Community Unplugged
14 hours.
Tiktok was suspended in the United States for 14 hours.
All the jokes about social media influencers returning to the “real world” and having to experience the fragility of the job market were about to come true. For most people, Tiktok wasn’t an economic hustle, but a global community of belonging and exchange. Social media attachment and finding comfort in digital communities isn’t a new thing, so that begs the question: what made Tiktok special? How is it different from Instagram, X (formerly known as Twitter), or even Tumblr? What was it about Tiktok that had people devastated at the threat of its ban?
As a refresher, Tiktok, formerly known as Musical.ly, was launched in September 2016—a few years before the pandemic—and was a viral sensation. In the beginning, the app was used for lip-syncing and dance trends before evolving into a space where people could give life advice, learn recipes, and connect with others about popular culture.
To many, pandemic-era Tiktok was the app at its peak because it was thriving on multiple levels. People were temporarily free from “the real world” during an unprecedented global health scare. Who knew that a lack of social interaction also meant freedom from external perception and potential judgment? Users had distance from the outside world allowing a new era of self-expression and freedom to occur. On a personal note, the pandemic had come during my early high school years, when I was discovering what it meant to be queer. Tiktok introduced me to a whole chapter of history that hadn’t been taught yet: the beauty and resilience of queer people. The solace I found on the internet helped me grow into the person I am today.
But the pandemic wasn’t just about finding yourself online, we also were in a politically charged time. While some demographics were enjoying the dance trends, others were worried about the rise of police brutality and violence that was spreading throughout Oakland. Following the murder of George Floyd in May of 2020, TikTok became a way for Black people to collectively process their grief and anger towards the various institutional systems of oppression that allowed this tragedy to happen. During the pandemic, Tiktok acted as a gateway for people to connect with others online, especially when it came to advocacy and sharing information. Particularly during the Black Lives Matter Movement in 2020, many people flocked to TikTok to exchange knowledge about protest safety, tips on how to protect themselves from harm, and even staged political “Blackouts” to boost the content of the app’s Black creators.
Tiktok has evolved from being a casual social platform to one that strives to inform the public about the issues around them. Relying on social media, as opposed to traditional news broadcast coverage, has grown as an acceptable way to consume news. A study from Sept. 2024 found that nearly 25% of adults consume their news from social media, and 17% of those adults consume it from TikTok. Of course, this accessibility is not to be mistaken for credibility.
In recent years, Tiktok emerged as a space for nuanced conversations about the current socio-political state of the world. It wasn’t long before licensed professionals, teachers, and scholars started providing research and material in an accessible way. Tiktok, once a carefree app targeted to younger demographics, started to transcend age and discipline by connecting people all over the world. TikTok engages with its community differently from other social platforms because of its fresh, nuanced perspectives on current issues, and more accessible, digestible information. Now, TikTok thrives on civic engagement and discourse. Communities could have important conversations across comment sections. Typically, if someone wanted to have a high-level, intellectual conversation on any topic, it would’ve had to happen in an academic setting: places that can often reiterate classist ideologies and rhetoric.
Social media apps like TikTok gave people the opportunity to explore themselves without fear of judgment because the individual had the power to control what they were seeing. There’s a difference between being able to govern and regulate content yourself, versus a government system deciding for you based on international political affairs regarding “data mining, manipulation, and exploitation.” The New York Times released an article discussing what theories the Supreme Court suspected that China “planned” to use Tiktok as a “propaganda machine;” trying to influence the American public by spreading misinformation and disinformation leaks. A claim that had little substantial evidence to back it up, feeding off of fears of international “espionage” and “digital warfare” from the Chinese government.
Data privacy is not exclusively an international issue. It has been a contentious issue in technological spaces for ages. The Trump administration’s relationship with the Chinese government has been a strained one, to say the least, with Trump’s paranoia about potential security risks and its damage to the American people. Yet, U.S. companies like Meta, Amazon, and LinkedIn farm data from their users to better improve their algorithms, potentially selling and trading them on the dark web or using them as intel for various machine learning tactics; TikTok isn’t special. The riot against TikTok has had more to do with fear and critique of Chinese influence on American citizens than it does with protecting users’ right to access and control how their data is used.
14 hours. That’s all it took for people to recognize that the government has the potential to strip one of the largest open forums away from the public. To ban TikTok entirely, much less President Trump’s temporary suspension of the app is unconstitutional. The Center for International and Strategic Studies highlighted how this action violates the First Amendment, which protects free speech for all U.S. citizens. The ability to organize, campaign, and educate is becoming increasingly difficult when the government is keen on censoring all attempts to do so.
TikTok had “returned to normal” by the evening of January 18th, following Trump’s promise to extend the ban deadline by 75 days. Although commentary on the recent political developments has quieted down, I believe that the community and education platform built during the COVID-19 lockdown is the reason why TikTok thrived before this suspension, and why I believe it will thrive again.