TikTok is one of the largest social media platforms to date with over 100 million American users. It was the 2nd most downloaded app this year with 4 million downloads. You may be wondering, with all the popularity, why are they considering banning?

Bytedance is the Chinese technology company that runs TikTok. Chinese law states domestic companies must “cooperate” with the government. This has caused Trump to believe TikTok is storing US data and sharing it with the Chinese government and Communist Party, even though TikTok has claimed this to be false.

In his first executive order against TikTok, President Trump states, “This data collection threatens to allow the Chinese Communist Party access to Americans’ personal and proprietary information — potentially allowing China to track the locations of Federal employees and contractors, build dossiers of personal information for blackmail, and conduct corporate espionage.”

Trump’s plan to combat this was to stop transactions between Americans or American companies and TikTok on September 20th. This would take TikTok off the app store and you would no longer receive updates if you already have the app installed, which at some point will make the app unusable.

If you’re an avid TikTok user, I’m sure you’ve noticed that this did not happen. Late September 19th, Trump said he would allow Oracle and Walmart to purchase 20% of TikTok (to be renamed TikTok Global). He extended the deadline for Executive Order #1 to September 27th. The only problem is China has not signed off on this deal yet, and it doesn’t look like they plan on it either.

TikTok had to go to federal court, Sunday night,  to buy more time for their deal. They were not able to convince China to go through with the Walmart/ Oracle deal by September 27th. Federal Judge, Carl Nichols, granted TikTok an emergency injunction which means you can still update and download the app, at least for now.

Executive order #2 is still intact and has gone into effect. Trump has given Bytedance until November 12th to sell a share of their business to an American company. In this executive order, it states that if come November 12th TikTok has still not been bought then the president has the option to extend the deadline by 30 days.

What does this mean for you? Most likely TikTok will be purchased in part by an American company much before the app seriously starts being affected and your For You page will not be phased. In the rare scenario it doesn’t, Trump can’t really “ban” TikTok. He can only stop American users from purchasing and updating the app. By that point, it would be expected an American version of TikTok will have already been created and will start to gain popularity.

You may be wondering how this ban, being so close to the election, affects Trump? According to Forbes, 52% of adults 18-29 oppose the TikTok ban and 33% of adults overall oppose it. But could a kids app actually affect an entire presidential election?

As we learned from Trump’s Tulsa, Oklahoma Rally in June, TikTok teens can do more damage than you’d think. Brad Parscale, chairman of Trump’s election campaign, tweeted how Trump received over a million ticket requests for his rally. On the day of the rally, 6,200 people showed up. This is all due to a trend circulating on TikTok promoting people to register for tickets in order to “prank” Trump.

Gen Z has used TikTok to bond and unite over the last couple of years and has proven they aren’t afraid to speak their opinions on our country’s leadership. It’ll be interesting to see how aggressively teens will monitor the evolution of TikTok.