By LEO ROBLES
Student Reporter
On Friday the famous social media app, TikTok, was officially banned in the United States.
Last year on January, there was a senate in which the CEO of TikTok and the Senator Tom Cotton both were at a hearing and the senator proceeded to ask Shou Zi Chew, the former CEO of TikTok, about his current citizenship status.
In the hearing, the senator repeatedly asks Shou about his citizenship information and if he had any possible connections of the Chinese communist party. The hearing was very popular among social media and the senator was criticized for his approach.
Shou kept on mentioning that he was Singaporean and that he does not have any connection with the Chinese communist party or its government.
According to CBS news, the app was shutting down in the United States due to the accusations of spying on citizens through the app and also its relationship with China.
U.S. officials offered the owner of TikTok to sell the app before January 19.
After the given date, if the owner has not done made a decision, then the app would proceed to be banned in the U.S. territory. TikTok is currently banned in China, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India.
The United States found it useful to prevent the app from getting any sort of personal information from their American users.
The entire situation seemed almost impossible to believe since the app is well known among young citizens and teens, and they were not aware of the allegations that the owners of TikTok were facing.
Many of the users around the world.
Entire country were content creators and some of them have clarified that TikTok was one of their main sources of income. The app was also the reason why many of the users became content creators and made those people popular among the app.
The banning of TikTok made a huge impact in these content creators since they would no longer have access to make their work in it. Some of them migrated to other apps or they decided to just focus on their other social accounts, but the disapproval of TikTok had made its own path through social media users.
TikTok just like any other app, they had a unique structure of the app that connected with the users and made it one of the most popular apps nationally. The ban not only affected TikTok, but other apps like CapCut, Marvel Snap and Lemon8. Those apps while not all social media apps they are owned by the same company that owns TikTok. TikTok was officially banned for 12 hours on Sunday. Meanwhile the new elected president, Donald Trump, was going into office on Monday. President Trump’s recent arrival has placed an order on the justice department to not enforce the TikTok ban, but to be postponed. Many users were surprised of the sudden return of the app since they were ready to focus on other social media apps.
Ivan Elias from Woodward, a Sophomore at NWOSU with a major in Criminal Justice, thought that it was sort of extreme by the United States government to decide to ban the app. He thought there could be a different outcome that would not affect content creators directly. He said that their decision was not fair, and that the entire situation seemed rushed. He went on to say that since the app was returning even for an estimated time, it would be a little different since now everybody will talk about it and it would leave a mark in the app, making it unforgivable.
He is happy that the app is staying a little longer since he has made some content himself making a few memes and expects to increase his popularity among the app as well as other content creators that he follows.
TikTok is still active but it is not accessible for those who have already deleted the app since it is no longer in the app store. Many American social media users have spotted a new Chinese app with similar functions like TikTok.
According to a CNN article the former TikTok users are downloading RedNote since they no longer have TikTok, and thanks to RedNote’s similarities to TikTok, the have been increasing their popularity at a major level.
RedNote has gained a great number of American users and the possibility of getting banned as well could happen. Some of the new users have made posts about not letting politics interfere in their social media navigating and they only want to enjoy the app.