meta’s ability to fight the Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) antitrust lawsuit, as the company would then have a near monopoly over the social media market, so for now, these are all just rumors.

Being Meta’s largest competitor, TikTok has not only taken away market share and prevented the Zuckerberg empire from advertisement dominance, but it has also outpaced and set trends that Meta has had trouble keeping up with. For that, Meta, along with Alphabet, Inc. (Google and YouTube) and Amazon, has spent millions of dollars per year lobbying Congress to ban its rival. In addition to this, congressmen, who obviously had some power in preventing TikTok from doing business in the United States, invested, either personally or through family trusts or organizations, in Meta stocks, thus showing an aspect of insider trading and corruption. Nancy Pelosi, Michael McCaul (an influential mover in the TikTok ban), Markwayne Mullin, Dan Crenshaw, and others have stood to benefit from Meta’s gains and TikTok’s losses, and it is no surprise that they are fully on board with eliminating TikTok’s independence and ability to freely operate in the United States.

Regardless of TikTok’s uncertain future, the federal government’s ban on the platform is more concerning. As I have written previously, the TikTok prohibition is not about protecting Americans’ data, and if it were, we would be concerned about the data collection of Meta, X (formerly Twitter), Temu (a Chinese company), and any other platform or application that does this. Even with American companies, the United States government could order data released and stored for the purposes of investigating crimes, and of course, these investigations can be used for political purposes and to eliminate dissidents and those arbitrarily deemed as enemies of the state. We should be more concerned about domestic surveillance and what our own government does than a hypothetical scenario of China capturing our data and using it for various nefarious purposes (I am still waiting for legitimate evidence that China is actively stealing Americans’ data through TikTok).

TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, is only one-fifth owned by Chinese investors (the rest are global investors, many of which are Americans), and since the data is not held in China, Americans do not have to worry about the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) accessing their data, as American politicians have lied about and told us is the case. It is obvious why Congress and the president would take part in limiting free speech that aims to challenge the authority of the federal government, but the Supreme Court justices unanimously upheld the ban under the false premise of national security concerns. The government has used national security as a basis to pass numerous laws that violate our individual rights, including the infamous Patriot Act, which all but obliterates the First, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and Ninth Amendments to the United States Constitution. The TikTok ban certainly violates the First and Fifth Amendments, but even if one did not care about constitutional arguments, only authoritarian regimes, such as North Korea, prohibit free speech platforms. In fact, TikTok is not even permitted to be used in China (officially, it is listed as unavailable in that country because ByteDance’s Douyin is used instead, but I think most people can piece together that the CCP does not want Western propaganda to be circulating within its country’s borders). TikTok is a global application, and it is incorporated in the Cayman Islands (through ByteDance) and based in Singapore and Los Angeles, California. It is not the Chinese spying apparatus that Americans have been propagandized into believing that it is.

It was ironic that in protest against the United States government, TikTok “refugees” flocked to Xiaohongshu (“Little Red Book” or REDnote), which is a Chinese application similar to the platform that they were used to using, as asylum seekers. They would voluntarily give their data to the CCP since American politicians did not care about the right of people to utilize any platform of their choice. REDnote would actually do what politicians falsely claimed that TikTok was doing, and therefore, this protest was actually admirable (and a little bit hilarious). Americans, after being warmly welcomed by Chinese citizens, then started to realize that the propaganda against China was not accurate and that Americans are not actually as free as they think they are. I have been saying for some time that the United States has the illusion of freedom, and this is what keeps American pacified and distracted enough to not rebel. In reality, we are not truly free, and the banning of a social media platform is evidence of that.

Just when Americans were finally starting to wake up to the reality of what the government was doing, from lack of federal aid in North Carolina to the peculiar happenings with the Maui and Los Angeles wildfires to the mysterious drone sightings to Trump assassination oddities to 9-11 truth, authoritarian politicians wanted to halt the spreading of “conspiracy theories” and make Americans dumbed down again (MADDA?). However, the largest awakening in the United States was that of the realization that the Israeli government (not the Jewish people) was (and still is) partaking in atrocities that have been condoned by the United States government. In fact, Senator Mitt Romney and Secretary of State Antony Blinken (under President Biden) got caught admitting that the reason that TikTok needed to be banned was because it had too much of a “pro-Palestinian” bias. Of course, TikTok allows both pro-Israeli and pro-Palestinian content to be circulated without censorship, so if the majority of such content was negative toward Israel, perhaps this would suggest that there is some merit to the idea that Israel is not the perfect little country that Americans thought it was. Maybe there is something to the claims of genocide, after all.

Regardless, it is clear from the Romney-Blinken exchange that the motivation behind the TikTok ban was actually because politicians did not want people freely speaking about the Israel-Palestine conflict, and with the enormous Israeli lobby buying American politicians, it is no surprise that the Benjamin Netanyahu regime was successful in getting the application expelled from the United States (or, at least it thought). If we let the Israeli government determine what platforms are acceptable in this country, we are also allowing it (a foreign nation) to violate our free speech rights (something that our government should be protecting against, not encouraging).

We should be happy that TikTok is back online, but it has been reported that the algorithm has changed since the temporary shutdown. We should also be skeptical about the next steps in social media and what the Trump administration is up to in regard to cozying up to Shou Chew, Mark Zuckerberg, and Elon Musk. Corporatist arrangements between the government and social media companies are not something that we should take lightly, nor should we accept violations of our right to freely communicate with one another and express ourselves through online platforms. It would be wonderful to simply have governments, both foreign and domestic, keep out of the affairs of private companies and individuals’ lives, but this world is far from ideal. While we are, in reality, subject to the whims of our overlords, we must find solutions to the problems that we face. Use TikTok, while you can, to spread the message that things are not the way that they seem, and we will see what the future holds for the platform.

Thank you for reading, and please check out my book, The Global Bully, and website.