Over a week after the brief TikTok ban in the United States on Jan. 18, many creators are left with more questions than answers.
This ban was a result of a bipartisan bill passed by Congress and signed by President Joe Biden in April of last year. However, the blackout didn’t last long.
TikTok continued services in the United States a mere 12 hours later due to President Donald Trump’s indication that he would delay the ban once he took office on Jan. 20. President Trump later followed through on his promise when he signed an executive order to delay the ban for an additional 75 days.
The delay on the ban is merely that: a delay. TikTok still faces a ban in the United States if no agreement is reached regarding the sale of the app to a U.S.-based company. Trump wrote on TruthSocial that he’s open to a 50-50 partnership between the United States and the Chinese-based company ByteDance.
TikTok’s future in the United States is still uncertain. Jessica Kokesh, the social media editor for Weber State University, faces a dilemma regarding the social media platforms’ unpredictable future.
“I slowed down posting on the TikTok page in December just because I knew the ban was coming in January, and I didn’t wanna be putting too much effort into the page,” Kokesh said. “But with the kind of 75-day limit — or I guess reprieve, whatever they’re calling it — we’re gonna continue posting on it as we normally did.”
One of Kokesh’s main concerns regarding the ban is losing another platform to reach potential students.
“I do think it’s kind of unfortunate to lose another channel to reach people, especially younger generations, because as a college, we wanna introduce ourselves to people under 18 or people in their 20s who maybe aren’t going to go to college, and TikTok is the most popular social media platform for younger people,” Kokesh said.
Banning TikTok is not a universally accepted decision in the United States. Pew Research ran a poll in July 2024 on the topic and their results showed that only 32% of Americans support the ban with 39% unsure and 28% opposing the ban.
The argument for the ban is rooted in national security. TikTok collects a lot of user data, listing information like name, age, phone number and location, among others, in their privacy policy. This worries many who support the ban.
Mylynn Felt, an assistant professor of communication at Weber State University, understands this concern but also expressed that American-based social media companies also share these same data collection policies.
“TikTok definitely collects significant data from its users, and the security threat of that data in the hands of an adversarial country has the potential for real harm,” Felt said. “Meta, X, Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Apple all retain significant data on their users and have the potential to leverage that power in ways Congress might not approve. The difference is that Congress believes they have more leverage over these large data-collecting companies than they do over ByteDance.”
Felt is currently conducting research on the TikTok ban in conjunction with Li Chen, an assistant professor of social media and data analytics at Weber State. The focus of their research is to understand how users are adapting to the ban and how users are coping with the possible disappearance of their online communities.
Chen has seen mass migration off of TikTok to other social media platforms such as BlueSky and the Chinese platform RedNote. One of her goals for her research is to understand the motivations behind the migration and the effects that it has on an online community.
“It’s an impossible kind of assignment for them to migrate,” Chen said, “I mean, to move the whole kind of the online community from one platform to another.”
The only thing we know for certain is that TikTok’s future is uncertain. Creators are confused on whether or not to commit more time to the platform and users are working on finding alternatives that still provide the content they enjoy. Only time will tell what lies in store for TikTok.