Kelby Chichester
Instead of viral videos being shown on your ‘for you page’, around 10:30 p.m., 90 minutes before the shutdown deadline, TikTok users in the U.S. received a pop-up saying: "Sorry, TikTok isn't available right now."
The announcement proceeded to say, "A law banning TikTok has been enacted in the U.S. Unfortunately, that means you can't use TikTok for now. We are fortunate that President Trump has indicated that he will work with us on a solution to reinstate TikTok once he takes office. Please stay tuned!"
CEO Shou Chew posted a video on the app thanking Trump, who was not yet in office and pledged: "More to come."
In a dramatic turn of events, TikTok was back online just 12 hours after being banned, as if it had never left. Trump signed an executive order granting the app a 75-day extension, making it one of the shortest bans in recent history.
The ban stemmed from U.S. officials' concerns that the Chinese government could exploit TikTok to manipulate content and access sensitive user data. The app is owned by ByteDance, a Chinese technology company operating various content platforms.
In response to the ban, some users staged protests by flocking to Chinese-owned platforms. RedNote, known as Xiaohongshu in China, saw a significant spike in popularity. The lifestyle platform's daily active users in the U.S. skyrocketed from fewer than 700,000 to approximately 3.4 million in a single day.
While many people deleted the app, users who did not were greeted with a message that stated, “Welcome Back! As a result of President Trump’s efforts, TikTok is back in the U.S.!”
Many TikTok users didn’t believe and even made videos showing the propaganda being spread due to Trump, not holding office yet. Many users believed this was Trump’s way of trying to gain Gen Z’s support but failed.
On TikTok, one user posted a video of the “no results found” page for “Donald Trump Rigged Election,” captioning it: “And here we have it folks. Confirmation that TikTok has changed. Censorship at its finest. This should concern you whether you voted for him or not.”
Users are noticing a decline in the number of livestreams and news but an uptick in content being removed or flagged for violating community guidelines, including actions that were previously allowed such as political topics.
In response, TikTok assured people that "our policies and algorithms did not change over the weekend."
The company added, "We are working hard to restore our U.S. operations back to normal and expect some temporary instability as we restore our services, which could impact TikTok features or users' access to the app."
However, some users have reported seeing more content moderation, such as limited search results, warnings about misinformation, and prompts encouraging users to verify their sources. Some even claim that TikTok has started removing comments containing phrases like "Free Palestine" and "Free Luigi," a reference to Luigi Mangione, who allegedly killed a UnitedHealth executive.
Danisha Carter, a 27-year-old political and social commentator with two million followers, revealed that her TikTok account was permanently suspended shortly after the platform went offline on Saturday. When she tried to log in after the ban was lifted, she was informed it was due to "multiple policy violations."
Since the ban was lifted, many TikTok users have expressed a change in the app since coming back. There’s been an increase of ads for apps owned by Meta such as Instagram, and many users showed how the recent Meta TikTok pages bought followers.
More users reported how after they blocked the Meta pages, his TikTok refreshed entirely and went back to his normal videos he saw before the ban.
Whether the issues were merely technical, they nevertheless increased fears around Trump’s newfound alliance with tech titans.
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