It’s all getting very real. While there has been lots of chatter in recent days, including speculation that Mr Beast or Elon Musk might swoop in to save the day, the reality is that the legal juggernaut is ploughing on regardless and may be unstoppable. TikTok may be shut down by Sunday and your account will suddenly go dark.
Citing “people familiar with the matter,” Reuters has warned that “TikTok plans to shut its app for U.S. users on Sunday, when a federal ban on the social media app used by 170 million Americans is set to take effect, barring a last-minute reprieve.”
It seems likely that TikTok would shut down access to its platform, redirecting users to a website explaining what has happened. But with fingers (and everything else) crossed, it also seems likely that behind the scenes, the ecosystem will be on pause, ready to waken back up if there’s a Trumpian reprieve next week.
There’s a good chance you’ll be offered an option to download all your data — albeit that could be an extraordinary technical challenge if 100-million-plus users choose to download heavy amounts of video data within a short window. That has all the inklings of a platform crash just waiting to happen. Don’t count on it.
It also seems unlikely that using a VPN will be the answer. Much of the ecosystem you will be accessing is U.S. based and will likely be unavailable — you can hope this is temporary, but again nothing is certain. Your app knows you’re a U.S. user and it is hardcoded to a specific ecosystem, you can’t change that without moving to an app from a different jurisdiction. It’s likely this won’t be as easy as bypassing broadcast territory rights by opening the app from “a different country.” A VPN would help you if the data was available but blocked, not if the backend is out. Remember, TikTok has already made concessions to the U.S. by storing data locally. This will be a huge disadvantage for users if the ban goes into effect. “We go dark. Essentially, the platform shuts down,” warned Noel Francisco, TikTok’s counsel.
Clearly, TikTok could make it work such that American users could use their apps when outside the U.S., either in reality or through a VPN masking their location. This is how banned apps are available in countries that have gone dark, such as China, Russia and Iran. It’s also how Pornhub has maintained its U.S. audience despite being blocked in multiple states. But if TikTok is adhering to the ban, it won’t allow a user it knows to be a U.S. resident to access their platform from their existing app, simply by appearing to be temporarily overseas. We won’t know until Sunday.
What we are seeing now is the confusion caused by different interpretations of an unprecedented legal situation, with a major social media platform being banned in one of its biggest markets. This isn’t the same as access being shut down by local censorship, the ecosystem itself will be unavailable. Your app may still be on your phone, but the data center that sits behind it will not be available to you.
Cleverly — the platform hopes — this mothballing makes it easy to restart the machine, as opposed to making changes to try to accommodate a raft of workarounds to nibble around the edges of the ban. Better to put the app to sleep for a while, prompting chaos and a user backlash just hours before a populist president takes office. You can see how the script might play out. Some form of next step is likely.
Meantime, if you do have any content you want to keep that’s only on TikTok, I suggest you download that now. And if there’s any other data or messages you do not want to lose, then grab those as well. I suspect this will be au revoir rather than goodbye to the wildly popular Chinese app, but nothing these days is certain.
Meantime, don’t jump onboard the first alternative app you see, especially if that’s another Chinese app without the normalization and scrutiny TikTok has endured in recent years. That especially means RedNote, which you should avoid.
And for those with smug grins outside the U.S. who still assume nothing changes — don’t be so sure. Remember, much of the content you view might be caught in the ban, and the whole ecosystem is about to change drastically and suddenly. And what about your followers and those you follow who are U.S. based. This isn’t a fully executed separation. You may be hit much harder than you expect.
Watch this space — as they say.