As The TikTok Ban Looms, White House Launches A New Account On The App
đź“ť usncan Note: As The TikTok Ban Looms, White House Launches A New Account On The App
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WASHINGTON, DC – NOVEMBER 13: U.S. President-elect Donald Trump speaks at a House Republicans Conference meeting at the Hyatt Regency on Capitol Hill on November 13, 2024 in Washington, DC. As is tradition with incoming presidents, Trump is traveling to Washington, DC to meet with U.S. President Joe Biden at the White House as well as Republican members of Congress on Capitol Hill. (Photo by Allison Robbert-Pool/Getty Images)
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You would think the drama over a TikTok ban would have been resolved by now.
Instead, in a move that can only be meant to change the optics related to TikTok’s future, the White House launched a new account on the platform, which is used by about 170 million Americans.
The first clip on @whitehouse features President Trump in a promo saying “I am your voice” with a caption about America being back. The account already has a handful of videos available, but most of them are about President Trump.
History of the TikTok ban
It’s another twist in a story that is hard to pin down. I’ve been writing about the TikTok ban from the beginning, covering all of the twists and turns.
Here’s a highly condensed recap. First, U.S. officials started recognizing that the Chinese-owned app could be used as a surveillance tool. Former President Joe Biden signed a law making the app illegal to distribute on app stores last spring, but President Trump has delayed enforcing the ban multiple times since then.
We’re now approaching the next deadline for an extension on September 17. Meanwhile, the timing of the new White House account seems odd considering the ban is supposed to go into effect again in a few weeks.
Still, it’s hard to take these expiration dates and possible extensions seriously because President Trump is an advocate for keeping the social media app around. Now that he is using a new account, it seems even more likely that he will extend the ban again.
Why a TikTok ban seems more likely
The issue here is one of legality, not preference.
President Trump is going a bit rogue because lawmakers never intended the ban to be extended this many times. Trump has found a workaround by issuing executive orders to delay the ban, which he has the right to do, but the original ruling was meant to address a foreign threat and had timelines for enforcement built-in.
We’re now facing an uncertain future, especially if you are a TikTok creator or rely on the app to help you find places to eat or discover new music, like me.
One recent report notes that Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick thinks TikTok won’t survive much longer. “It’s got to come out of Chinese control,” said Lutnick on CNBC. “We’ve made the decision. You can’t have Chinese control and have something on a hundred million American phones. That’s just not OK.”
Another report claimed ByteDance, the company that owns TikTok, is working on a new app that will be released on September 5.
Users will be forced to switch to the new version, which hints at the possibility the current version won’t be around that much longer.
What the TikTok ban really means
The basic summary here is that no one really knows what will happen.
For fans of the app, content creators, and even those who are pushing for freedom of speech and have a hard time accepting that the federal government has any role to play on social media platforms, it feels like this time there may be an actual change.
A new app? An actual ban? Life as usual? Come September, we’ll know a lot more about whether a TikTok ban could actually happen.
