By Sydney Fairbanks and Madison Fessler / Jambar Contributors
In December 2024, a federal appeals court upheld the law that would ban TikTok nationwide Jan. 19 — unless TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, sold the app.
Massachusetts U.S. Sen. Edward Markey introduced legislation that would delay the forced selling or ban for 270 days.
The law requires TikTok to be sold to an American company, with many investors expressing interest. However, ByteDance refuses to sell the company and has remained firm it will oppose all efforts to force a sale.
Shortly after the appeal was denied, TikTok requested an emergency pause of the law. Pausing the ban would allow the Supreme Court time to determine if it should review the law.
As of Jan. 15, the U.S. Supreme Court has not made a ruling, despite multiple justices saying they would uphold the ban.
President-elect Donald Trump said during his campaign he would seek a reverse to the ban if enacted.
John Sauer, Trump’s lawyer, asked the court to pause implementation of the ban in order for Trump to find a political resolution to issues in the case.
President Joe Biden signed the ban into law following a December 2022 act, which prohibited the use of TikTok on federal government-owned devices.
Youngstown State University followed this by banning TikTok on all YSU-owned devices.
Aaron Merlino, acting information security architect for YSU, said YSU banned the app because of security concerns.
“If you read the agreement of what data the application pulls from your phone, it’s rather scary. It basically data harvests just about everything off of that device that it’s installed on,” Merlino said.
The ban comes amidst questions of whether ByteDance is giving U.S. user data to the Chinese government. According to an ABC News article, there is little evidence to support the sharing of user data or the Chinese government asking for said data.
Ellie Maurice, senior marketing major, said she uses TikTok for work to keep up with trends and decide what will perform well on social media. She said she doesn’t see how TikTok is worse than other social media platforms.
“If [TikTok] is bad in any way, shape or form, it’s just as bad as any other social media platform out there. Nothing in my understanding gives me any reasonable answer as to why it would get banned entirely,” Maurice said.
Maurice said she currently spends multiple hours a day on TikTok. Without the app, she said she hopes to find more productive ways to spend her time.
“I would just find different ways to entertain myself, probably spend more time on other platforms realistically. I mean hopefully, I would do more productive and developmental things,” Maurice said.
However, she said she would not be able to find a replacement that compares to TikTok.
“I know everything that gets posted on TikTok ends up on Reels, either on Facebook or Instagram, but I don’t like the reels interface as much as TikTok. I find TikTok to be a lot more — digestible. So I don’t think I’d be consuming the same content on different platforms,” Maurice said.
