TikTok ban – how much longer?
That’s the question now being asked by the 170 million US users who have been left “in the dark” as TikTok shuts down its US operations, at least for now. When will the application be returned? And the nightmare scenario has come true. This is not just an App Store problem, this is a platform problem. TikTok has pushed its compliance to the ban to the fullest extent.
Many users who read the news commentary until Sunday expected that a VPN could help circumvent the ban. Not so. “Unfortunately, VPNs are currently not working to bypass the ban,” Top10VPN’s Simon Migliano told me. “Bytedance appears to be fully committed to preventing even a single US user from accessing their TikTok account.”
As I reported early this morning, shortly after the ban went into effect, the only solution appears to be to use a VPN “to create a new account from a non-US IP and SIM,” Migliano confirmed. “But this is as good as it gets for now – if your TikTok account was created in the US or with a US SIM, then changing your IP address or spoofing your GPS data won’t unblock TikTok like you’d normally expect .”
The overnight increase in demand for VPNs in the US has been up to 827%, “a really significant increase as VPNs are already very popular in the US, so it takes a lot to move the needle like this.” This simply underscores the sudden impact that TikTok’s shutdown of its platform has had on the American public.
This was supported by VPNMentor, who reported an even higher increase in demand peaking at a massive 1566% increase within minutes of the app being shut down in the country. However, this rapid escalation quickly subsided after certain users found that using a VPN proved futile due to the restriction blocking not only IP addresses, but apparently all accounts originating from the US. Regardless, our research team has been following up on this request and can confirm that despite trend swings, our latest update was up 1400%.
And that’s critical because it underlines the political angle here. TikTok’s decision to make the biggest impact it can, the fact that Biden has essentially postponed implementation for the incoming Trump administration, warm words from Donald Trump himself about his plans to extend TikTok’s timeline as sooner than tomorrow to see a deal done, and now some rumblings from Republican leaders that reversing the shutdown of TikTok may not be as easy as thought.
And then there’s the matter of the devil you know – the conclusion that while TikTok has its problems, we’re several years and a lot of scrutiny into a strategy it contains. The flurry of new Chinese apps floating around US app stores, especially Rednote, has security implications that no one has really grappled with yet.
Anyway, I expect your iPhone and Android apps to be back in some form by the end of this week – it could be much sooner than that, maybe even Tuesday if all goes well. But TikTok will have to change as a result of all this, and ByteDance needs to compromise on a deal with the US, despite its reluctance to do so in the past – or we’ll find ourselves back here forever. For now it seems inconceivable that the huge public impact could be ignored.
Painful as it may be, ByteDance has played a smart but dangerous hand. By going further than it should, it has made a grim point and forced the timing of what happens next. But the danger will be the unintended consequences of this decision. No one can fully control what happens next, not ByteDance or Donald Trump – there are too many moving parts.
