DIMM022: They really went and banned TikTok.
I was going to write this in preparation for a TikTok ban, but now as of writing, it is officially unusable in the US. Here's a play by play of what happened on my end.
So January 19th is the day that a law goes in to effect that says that TikTok has to either sell itself to an American company, or be taken off of app stores in the US.
Today is January 18th, and I got on the app between Deadlock games and saw a popup and quickly closed it. TikTok flashes you with popups a lot so I didn't think before I did it. But I did see that it said "Important Update from TikTok". So I looked that up and this is what I got given.
This might seem obvious in retrospect, but I just kept thinking that there is no way that they are actually going to shut down this app. There were a bunch of things coming out about extensions from the people in the office who started this, and the people about to enter the office on the 20th. I don't know what the hell anyone in congress was thinking but yes of course nobody wants this shit to happen, and this gives the other side an easy slam dunk as soon as they get in to office. There were attempts to flip the issue over to the other side, but clearly that didn't work.
After this popup, it finally occurred to me that this app was honestly truly going to shut down in the very near future. So I started downloading all of my favorited videos. Then, at 8:31PM (Unix:1737257486), one of them said, "There was a problem saving your video. Try Again." and I kept trying over and over again, and nothing. I went to my overall list of favorites, and there was nothing there. I went to my liked videos, nothing. I restarted my app thinking that maybe something had just gone wrong. It started on a football video in spanish, and scrolling up did nothing, and refreshing just refreshed to the same video. Restarting the app over and over did the same thing.
Then, a final popup.
Sorry, TikTok isn't availible right now
A law banning TikTok has been enacted in the U.S. Unfortunately that means that you can't use TikTok for now.
We are fortunate that President □□□□□ has indicated that he will work with us on a solution to reinstate TikTok once he takes office. Please stay tuned!
Learn More | Close app
And since then, nothing.
I do want to say that I loved TikTok. The videos, the personality, the people on TikTok are irreplaceable. And it makes me really sad that it is gone. I don't really want to get in to politics with my channel, but I am really scared for the next four years. And this is definitely not a good start. Even if TikTok does come back under the next president, that doesn't look good for the outgoing administration who literally just lost the election. Giving them something so easy to just go and fix that 170 million americans will love them for, and hate the other one for, is such a slam dunk, no wonder there was bipartisan support.
Last Minute Update:
I was gonna post that, but now TikTok is back. At around mid-day today (Jan 19, 2025), it came back online with this popup. So maybe my intuition that there was no way that they were going to shut down this app was right? IDK anymore this is why I like to wait until things are settled before I talk about them.