TikTok Ban Timeline and Updates
Fury Basso-Davis | February 11, 2024
The TikTok ban has been a popular discussion topic online every few months since 2020 given national policy reversals starting with Donald Trump’s first administration.
Below we trace the Timeline of TikTok’s US Ban and What Comes Next, highlighting events from August 2020 to January 2025.
On Aug. 7, 2020, Bobby Allyn, a journalist for National Public Radio (NPR), reported that then-President Donald Trump signed an executive order that would have effectively banned TikTok in the U.S.
On Aug. 6, 2020, President Trump invoked emergency economic powers that urged broad sanctions against the app, a move that intended to put pressure on the Chinese-owned app to sell its U.S. assets to an American company such as Microsoft, Oracle or Perplexity AI, according to NPR reporting at the time.
The executive order was supposed to take effect in 45 days and would disband any transactions between TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, and the United States. Those transactions would be made illegal for national security reasons such as data privacy concerns.
Since TikTok is owned by a Chinese company, it was thought by the government that it could serve as a way of sending American data to the Chinese government. The U.S. government showed concerns about Chinese disinformation campaigns to get popular on TikTok and cause election interference according to Ms Mojo on Youtube.
In a separate article from NPR by Shannon Bond she wrote that there were long-running Chinese influence operations posing as American voters on TikTok. Bond stated there was an “attempt to exacerbate social divisions ahead of the 2024 presidential election,” according to a new report from the research company Graphika.
“The push by the campaign known as ‘Spamouflag’ includes accounts claiming to be American voters and U.S. soldiers. They posted about hot-button topics including reproductive rights, homelessness, U.S. support for Ukraine and American policy toward Israel. They criticized President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris as well as former President Donald Trump and the Republican Party, and sometimes used artificial intelligence tools to create content,” Bond said.
Kate Ruane, director of the Free Expression Project at the Center for Democracy and Technology told NPR the order likely meant that TikTok could no longer receive advertising from American companies and the app could be removed from the Apple Appstore and Google Play. Any store that allowed it to stay could have faced serious fines.
On Sept. 27, 2020, Donald Trump's executive order was blocked by Judge Carl J. Nichols, a District Judge, and in October 2020, his executive order was banned by a federal judge, the federal judge added that Trump had exceeded his authority by invoking emergency economic powers based on hypothetical claims. In November 2020, an appeal from the White House went out and a second federal judge blocked Trump’s executive order again due to lack of evidence.
“I thought that the TikTok ban was a silly step for the government to take,” Frankie Ratowitz, a sophomore at the University of North Carolina Asheville (UNCA), said. “If I remember correctly Trump introduced the idea around 2020, specifically after TikTok communities pranked him. I thought it was a way for Trump to retaliate against younger people.”
In July 2021, former President Biden issued an executive order that revoked Trump's attempt to ban the app but signed the No TikTok on Government Devices Act. This bill required TikTok to be removed from the devices of all government officials.
In an article written by Cable News Network, a proposed law by the Senate Intelligence Committee in December 2022, social media companies with a minimum of one million monthly users that are headquartered in or have "substantial influence" over nations deemed foreign adversaries, such as China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, Cuba and Venezuela, would be prohibited from conducting any transactions in the United States.
In March 2024, cyber security experts had a briefing on the risks posed by TikTok, lawmakers approved legislation that would make ByteDance sell TikTok to a U.S. owned media company, and the house voted 352-65.
After another briefing in April 2024, the Senate passed legislation that would force TikTok to be sold to a U.S. company or be banned in the U.S., this was passed by a vote 79-18. Former President Biden signed the bill into law giving ByteDance 9 months to sell to a U.S. company.
In June of 2024 during Trump's entrance to the 2024 election cycle, he said he would not ban TikTok because he said he “got to use it,” according to The Guardian.
In January, former President Biden and his administration said they would not enforce the TikTok ban on January 19, leaving it up to the Trump administration, which was to take office on January 20.
Incoming President Trump said he had not made a final decision but was considering a 90-day extension for the Jan. 19 deadline, “I think that would be, certainly, an option that we look at. The 90-day extension is something that will be most likely done because it’s appropriate. You know, it’s appropriate. We have to look at it carefully. It’s a very big situation," Trump said over the phone in an interview with National Broadcasting Company (NBC).
TikTok then told its 170 million United States users that it would be going offline in the U.S., and for 16 hours it did until its use was restored. The Apple Appstore and Google Play are currently unable to have the app in their stores due to potential fines.
“Now that the ban has actually gone through I think it was an complete publicity stunt,” Ratowits said. “The fact that hours after the ban TikTok was back due to Trump fueled this. Especially because Biden was still in office. I think it was a very obvious attempt to appeal to the younger voted block. I think that it might have worked because I don’t believe that people remember that it was Trump who first posed the idea.”
WWC student Marta Deildfuss, a junior, had strong opinions about the app banning.
“Only fascist countries ban social media,” Geildfuss said.
To give his team time to "determine the appropriate course forward in an orderly way that protects national security while avoiding an abrupt shutdown of a communications platform used by millions of Americans," Trump signed an executive order after taking office that instructs the attorney general to refrain from taking any action to enforce the TikTok sell-off bid for 75 days.
In an article published by The Guardian on Jan. 29, 2025, Trump now claims that Microsoft, alongside other tech companies, are in talks to buy the app and that within 30 days he will have news about the future of the platform.
As of now, the app remains available (if already downloaded) in the United States, however after the 75-day sell-of-bid deadline it is still undetermined if TikTok will remain available in the U.S. if an American company does not buy it.