Madison Long
Staff Writer
Class after class, assignment after assignment, college students spend their days bearing the frigid cold and chatting with friends. After a day’s work, a quick change into familiar sweatpants welcomes the start of the ritual bed rot. Texts later, and they’re swiping across screens to open their usual app, only to be interrupted by an aggressive pop-up,
“TikTok is temporarily unavailable.”
“I was really upset because I post things on there, and I have things saved, and I couldn’t go back and look at them,” said Elan’i Gorostiza when asked about her initial reaction to the ban. “I tried to open the app because I didn’t want to do my homework, and it popped up the little message.”
After the interview and being confronted by her roommate, Charmaine Lowe, Elan’i also admitted to “crashing out” because she couldn’t doom-scroll before bed. But she’s not the only one. Sunday, January 19, began with an upset from some 170 million users as The U.S. Supreme Court enacted a unanimous decision to ban TikTok.
The Supreme Court Opinion expresses under the Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act that “any application that is operated…by ByteDance Ltd or TikTok” will be shut down 270 days after designation for risk to national security. The concern comes from TikTok’s sister app, Douyin, which is currently under Chinese laws that allow government access to private data in relation to intelligence work.
ByteDance Ltd is the corporation that owns the TikTok proprietary algorithm, which is part of the app’s popularity. Relying on app interactions to develop specified content, “For-You pages” are generated using accounts newly followed, videos liked, or comments left.
“You could just keep scrolling for hours and hours and not realize where the time has gone,” said Elan’i. “I spend a good chunk of time on TikTok, so on average, probably like five hours.”
Around 14 hours after going dark, Tiktok came back online. But why?
As one of his first acts as president, Donald Trump used the 90-day stall period built under the Act to extend the time that ByteDance Ltd could sell part ownership to the U.S. However, that doesn’t mean the app will stay forever. Negotiations to prevent a ban were in process in 2021 and 2022, but an agreement was not finalized.
“I think that the ban shouldn’t have really happened,” said Elan’i, the music education major. “It’s kinda like a way for people to express themselves, so you’re basically taking that away from many people.”
And for many, TikTok is just that. Users of the app can discover new stories, share common interests with strangers across the internet, and create their own videos. Content creators have taken the app in stride and used it as an opportunity to entertain, spark creativity, develop marketing strategies, or be a social activist, all from home or remotely.
Just before TikTok went quiet, tweets, Instagram notes, and Snapchat stories were focused on users making their “last” trending videos before the app became virtually inaccessible. Some raged, and others cried as they mourned the loss of the platform most known to be used for trending audio, lip-syncing, and viral dances.
“I posted an Instagram note, and that was mainly it,” Elan’i said, when asked how she shared her discontent. “‘Supreme Court count your days.’”
