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This article is written by a student writer from the Her Campus at U Mich chapter.

TikTok is the most popular platform used today. Honestly, it’s the best mobile app with an algorithm that truly reads us. If you’re anything like me, you’re doing work and then somehow you end up in a rabbit hole of watching Storytimes on TikTok. You were supposed to take a ten minute break but somehow it ended up being a couple hours long. It’s okay we all have those days. TikTok just always knows what’s happening to us that it is that addicting. However, recently there has been rumors that TikTok is going to get banned in the United States. Is this the case though? Keep reading to find out! 

TikTok began in 2017 as an app called Musically. Musically was an app that became popular in summer 2015. It was a platform where people could lip sync to music and become famous through those videos. Celebrities like Jason Derulo began to promote their music through lip syncing to their songs and posting those for everyone to see. There was a rise of Musically stars such as Danielle Cohn and Baby Ariel. After a while Musically began to lose its popularity. In 2017, Musically was bought by Byte Dance and rebranded to be TikTok.  

Three years later, people were skeptical about Byte Dance’s intentions with TikTok. This led to Trump’s attempt in passing regulation to avoid doing business with Byte Dance. He intended to do this as TikTok’s data collection is a risk to national security by potentially giving China the exact locations of Federal employees and being able to influence US citizens for corporate espionage. He knows that TikTok is one of the top social media platforms, so he wanted to give 45 days for large companies like Microsoft to alleviate their security concerns. TikTok then refuted by claiming that US data is stored outside of China and is not regulated by Chinese law, but Trump did not believe them. Hence, TikTok decided to partner with a large company named Oracle. This assured lawmakers that data stored in TikTok is not owned by the Chinese government.  

In 2022, there was a collaboration between TikTok and Oracle that led to the beginning of Project Texas. Project Texas was a 1.5 million dollar project made to prove that TikTok does not have Chinese influence and their data is safe from other countries. According to TikTok, they were collaborating with Oracle to figure out ways to make TikTok safer during 2021. They decided to route all US cloud data to Oracle cloud infrastructure and keep their offices in Singapore and US as backup. They also decided to remove US personal data from their US offices to ensure safety. This eased the minds of Americans skeptical about TikTok.  

However, in 2023, Biden decided to have more regulation for TikTok and deleted TikTok off all White House devices. He did this to ensure US data remained safe.  They were worried that the Chinese government could use TikTok to gather intel about US citizens and be able to change the algorithm to affect operations. Also, the FBI mentioned that these concerns are valid as the Chinese government is communist which opposes the US government’s values. 

 This led to TikTok’s CEO Shou Zi Chew defending TikTok in a hearing with US lawmakers. He downplayed the security risk and mentioned how data security is unique compared to other platforms. This resulted in the House of Commerce and Energy having full support of the ban. This led to states in the US being able to work towards banning TikTok in Republican states such as Montana. However, a judge in November blocked this regulation before it was true in those states. 

On March 13th, Congress passed a bipartisan bill in order to get Byte Dance to sell TikTok to Non Chinese people within 165 days which is almost six months. If this did not occur, then TikTok would get banned in the United States. This bill was a 325-65-1 vote. Some lawmakers are feeling doubtful about this ban as many citizens called them to express their anger about TikTok potentially getting banned. The senate when asked about this bill are saying that this bipartisan bill talks about changing which company owns TikTok and “disarm” the app rather than have a complete ban of the app in the US.  

However, the creators and American users view this bill differently. The creators of TikTok believe that this is the government’s way of getting rid of TikTok. Most American users are not in support of this. A poll done by the NORC Center for Public Affairs and Associated Press found that 35% of American adults are against a ban but 73% of TikTok Users are against a ban.  

TikTok is at the risk of getting banned if it is not sold to another company. Will it end up banned? Stay tuned to upcoming events to find out! 

Aspiring physician studying Cellular, Molecular and Development Biology as a junior at University of Michigan. My hobbies are reading, dancing and drawing.