Everyone is making jokes about TikTok being banned but should I panic?

TikTok occupies about 90 per cent of my waking thoughts these days. I honestly don’t know what I’d do without it. The thought of losing it scares me to death and you know what? I welcome death if life doesn’t have TikTok in it. Now you might have been a bit confused by videos of Americans making memes about trying to seduce Trump to stop TikTok being banned and thought to yourself: “Wait. Back up. Is TikTok being banned?” The answer is no, thank God, but this is everything you need to know about why people have started thinking this way:

Okay is TikTok being banned?

Not in the US or the UK – at least not yet. It has been banned overseas before, though. In India TikTok was outlawed after it was deemed a national security threat. However this isn’t the first time a ban has happened and it has been reinstated. The same thing happened in Bangladesh and Indonesia.

Why is everyone making jokes about it then?

The anxiety can be traced back to comments made by the US government. Mike Pompeo, the American Secretary of State, has been vocally supportive of bans elsewhere in the world and a possible ban in America, saying it’s “something we’re looking at.” The blurred lines between US and UK TikTok has resulted in a lot of confusion as to whether a ban might affect the UK, but as of yet nothing has been confirmed.

So I don’t need to panic about TikTok being banned, right?

Governments the world over, including those in the US, the UK and Australia, are concerned about TikTok being a Chinese-owned app and having such a presence in our lives. It’s no secret TikTok uses our information to direct us to certain videos – a lot of apps do – but the mechanics of TikTok’s algorithm (and how much of our data it stores and uses) remain a bit of a mystery. TikTok representatives refuse to appear in congress in the US and until they do you can expect governments to treat it with a fair amount of skepticism.

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Featured image via Kon Karampelas and  hao wang on Unsplash