If you are breathing, you probably heard about how the US government was going to ban TikTok this week. A last ditch effort was made to save the app back on January 9th, but the Supreme Court shot that down. TikTok asked the Biden administration for more clarification on the law – however they weren’t happy with the response (which basically tossed the ball into Trump’s court), so they preemptively shut TikTok down in the US last night around 7:30 pm pacific time.

The whole thing is just one big mess.

The US would like to frame this as a security issue, but it’s a bit more complicated than that.

Other sites and apps collect our data and sell it too. One of the senators who created the bill talked about what a powerful propaganda tool it is – and I think that’s what this all comes down to. They want to control the narrative and they can’t do that if the company that owns it is private and based out of another country. There’s also the fact that several of the senators who started the ban OWN Meta stock. TikTok has exceeded Meta and their properties in popularity, and I bet you Zuckerberg can’t stand that.

Etc etc etc.

Far smarter people who are way more eloquent have discussed this ad nauseam across the web. I highly recommend checking them out if you have the chance.

I made the jump to TikTok in 2019, and had a love hate relationship with it. I enjoyed watching videos on there, but I didn’t like the way the soundbites could get stuck in my head on repeat. It also felt like it aggravated my anxiety a little. And it was an easy scape goat for my ever decreasing attention span.

(Later I’d realize that, no, I just had ADHD…)

I never became TikTok famous by any stretch of the imagination. At most I had maybe 190 followers, and I’m sure most of those ignored me. I am not that exciting. However, I did make some new friends – a group my husband affectionally calls the writer chat – and I had my eyes open to new crafting possibilities. Specifically binding fan fiction into books. I also felt like I became a better citizen of the world through the app. It covered stories that the news didn’t follow. It showed the damage from the Russian invasion into Ukraine, and the Palestine/Israel conflict. In fact it forced me to reevaluate and learn more about that particular bit of history – something that schools barely touch on.

As an elder millennial, this isn’t the first social media app or site that I’ve been a part of that has gone the way of the dodo. However, nothing has ever quite been like this. On myspace, Hi5, or Livejournal, we all just stopped logging in one day. We didn’t have a message pop up telling us that the service was no longer available.

As soon as the app went down, I deleted it. I don’t know if I’ll ever go back to it. I’ve been moving videos over to YouTube for the past month, and so far I kind of like it.

Time will tell.