Is time really up for TikTok?

February 2025

By Jonathan Cruz and Clarissa Espinal, Staff Reporters

We have all heard about the world wide app TikTok. This social media platform is known for making short 15 second videos. TikTok first blew up around 2019-2020. The reason TikTok is very popular is by their algorithm, pushing things that you want to see such as comedy, life hacks, dance videos, educational, etc. Now we are at a place where TikTok is getting banned.

The TikTok ban was first mentioned in 2020 when president Trump proposed a ban of the app since he thought it was a national security threat. Their primary concern was that the app was having ties or a relation with China due to the platform being owned by a Chinese tech company ByteDance. On April 24, 2024 Joe Biden passed a bill to Give ByteDance nine months to sell TikTok to a US-approved buyer or it will face the ban. In June 2024, Trump joined TikTok and realized that he is a “Big Star” when he gets millions of followers during his campaign. He later goes on to say, “So if you like TikTok, go out and vote for Trump…”(Forbes Breaking News) On December 27, 2024 Trump goes on to ask SCOTUS to pause the ban because he wants to try to save the platform.

On January 19, 2025 was the set date TikTok was getting banned, when the day finally came the app went dark for a short period of time but then was restored throughout the U.S. As the future of the app still looks murky, plans for an American to purchase TikTok seem to be narrowing down.

While many companies have thrown their hat into the ring, president Trump expressed his support towards two tech giants: Elon musk, CEO of Tesla, spaceX, and Larry Ellisson, co-founder of Oracle. Oracle is a software company, which houses most of TikTok’s U.S. servers.

January 20, 2025 on President Trump’s first day in office, he signed an executive order delaying the ban for 75 days and instructed the US Attorney General to not enforce the law. However the app remains unavailable in U.S. app stores but people who haven’t deleted the social media app still have access to TikTok.