In just a few years, TikTok grew from an addictive and silly app for teens into a potential national security threat. How? The short-video platform avoided a ban in the US in January – but the threat is still active three months later.
Another legal battle over the future of TikTok is once again in full swing. Just like with the original January deadline, TikTok is still legally required to divest from its parent company ByteDance – or be banned.
Donald Trump signed an executive order delaying the ban on his first day in office, additionally promising not to enforce the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act against service providers – Amazon Web Services, Apple, Google, and others.
But now, 75 days later, nothing’s changed. Rumors are swirling, of course, and Trump has promised a TikTok sale before the second deadline of April 5th – but details remain vague. The US President – who likes TikTok – might even have to extend the term again.
This is all legally dodgy, by the way, because the law requiring TikTok’s sale is already in effect and has been upheld by the US Supreme Court. Plus, China – ByteDance is a Chinese firm – might not agree to let any sale happen.
Still, the fact is that TikTok, once a funny niche app for teens, has evolved into a global cultural and social phenomenon, and is now held to be a potential national security threat by many US lawmakers.
How did TikTok reach this juncture? Here’s the entire history of the forever-viral app, from launch to the turbulence of yesterday, today, and tomorrow.
TikTok’s Chinese origins
March 2012: entrepreneur Zhang Yimin founds ByteDance, an internet technology company, in China. One of its first hit products is Toutiao (“headlines”), a personalized news and content aggregator.
July 2014: Another Chinese entrepreneur, Alex Zhu, founds a startup called Musical.ly. Users of the platform created and shared short lip-sync videos. Next year, the app went viral and even hit the first place in the Apple app store.
September 2016: ByteDance launches Douyin, originally under the name A.me before rebranding. Within a year, the video sharing app for Chinese users attracts 100 million of them. Douyin’s popularity inspires the company to create a version for foreign audiences – TikTok.
TikTok’s global expansion and challenges
November 2017: ByteDance acquires Musical.ly for $1 billion and merges it with TikTok nine months later. This is the moment TikTok reaches global audiences with the bang – and with the help of its powerful algorithm that encourages binge-watching. Celebrities flock to the app.
February 2019: the Federal Trade Commission fines ByteDance $5.7 billion for collecting data from minors under the age of 13. In response, TikTok then adds a “kids only” mode, predictably despised by kids.
September 2019: that same year, The Washington Post says that while images and videos of protests in Hong Kong are common elsewhere on social media, they’re mysteriously absent on TikTok. The Guardian additionally reports on internal documents detailing how TikTok instructs its moderators to delete or limit the reach of videos touching on topics sensitive to China.
December 2019: after calls for national security probes into TikTok and other Chinese-owned apps, the Pentagon recommends that all US military personnel delete TikTok from all phones. The recommendation turns into a ban in January 2020.
July 2020: TikTok, excluding Douyin which is available only to users in China, reports close to 800 million monthly active users worldwide after less than four years of existence. The fact that everyone was stuck at home during the first waves of the COVID-19 pandemic helps.
That same month, President Trump says he’s considering banning TikTok to retaliate for China’s alleged mishandling of the pandemic.
Trump’s first TikTok ban attempt
August 2020: Trump moves against TikTok – his executive order bans US companies from any “transaction” with ByteDance and its subsidiaries. A second order a few days later demands that ByteDance divest itself of TikTok’s US operations within 90 days. No deals materialize.
November 2020: Joe Biden is elected president and Trump’s plans to force a sale of TikTok begin to unravel. After his inauguration, Biden indefinitely postpones the legal cases involving a possible TikTok ban. Soon, TikTok reaches more than a billion monthly active users.
June 2022: still, allegations that TikTok is sharing user data with China’s government and is thus a threat to US national security don’t go away, especially after BuzzFeed reports that ByteDance employees have repeatedly accessed the nonpublic information of TikTok users.
TikTok quickly announces it has migrated user data to US servers managed by Oracle, an American tech firm.
Despite that, Brendan Carr, the Federal Communications Commission commissioner (now chairman), calls for Apple and Google to remove TikTok from their app stores, citing concerns that sensitive user data was being accessed by Beijing, and that ByteDance would be forced to hand over user data due to the surveillance demands of the Chinese government.
December 2022: FBI Director Christopher Wray joins the chorus of TikTok critics, warning that Chinese officials could manipulate TikTok’s recommendation algorithm for influence operations, and that the app “screams” of security concerns. The US government then bans the use of Tiktok on devices owned by the federal government.
TikTok’s legal battle
March 2023: TikTok CEO Shou Chew takes the stand on Capitol Hill to defend the app as US lawmakers grill him for six hours over allegations that TikTok is a tool of the Chinese government.
March 2024: efforts to ban TikTok in the US culminate in a House of Representatives vote to pass the TikTok ban-or-sell bill. The Senate follows suit, and Biden signs the bill in April 2024.
May 2024: TikTok and ByteDance sue the US federal government to challenge the law’s constitutionality but in December, a federal appeals court upholds the ban. The company announces it will now address the Supreme Court.
December 2024: Trump – who joined TikTok in June and now seems to think that the platform helped him win the election – asks the Supreme Court to pause the potential TikTok ban until a “political resolution” can be found.
January 17th, 2025: The Supreme Court upholds the law banning TikTok, saying that the risk to national security overcomes concerns about limiting free speech. The ban is set to begin on January 19th.
January 18-19th, 2025: TikTok makes good on its informal promise to completely shut down US operations even before the ban takes effect. “A law banning TikTok has been enacted in the US,” says a message in the app. Unfortunately, that means you can’t use TikTok for now.”
The app is also removed from major app stores. But then Trump announces that the service providers agreed to reinstate the app after assurances that there will be no liability for companies that help keep TikTok from going dark.
January 20th, 2025: on his first day in office, President Trump signs executive order delaying the ban for 75 days and instructing the US Attorney General not to enforce the law. The app remains unavailable on app stores, though.
February 13th, 2025: TikTok finally returns to Apple and Google app stores in the US. But the deal for ByteDancer to divest from TikTok has still not been reached before the April 5th deadline.
Trump seems truly invested in the case once again. Probably sensing that China won’t agree to any type of deal, he even said he’d be willing to reduce tariffs to get a deal done with ByteDance to sell the short-video app used by 170 million Americans.
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