No, TikTok won’t suddenly disappear from your phone. You also won’t go to jail if you continue to use it after it’s banned.
After years of attempts to ban Chinese-owned appincluding by former president Donald Trump, a measure to ban the popular video-sharing app has won Congressional approval and is on its way to President Biden for his signature. The measure gives Beijing-based parent company ByteDance nine months to sell the business, with possibly an additional three months if a sale is pending. If not, TikTok will be banned.
So what does this mean for you, a TikTok user, or perhaps the parent of a TikTok user? Here are some key questions and answers.
WHEN DOES THE BAN COME INTO FORCE?
The initial proposal only gave ByteDance six months to divest from its American subsidiary, negotiations extended it to nine. Then, if the sale is already in progress, the company will have an additional three months to finalize it.
So it would take at least a year before a ban comes into effect – but with legal challenges likely, it could extend even longer, perhaps years. TikTok has had some success in legal challenges in the past, but it has never sought to block federal legislation from taking effect.
WHAT IF I HAVE ALREADY DOWNLOADED IT?
TikTok, which is used by more than 170 million Americans, likely won’t disappear from your phone even if a possible ban goes into effect. But it would disappear from Apple and Google’s app stores, meaning users wouldn’t be able to download it. This would also mean that TikTok would not be able to send out updates, security patches, and bug fixes, and that over time the app would likely become unusable, not to mention a security risk .
BUT SURELY THERE ARE WORKAROUNDS?
Teenagers are known to bypass parental controls and bans when it comes to social media, so avoiding the US government ban is certainly not outside the realm of possibility. For example, users may try to hide their location using a VPN or Virtual Private Network, use alternative app stores, or even install a foreign SIM card in their phone.
But technical knowledge is required, and it’s not clear what will work and what won’t. It is more likely that users will migrate to another platform, like Instagram, which has a TikTok-like feature called Reels, or YouTube, which integrated short vertical videos into its feed in an attempt to compete with TikTok. Often these videos are taken directly from TikTok itself. And popular creators are also likely to be found on other platforms, so you’ll likely see the same things.
“The TikTok bill relies heavily on the control Apple and Google maintain over their smartphone platforms, as the bill’s main mechanism is to order Apple and Google to stop allowing the TikTok app on their respective app stores,” said Dean Ball, a researcher at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. “Such a mechanism could be much less effective in the world envisioned by many proponents of…
