Stay up-to-date with the politics team. Sign up for the Teen Vogue Take
The Supreme Court announced Friday that it will allow the TikTok ban to go into effect, as some politicians — you know, the people who pushed for the ban in the first place — suddenly scramble to delay it. Access to the app could be fully restricted in the United States on January 19 unless TikTok’s owner, Chinese company ByteDance, agrees to sell its U.S. arm to a buyer approved by the U.S. government.
Users are, to put it mildly, pissed. As Teen Vogue has reported, young people don’t buy Congress’ argument that the Chinese government could use the app to gain access to sensitive user data. After all, U.S. companies sweep up huge amounts of user data all the time. And TikTok is a vital source of news and entertainment for millions of young Americans, as well as an organizing hub and a source of income for creators.
As the ban draws closer, users are blasting their elected officials for having totally out-of-whack priorities.
Several made sure to get a jab in at Meta, Mark Zuckerberg’s behemoth that reportedly planted the seeds to set this ban in action. 404 Media’s Jason Koebler reports that Zuck has dreamed of this moment: “[The TikTok ban] would be U.S. intervention against the most credible competitor Meta has seen in years, and U.S. intervention to kill a superior product to the benefit of an American company.”
One video spliced midwest emo guitars over someone saying straight-to-camera, “But, but China stealing your data! I don’t care. I would drop-ship my DNA to the front door of the Chinese Communist Party before I watch an Instagram reel.” Another TikTok, with over 100,000 likes, made fun of the fact that people would rather read a book or “work on their mental health” then go back to Instagram.
Indeed, some users have recently rushed to Chinese-owned short-form video app Xiaohongshu, or RedNote, directly gifting their user data, out of spite for the ban and “as a general f*ck-you to the American ruling class,” as Matt Novak opined for Gizmodo. One TikTok, with over 250,000 likes, explained how to try to hurt the pockets of billionaires like Zuck by making it harder for platforms to accrue revenue off your data.
The opposition to Meta’s TikTok clone Reels isn’t just about the politics of its parent company — it’s also that, many users say, the user experience is just junky. But trust, the politics are part of it: The company recently announced changes to its user policies, including allowing users to suggest that being LGBTQ+ is “mental illness” and loosened restrictions around topics like immigration — a move that 404 says is “laying the narrative groundwork” for Trump’s mass deportation plans. More significantly, as creator Imani Barbarin says in a TikTok with nearly a million likes, “Everybody has my data.” As I’ve explained previously, the data privacy concerns attributed to TikTok, in part used to justify the ban, are prevalent across all social media conglomerates.
