TikTok Is Banned In The United States From Sunday According To A Declaration By The Court
19-01-2025 Sunday 1800 GMT +06:00
_TikTok has been banned for users in the United States since last month due to a controversial law, with company officials saying the order was because the company is China-based. Since 10:35 p.m., TikTok users in the United States have been seeing the message "Sorry, TikTok isn't available right now" when they try to access the website.
After days of discussion and criticism, the last attempt to keep TikTok running yesterday failed, and everyone was somehow convinced that there was no way to prevent the ban for now. However, the company said that President-elect Donald Trump has promised to restart TikTok after taking office.
This is the first time in US history that a popular and widely used social media platform has been banned.
In a statement on Friday, PEN America, an advocacy group for free speech, strongly criticized the Supreme Court's decision, saying that restricting access to foreign media is a hallmark of repressive governments, and that everyone should always be vigilant when national security concerns are suppressed.
TikTok, created by China-based company ByteDance, was launched in September 2016, and in October 2018, it became the most downloaded app in the United States. In 2022, TikTok had nearly three billion users in the United States, with an average of about 1 billion users per month.
TikTok also disappeared from the Apple and Google Play app stores, preventing downloads and installations of the app. The Supreme Court upheld the law, which required Apple and Google to remove the service from the app stores. TikTok's back-end cloud providers and web-hosting companies, including Oracle, were also asked to stop supporting the app, or face billions of dollars in fines.