TikTok
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TikTok, social media platform designed for creating, editing, and sharing short videos between 15 seconds and three minutes in length. TikTok provides songs and sounds as well as filters and special effects that users can add to their videos. Users also have the option to upload videos from their own devices to TikTok. TikTok is available to people in most countries around the world. China has a separate version called Douyin that has the same basic functionality but includes content of interest to the Chinese public.
Short-form videos initially achieved popularity in 2013 thanks to Vine, an app that allowed users to create and share clips that were just six seconds long. The following year saw the debut of Musical.ly, a Chinese social media platform that allowed for longer videos (from 15 seconds to one minute). It originally focused on the lip-synching craze, offering thousands of songs to which users could make entertaining lip-synching and dance videos. Musical.ly quickly gained popularity, especially among American teenagers, and within a few years it had tens of millions of users. At the end of 2017 the Chinese company ByteDance acquired Musical.ly for some $800 million. In the summer of 2018 ByteDance merged all the content and user accounts of Musical.ly into TikTok.
TikTok users can make and share videos on any topic. Comedic and educational videos are common, and others challenge users to dance, to lip-synch, or to complete a nonsensical act, such as rolling on the ground like a tumbleweed. TikTok provides guidelines for submissions, but sometimes users post dangerous or illegal content, such as dares that involve safety risks. One challenge sparked a wave of car thefts across North America after TikTok users demonstrated a security flaw in certain models of Kia and Hyundai vehicles. Critics, as well as the owners of the app, advise users to remain cautious about the type of stunts they choose to perform and share. Likewise, they suggest that parents regulate their children’s activity on TikTok. To that end, TikTok has added a feature that monitors screen time and allows users to set reminders to take breaks.
Regulators around the world have expressed privacy, safety, and security concerns about TikTok. They point out that the Chinese-owned business collects personal information on its users, and critics argue that the company might not be able to keep the information safe from the Chinese government. The Chinese government, in turn, could use the information to keep people under surveillance or to carry out other criminal acts. Critics also suggest that if Chinese authorities interfere with TikTok, they could influence millions of users by controlling what they watch. In 2020 India imposed a nationwide ban on the app in the wake of a deadly border clash between Chinese and Indian troops. In December 2022 U.S. Pres. Joe Biden signed a law prohibiting TikTok on U.S. government-issued devices; after determining that the app presented a cybersecurity risk, the European Commission and the governments of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Taiwan, and the United Kingdom enacted similar bans. Nevertheless, by the early 2020s more than one billion people worldwide were regularly using TikTok.
In April 2024 a foreign aid bill that included provisions relating to TikTok was passed by the U.S. Congress and signed into law by Biden. The law states that TikTok will be banned in the United States if ByteDance does not sell its stake in the company within a year. TikTok executives stated that they would challenge the law in court, stating that it violates Americans’ First Amendment rights to free speech. In the meantime, many avid TikTok users flocked to the Chinese-owned social media application Rednote, which grew by more than 700,000 users in January 2025. Some prior users welcomed the “TikTok refugees” while others reacted with suspicion.
Trump, who was elected president in the November 2024 U.S. presidential election, has expressed that he would keep TikTok available to Americans, and asked the Supreme Court to delay their decision. The Supreme Court, however, upheld Biden’s ruling in January 2025, and the app was scheduled to be banned starting the day before Trump was inaugurated into office. The app would remain on users’ phones, but it would no longer be available for download on app stores, and there would be no new updates, leading it to eventually become slower and less reliable. Trump stated that he would pass an executive order (coinciding closely with his inauguration date) to prevent the ban from taking effect. It is uncertain whether such an order would have staying power—it may merely delay the inevitable. According to Kent Law School professor Mark Rosen, such an order would also theoretically grant a U.S. president “king-like” power since it would be in direct defiance of the law.
The app shut down temporarily starting on Saturday, January 18, 2025 but services were gradually restored by the following morning. The official TikTok Policy account posted on X about the short-lived ban, thanking Trump for “providing the necessary clarity and assurance to our service providers that they will face no penalties providing TikTok to over 170 million Americans.” On January 20, 2025, the day of his inauguration, Trump passed an executive order that provided TikTok a 75-day extension to find alternative owners, suggesting that a U.S. entity take 50 percent ownership of the app in an attempted compromise. While some large tech companies chose to abide by the initial ruling (Google and Apple, for example, removed TikTok from their respective app stores), others, such as Oracle, once again restored TikTok support.
