TikTok bans explained: Everything you need to know

What is the TikTok ban bill?

The U.S. House of Representatives passed legislation March 13, 2024, requiring Chinese company ByteDance to sell off the social media app within six months or be banned from U.S. stores and websites. The ban would force Apple and Google to remove TikTok from their app stores, and service providers to block the browser version of the app in the United States.

The bill -- known as the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act (H.R. 7521) -- passed the House by a 325-65 vote with overwhelming support from both Republican and Democratic lawmakers. That standalone bill was not voted on by the U.S. Senate. The bill defines TikTok -- and other technology controlled by parent company ByteDance -- as a "Foreign Adversary Controlled Application."

The House of Representatives tried again a month later with some additional modifications, when on April 20, 2024, it voted on a foreign aid package (H.R. 815) for Ukraine, Taiwan and Israel, that also included the TikTok provisions. That bill once again had bipartisan support, passing the House with a 360-58 vote. The U.S. Senate voted and passed the bill on April 23, in a 79-18 vote with bipartisan support.

Former President Joe Biden then signed National Security Act, 2024 into law on April 24, 2024, which included the TikTok divest or ban bill.

Under the terms of the bill signed by Biden, ByteDance had nine months to divest itself of TikTok and find new ownership for the social media company. The new owners need to be based in the U.S. or an allied country. The president could extend the time by an additional 90 days if a deal was in progress at the end of the nine-month period. The nine-month deadline ended Jan. 19, 2025.

On Jan. 20, 2025, upon inauguration, President Donald Trump signed an executive order postponing the enforcement of the ban for 75 days, giving the administration more time to pursue a resolution.

Trump favored a TikTok ban in his first term but later opposed a ban in the 2024 race for the White House.

TikTok pushed back against the initial rounds of voting in Congress, rolling out a $2.1 million advertising campaign featuring U.S. users discussing how the app has helped them and their businesses. Reflecting the political nature of the ban, TikTok focused its ads on U.S. battleground states with tough 2024 Senate races to try to convince incumbents to block the House of Representatives ban.

In a statement issued by TikTok after the bill was signed, the company claimed the law was unconstitutional, and later challenged the law in court. The challenge was not successful.

TikTok claims more than 170 million Americans use the app, and nearly 5 million businesses have used it to start and grow their companies.

TikTok ban timeline: How it happened and what comes next?

TikTok has been under fire for many years. Here's a look at the TikTok saga:

• September 2020. The first Trump Administration attempted to use its emergency power to block the application.
• January 2023. TikTok proposed a $1.5 billion plan called Project Texas to move all U.S. data to the United States to allay privacy and security concerns. That plan, which transferred data to Oracle's cloud and set up a U.S. subsidiary to manage it, failed to sway Congress when it voted on its ban.
• February 2023. The Biden Administration banned TikTok on devices used by federal employees.
• March 2023. The FBI and U.S. Department of Justice launched an investigation into allegations that TikTok spied on American journalists. Chew appeared before the House Energy and Commerce Committee to defend the application. His testimony touched on TikTok's consumer privacy and data security policies, the platform's mental health impact and security concerns about the platform's parent company, ByteDance.
• March 2024. U.S. House of Representatives passes legislation requiring ByteDance to sell TikTok or be banned in U.S. app stores and websites. It then moved to the Senate, where it was never voted on.
• April 2024. Both the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate pass a foreign aid package, which included the TikTok legislation. Days later, Biden signed the bill into law.
• May 2024. TikTok files a lawsuit with the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C., alleging the law is unconstitutional because it stifles free speech. The suit also alleged an unlawful taking of private property. Eight content creators also sued the U.S. government, alleging the law violates the First Amendment right to free speech.
• December 2024. A federal appeals court unanimously upholds the TikTok ban regulation, rebuffing TikTok's complaint that the law is unconstitutional.
• January 2025
• Jan 17. The U.S. Supreme Court upholds the federal law that would ban TikTok, pending a sell-off, and planned to ban the app on Jan. 19.
• Jan 18. TikTok shuts off service for U.S. users, who were met with a message in the app stating, "A law banning TikTok has been enacted in the U.S. Unfortunately that means you can't use TikTok right now." The app was also removed from app stores.
• Jan 19. Trump issues an executive order enabling TikTok to continue serving U.S. users, delaying enforcement of the ban for an additional 75 days, until April 4, 2025.

