TikTok was briefly unavailable in the United States on Jan. 18 after the Supreme Court upheld a law requiring ByteDance, its parent company, to sell the app by Jan. 19 or face removal.
Hours later, newly inaugurated President Donald Trump issued an executive order delaying the ban by 75 days, raising legal questions about his authority to override federal law.
If a solution is not reached within 75 days, the ban will remove TikTok from all app stores and prevent ByteDance from pushing forward new updates, causing the app to slowly degrade.
While TikTok came back online in the U.S. within 12 hours of being shut off, it remains unavailable for download on major app stores such as the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store.
Computer science teacher Roxanne Lanzot said regardless of whether people can still download the app, any ban would be difficult to enforce.
“(The U.S. government) is going to need a lot of compliance in order to actually make this happen,” Lanzot said. “(Apple and Google) are not the only two makers of smartphones. There are lots of different companies making phones that are out there.”
The ban stems from a national security concern that the Chinese government could access sensitive user information since ByteDance is a Chinese company.
According to Wired, TikTok “ … knows the device you are using, your location, IP address, search history, the content of your messages, what you’re viewing and for how long.” Additionally, multiple studies found the app tracks users even when they aren’t actively using it.
Lanzot said most people are unaware of how much data the app collects.
“What I know from teaching computer science is that almost nobody reads those user agreements, and sometimes apps have an incredible amount of data that they get your permission to access,” Lanzot said. “The typical habit of all of us Americans is if you want an app, you just ‘yes, yes, yes, accept, accept, accept’ through those terms and agreements.”
In addition to security concerns, some fear the Chinese government could exploit TikTok to spread its propaganda.
Sen. Mark Warner, who was the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee until Donald Trump, said TikTok has the potential to become “the most powerful propaganda tool ever.”
Sophomore Caroline Lee shares Warner’s concerns. She said young adults who rely on TikTok for news are susceptible to propaganda and misinformation
“A lot of teens don’t read the news, and instead they get their news from TikTok,” Lee said.
While Lee said the privacy concerns of using TikTok are real, she also said people should consider the significance of TikTok in many people’s lives.
“TikTok has its dangers to national security, but many people use it to communicate with others,” Lee said. “A lot of people would also lose their jobs because some people create content for TikTok as a full-time job.”
Trump, who issued an executive order in 2020 banning TikTok from app stores, reversed his stance in 2024 after meeting with Jeff Yass, a billionaire Republican donor and ByteDance investor. However, Trump denied discussing TikTok in the meeting.
In March 2024, Trump told CNBC he still thought TikTok was a national security threat, but that “young kids will go crazy without it.”
In September, he posted a video on his social media site, Truth Social, urging people to vote for him in the presidential election.
“If you like TikTok, go out and vote for Trump,” he said in the video. “If you don’t care about TikTok and other things like safety, security, and prosperity, then you can vote for a Marxist who is going to destroy our country.”
Junior Santiago Sanchez said aside from security and propaganda concerns, he is concerned TikTok’s widespread use among teens could be disruptive to their education.
“If TikTok gets banned, I think a good thing that will happen is that students will stop procrastinating as much and not go on their phones as much,” Sanchez said.
Ultimately, Lanzot said the trust people have in government influences their opinions on the ban.
“In the intelligence community, you can’t just tell everybody what’s going on because it then becomes a security leak,” Lanzot said. “It’s one of those moments where we must ask ourselves how much we trust our own government to make the right decision, especially at such a politically fraught moment.”