With the fate of the popular social media site TikTok still uncertain, Murray State students weighed in with their opinions on its potential ban.
On the night of Saturday, Jan. 18, TikTok went dark as a bill passed in April of last year banned the app in the United States. The outage was short-lived, as around 12 hours later TikTok’s servers came back online following President Donald Trump’s pledge to sign an executive order halting enforcement of the ban.
House Bill 7521, entitled the “Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act,” banned companies in America from distributing or maintaining applications owned and controlled by foreign adversaries. Specifically, the bill targeted ByteDance, a Chinese company that owns TikTok and other applications such as CapCut. The law gave ByteDance 270 days to divest from TikTok and transfer ownership to an American company.
Lawmakers argued that TikTok’s data collection practices may put U.S. citizens at risk, as it may give the Chinese government access to stored personal data. Though no credible evidence of Chinese access to American personal data has been reported, the FBI has cited this as a potential national security risk.
According to TikTok, the personal data of all U.S. users is stored in American servers operated by U.S. cloud service provider, Oracle. TikTok also established the U.S. Data Security Company to manage access to U.S. user data and help prevent unauthorized foreign access to American user data. This company is controlled by an independent board of directors who are American citizens and have a background in cyber security.
TikTok challenged the ban, saying that it violated the first amendment rights of the app’s more than 170 million users. However, in a ruling on Jan. 17, the Supreme Court unanimously voted to uphold the ban.
On his first day in office, Trump signed an executive order directing the Attorney General not to take any action on enforcing the new law for 75 days following the order. This gives TikTok more time to reach a deal which might keep the social media platform available to U.S. users.
What this deal may look like remains uncertain. Trump previously discussed the idea of a 50-50 split in ownership between ByteDance and an American investor. Many names have been thrown around for who may buy TikTok, including Elon Musk and Larry Ellison, co-founder of tech company Oracle. Billionaire businessmen Kevin O’Leary and Frank McCourt have teamed up to offer a $20 billion dollar bid for the app. Youtuber Jimmy Donaldson, more commonly known as Mr. Beast, has also floated the idea of purchasing the app.
Trump’s defense of TikTok appears to be a shift from his stance during his first term. Trump previously led the effort to ban TikTok, including signing an executive order in 2020 which would have banned any dealings between ByteDance and any American company or individual, though this order was later struck down in the courts.
Emma Webb, junior nursing student, said she believed the ban was silly and did not see a reason why the site should be taken down. Webb said she felt that the ban took away freedom of speech for the site’s users who use the app as a way of expressing themselves and finding community. Webb said that even if there is a risk of China collecting people’s data, it would be better to make people aware of the risk instead of banning it entirely.
“Even if there is a whole data thing, I think if I wanted to give the Chinese my data, I think that’s my business,” Webb said. “(I) really don’t see how the government has a right to tell me what I can and can’t do in that regard. (I) didn’t really see how it was constitutional.”
Though Webb said she agreed with Trump’s decision to block the ban of TikTok, she said it came off as hypocritical considering his previous stance on the issue.
Noah Allen, freshman mechanical engineering major, is an avid user of the site and said he disagreed with the government’s decision to ban TikTok. Allen said he never thought the ban would stick.
“I was somewhat indifferent because deep down I knew it wouldn’t go through all the way,” Allen said. “When I first saw it was banned for real, I was like, ‘Oh my goodness it was actually banned.’ I was a little sad, but I kind of knew it was going to come back, especially with the election coming up and, you know, change of power.”
Lasala Fritsch, freshman cyber security and network management major, said she agreed with the government’s decision to ban TikTok. Fritsch said the site was a negative influence on kids, including her own younger sister. She said she disagrees with the decision to block the ban, and said that TikTok should have never been created.
“It should stay banned because I feel like it’s exposing too much to little kids,” Fritsch said. “Especially my little sister, because she’s 12 and she’s asking me about things that she’s too young to even know. Especially like, you know, sex and drugs. She’s just too young for that.”
Sami Neel, freshman human resource management student, said it was odd the government decided to block TikTok when there are other things that put our privacy at risk from China, especially with how many young people get their news from TikTok. Though Neel said she does not use TikTok often, she still knows people who were impacted by it.
“I know my friends were pretty upset about it. It was very dystopian when you opened TikTok and saw that message that popped up like, ‘Hey, you can’t use TikTok anymore, please close the app,’” Neel said.
Rae Valencia, senior architectural engineering student, said he believed the ban was “dumb” as it did not target other Chinese apps available for download. While he said Trump’s decision to block the ban was nice, he said Trump did it to save face after supporting the ban previously. He also said this ban could help his billionaire supporters who are looking to buy the app. He said the ban may also be a form of censorship.
“A lot of people were able to get a lot of information and discover a lot of things about themselves and the world that you wouldn’t really necessarily see on our form of social media,” Valencia said. “And then once it got popular enough, it got taken away because people were like, ‘Hey, the lower class are starting to realize they’re getting screwed.’”
Logan Griffiths, freshman middle school education student, said he thought the ban was “stupid.” Griffiths said he supported Trump’s decision to block the ban, and it was a constitutional right to express yourself any way you want. Griffiths also mentioned how there are other Chinese apps which could be doing the same thing as TikTok which aren’t covered by the law.
“I think it’s just a bunch of old traditional guys in Congress that see TikTok as this foreign entity and that all they’re doing is harm and all they’re doing is stealing the content,” Griffiths said. “I think overall it’s just pretty dumb, but it’s just a bunch of old traditional guys that like things done a certain way, American owned, and it just wasn’t that.”