Why does the U.S. want to ban TikTok?

The United States wants to ban the application for several reasons, but mainly due to national security concerns. U.S. lawmakers are concerned ByteDance might leak U.S. user data to the Chinese government if forced to. TikTok is classified as a Foreign Adversary Controlled Application under the law.

"Today, the CCP's [Chinese Communist Party's] laws require Chinese companies like ByteDance to spy on their behalf," Committee Chair Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, R-Wash., said during a hearing on TikTok's national security risks.

TikTok releases a transparency report where it discloses formal legal requests for user data. The biannual information request report shows how many requests were made in each country. According to the latest report, requests for information by law enforcement reached an all-time high in the first half of 2024, with 13,166 total requests around the globe.

While data and national security concerns are the primary driving force behind the TikTok ban, U.S. lawmakers have raised a number of other issues with the app, including the following:

• Addictiveness. While TikTok's addictiveness is a concern, it has employed a feature that tells users to leave the application after 60 minutes.
• Misinformation. TikTok claims it does not allow misinformation as part of its community guidelines and actively works to remove it. It also does not accept political ads.
• Children's safety. There are many concerns over children abusing or misusing the application. However, TikTok has made efforts to protect children on the app, providing a different user experience for U.S. users under 13. For example, the platform prevented them from going viral and using the private messaging feature.
• Mental health. Content that promotes eating disorders, tobacco use or suicide has been a concern. However, TikTok -- like most social media companies -- has a content moderation policy and aims to remove all violating content.
• Selling data. Gathering and selling data that TikTok doesn't need to make a profit is a concern. TikTok has claimed that it does not sell data to data brokers.
• Data security. Data leaks are a concern. Data leaks are a risk with any online service and common with social media. TikTok -- and other social media platforms -- use data access protocols to protect and organize data into categories of sensitivity.

Even before the federal ban, the U.S. prohibited the application on federal and public sector employees' phones and on state employees' phones in more than half of U.S. states. Several states have also sued TikTok. The first state to sue the company was Indiana, on claims that the application serves users inappropriate content and violates consumer protection laws in its data collection practices. Another lawsuit came from Arkansas, which sued TikTok, ByteDance and Facebook's parent company, Meta, over claims that the companies violate the Deceptive Trade Practices Act.

Montana was the first U.S. state to pass legislation banning TikTok on all personal devices. The bill was to go into effect in January 2024, but a federal judge blocked the ban in November 2023, saying it violated the First Amendment. The law, though it did not come into effect, would have prevented the app from operating within the state and fined app stores that hosted TikTok within state lines up to $10,000 per day.

Several universities have also banned the app on their networks.

Who might buy TikTok?

TikTok has been valued at well over $100 billion, raising the question of who would buy if ByteDance is willing to sell. That's more than twice the $44 billion that Elon Musk paid for Twitter in 2022.

That would limit potential buyers to the world's richest individuals -- a consortium of investors or tech giants. Several individuals have publicly or reportedly expressed interest in putting together a group to purchase TikTok from ByteDance. They include the following:

• Steven Mnuchin, an investment banker and former U.S. Treasury secretary.
• Chris Pavlovski, CEO of online video platform Rumble, who has suggested including Rumble in a consortium to purchase TikTok.
• Former Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick.
• Shark Tank investor Kevin O'Leary.
• Frank McCourt, billionaire businessman and real estate mogul.
• Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX.
• Jimmy Donaldson, Mr. Beast.

Frank McCourt has made a formal offer to buy the platform, without its proprietary algorithm, for approximately $20 billion.

