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 efforts to ban the Chinese app, including by former President Donald Trump, a measure to ban the popular video-sharing app has won congressional approval and is headed to President Biden for his signature . The measure gives Beijing-based parent company ByteDance nine months to sell the company, with a possible additional three months if a sale occurs. 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 important questions and answers.
The original proposal gave ByteDance only six months to divest its US subsidiary; negotiations extended this to nine months. If the sale is already underway, the company will be given an additional three months to complete it.
So it would take at least a year for a ban to come into effect, but with likely legal challenges it could take even longer, perhaps years. TikTok has had some success with lawsuits in the past, but has never tried to prevent federal legislation from taking effect.
TikTok, which is used by more than 170 million Americans, is unlikely to 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 won’t be able to download it. This would also mean that TikTok would be unable to send out updates, security patches, and bug fixes, and that the app would likely become unusable over time — not to mention a security risk.
Teens are known for evading parental controls and bans when it comes to social media, so dodging the US government’s ban is certainly not outside the realm of possibility. For example, users can try to mask their location using a VPN (virtual private network), use alternative app stores, or even install a foreign SIM card in their phone.
But some technical knowledge is required, and it’s not clear what will and won’t work. It’s more likely that users will migrate to another platform, such as Instagram, which has a TikTok-like feature called Reels, or YouTube, which has incorporated vertical short videos into its feed to try to compete with TikTok. Often such videos are taken directly from TikTok itself. And popular creators are probably on other platforms too, so you’ll probably be able to see the same things.
“The TikTok bill relies heavily on the control that Apple and Google have over their smartphone platforms, as the bill’s main mechanism is to direct Apple and Google to stop allowing the TikTok app in their respective app stores,” said Dean Ball, a researcher at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. “Such a mechanism could be far less effective in the world that many proponents of antitrust and aggressive regulation against big tech companies envision.”