So TikTok went dark on Saturday night and came back on Sunday and I spent the whole weekend feeling like I was watching a soap opera plot happen to a piece of software. If you missed it: the Supreme Court upheld the ban-or-sell law on Friday, unanimously, no dissents, which honestly surprised me a little. I figured at least one justice would want to make a stink about the First Amendment angle. Nope. Nine to zero.
Then Saturday night, right on schedule, the app just stopped working for everyone in the US. Not a slow rollout, not a warning banner for a few days. One moment it worked, the next it showed a full-screen message saying a law banning TikTok had been enacted and thanking users, more or less, for the ride. My cousin sent a screenshot to the family group chat at like 10:40pm with just "IT HAPPENED" and nothing else, which felt about right for the tone of the whole thing.
And then, maybe half a day later, it just... came back. No new law changed. No court reversed itself overnight. It came back because the incoming administration said it would go easy on enforcement, and TikTok apparently decided that was good enough to flip the switch back on. There's something very of-this-era about a company deciding federal law is more of a suggestion once it gets an assurance nobody's going to write the actual citations. I'm not saying that to be dramatic, it's just a strange thing to watch happen to an app fifty million people (I'm making that number up, it's a lot, you know it's a lot) have on their phones.
Here's the detail that I think is more interesting than the on-again-off-again part though: you still can't download it. Apple and Google pulled TikTok, CapCut, and a handful of other ByteDance apps from their stores before the deadline hit, because the law puts the liability on the app stores and phone makers just as much as on TikTok itself, and a private assurance from an incoming president doesn't do anything for Apple's legal exposure. So if you already had the app, congratulations, you have the app, working again, like nothing happened. If you deleted it, or got a new phone, or are a teenager whose parents finally caved and bought them a phone this month, tough luck, it doesn't exist for you right now. It's less a ban and more a really weird permanent freeze on the user base as of last Saturday.
The part I can't stop thinking about, though, happened before any of this. In the week or two leading up to the deadline, a big chunk of TikTok's American users, apparently sensing which way the wind was blowing, went and downloaded a completely different Chinese app called RedNote (Xiaohongshu, if you want the actual name) and started calling themselves "TikTok refugees." It shot to the top of the App Store charts. People were posting about paying a "cat tax" to their new Chinese overlords, joking about learning Mandarin, genuinely trying to make friends with users in China who mostly seemed baffled and delighted in equal measure. The entire stated reason for the ban was concern about a foreign adversary harvesting American data through an app — and a meaningful number of the affected users responded by immediately, voluntarily, joyfully installing a different app from the same country that nobody in Washington had vetted at all. I don't think I've seen a piece of legislation get trolled that hard, that fast, by the people it was ostensibly protecting.
I'll admit I deleted TikTok back in 2022 during one of my periodic phone-declutter moods and never reinstalled it, so I watched all of this from the outside, refreshing my group chat instead of the app itself, which might be the correct way to experience main character energy that isn't yours. My spouse still has it and spent Saturday night doom-scrolling the goodbye videos, people crying into their cameras like they were leaving for war. It's just an app. It's also clearly not just an app, or none of this would have happened, and nobody would have bothered downloading a Mandarin social network out of spite. Both things are true and I don't think that's a contradiction, it's just what the internet is like now.