Microsoft, Oracle, X (formerly Twitter) and Walmart have also all been mentioned as potential TikTok buyers. Google and Meta have been mentioned as possible suitors but might face antitrust hurdles.

What countries is TikTok banned in?

The United States is not the only country that has full or partial TikTok bans in place. Partial bans are usually limited to government or public sector employees. Full bans apply to all citizens.

Some countries have full bans on TikTok, including Afghanistan, India, Iran, Kyrgyzstan, Nepal and Somalia.

Regions that have enacted partial bans include the following:

• Australia -- on all government devices.
• Belgium -- on federal government work devices.
• Canada -- on government-issued devices.
• Denmark -- on Defense Ministry staff devices.
• European Union -- on Parliament, Commission and EU Council staff devices.
• France -- on professional phones of civil servants.
• Latvia -- on work devices at the Latvian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
• New Zealand -- on government lawmakers' work devices.
• Norway -- on government work devices.
• Taiwan -- on government devices.
• United Kingdom -- on government devices.

Other countries have banned TikTok in the past and have since rescinded the bans. Two examples are Indonesia and Pakistan, which both banned the application temporarily due to explicit content.

What types of data does TikTok collect?

One point of contention is the safety of TikTok's recommendation engine. The recommendation engine uses behavioral data to determine the user's interests and feed them relevant content. Some data that TikTok uses to do this is the following:

• How long a user stays on a page.
• If a user shares a video.
• If a user swipes away from a video.
• If a user comments on a video.
• If a user likes a video.
• Basic login information, such as name, age, phone number and email address.
• Location data.
• IP address.
• Biometric data.

Dispersion mechanisms are used to keep the user from seeing repetitive content. TikTok's data collection protocols are available in full on its privacy policy page.

Some TikTok divestment deals in discussion exclude TikTok's proprietary algorithms, which has played a large role in the previous success of the app.

Challenges of banning TikTok

Notably, TikTok challenged the legality of the bill to no avail.  

Another challenge of banning TikTok is alienating young users politically. TikTok's user base skews young. To ban access to the app would negatively influence a lot of young voters and consumers who enjoy the app. In the leadup to the ban, many users migrated to another Chinese-owned platform with similar functionality -- RedNote -- partially out of necessity and partially in protest of the ban.

Many SMBs also rely on the platform for their business model. And many multinational corporations have their own TikTok accounts and rely on the platform for some portion of business. Over the course of the ban's saga, there have been petitions to save the app and protests against the ban, with support from lawmakers as well.

One challenge in the event of a sell off would be for the new owners to maintain TikTok's popularity. A change in ownership might create a change in functionality that drives users away, even if the app remains available. TikTok would also still have to contend with the data privacy and security concerns that all social media platforms face, regardless of their ownership. Social media companies -- such as Meta and Twitter -- that also collect user data are vulnerable to breaches and privacy concerns, and are to a degree are under the control of their operating country's government.

The investigation into TikTok has reinvigorated a larger conversation about data privacy on all social platforms, and has sparked calls for data privacy law reform.

TikTok vs. Douyin

Both TikTok and Douyin are owned by ByteDance.

While TikTok is not available in mainland China, Douyin is a short-form video application that is often portrayed as the Chinese version of TikTok. Douyin has to follow Chinese media laws, and a Chinese phone number is required to download Douyin. TikTok is available in many countries around the world and is beholden to the laws of the countries it operates in.

Douyin has more features than TikTok. For example, Douyin has hotel booking and e-payment features in the application. It also offers full-length movies, in addition to standard short-form video. Douyin preceded TikTok. Douyin was launched in 2016, whereas TikTok was launched in 2017.

The TikTok ban could potentially affect ByteDance's other applications in the U.S. The company offers several apps in U.S. app stores, such as the video editing app CapCut. ByteDance's newer app Lemon8 -- a health, fitness and wellness app -- could also be subject to the ban. RedNote, another Chinese-owned TikTok alternative, might also run into trouble in the event of a ban.

The language used in the Congressional bill suggests that these apps would also need to be divested to continue operating in the U.S. market.