TikTok Shutting Down? What You Urgently Need to Know Before the Ban

TikTok Shutting Down: Countdown to US TikTok ban begins

If you scroll through some of the most popular short videos on the TikTok social media platform, you might wonder why they attract so much attention.

Charli D’Amelio, from Connecticut, who has nearly 156 million followers, dances to a remix of a Chris Brown song in an 11-second video.

Another video shows a smiling baby being pinched on the cheek; it’s been viewed 400 million times.

A clip of California magician Zach King riding a “magic broom” has been viewed 2.3 billion times. Now, billions of comedy sketches, dance challenges, life hacks, and cute pets and babies on TikTok could disappear in the United States at any time. TikTok is the overseas version of the Chinese short video-sharing app Douyin, which is owned by China’s ByteDanc.

A new U.S. law is about to ban the social media platform in the United States on national security grounds unless TikTok is separated from ByteDance. TikTok and ByteDance appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which expedited oral arguments in the case. Although TikTok is the most popular social media platform in the United States and has become part of American culture, its Chinese ownership has caused alarm among government officials and lawmakers.

Beijing’s potential access to all personal data and its ability to shape public opinion for its American users prompted the House of Representatives to pass a bill containing content that could ban TikTok by an overwhelming majority of 352 to 65 last March, and a month later, the Senate passed the bill by an overwhelming majority of 79 to 18, and President Joe Biden immediately signed it into law.

This happened despite TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew’s call for American users to oppose the legislation. “Protect your constitutional rights. Let your voice be heard,” Chew, a Singaporean with an MBA from Harvard, said in a TikTok video before Congress acted. TikTok has repeatedly said it has ensured that the data of its American users is protected from external influence and manipulation.

Its parent company, ByteDance, has more than 150,000 employees worldwide and has offices in Austin, Los Angeles, New York, and Seattle in the United States. Unless the Supreme Court grants a stay, ByteDance will lose access to the United States, its largest market, on January 19. “Assuming the Supreme Court upholds this law—unless the Trump administration can find some workaround, which I doubt they can—it’s either sell TikTok or face a ban in the United States,” Alan Rozenshtein, an associate professor at the University of Minnesota Law School, told VOA.

Outgoing President Joe Biden and President-elect Donald Trump have both supported bans. But Trump recently said he changed his mind after his campaign videos performed well on the TikTok platform during last year’s election. “They brought me a chart with a record. It was just so beautiful to look at. I looked at it and said, ‘Maybe we’ve got to keep this little thing up a little while longer,'” Trump said during an appearance in Phoenix in December.

The Supreme Court will hear the social media company’s appeal on Friday. The justices will weigh national security claims against constitutional free speech protections for ByteDance’s U.S. subsidiary and its approximately 170 million users in the United States. “That’s one level of conflict.

But in another sense, it’s also a fight for free speech itself, because the administration argues that one of the dangers of TikTok being owned by China is that the Chinese government will be able to manipulate the algorithms in a way that distorts the speech environment itself,” explained Rosenstein, who is also a senior editor at Lawfare, an online site that analyzes complex legal and policy issues related to U.S. national security.

Canadian investor Kevin O’Leary said he had informed Trump that he was close to a deal to acquire TikTok’s U.S. assets, which would save TikTok from being banned. “I wanted him and others in the cabinet to know that we’re going to do this and we need their help,” O’Leary told Fox News. He is best known as one of the hosts of the reality TV show Shark Tank.

Trump has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to stay the law so that he can negotiate a sale of the platform after his inauguration for his second term on January 20—the day after the ban takes effect. Meanwhile, Lemon8, another sharing app owned by ByteDance, has also sponsored posts on TikTok encouraging users to migrate to Lemon8.