The app TikTok is a social media giant. The app has about 800 million active users. However president Donald Trump is not a big fan of the app, for a few reasons. 

In 2014 there was a very popular app called “Music-ly” where users lip-synced songs and made dance videos. In 2016 there was an app called “ByteDance”, an app very popular in China. ByteDance wanted to rebrand and changed it to TikTok, and created a monopoly when they bought out Music-ly.

Every single active user on TikTok has their own unique “For You Page” that TikTok personally makes for you. They do a great job, me personally my For You Page are all comedy videos that make me laugh, while some users are just dance videos because that is what they like. 

People have always wondered about this mysterious algorithm that is so precisely accurate. Some believe that the app collects data, well not believe, it is confirmed that the app takes data from it’s users. 

Obviously foregin leaders would not be happy that an app from China is stealing data from their citizens and India banned the app in 2019. However the ruling was overturned in court. Once again it banned the app again in June of 2020. Their reasoning and I quote was “stealing and surreptitiously transmitting users’ data”. 

In 2019 America opened a national security review of TikTok, and for the first time republicans and democrats agreed on something, and that was TikTok posed a risk according to BBC News. 

The app was set to be deleted from the app store on September 20th, 2020. The servers were set to be shut down on November 12th, 2020. This all changed when Walmart and Oracle teamed up to take over the rights over the app. 

TikTok is here to stay until further notice and I couldn’t be happier. What makes TikTok different from other apps is that you never run out of content. You can be on TikTok for hours and new videos will always be available. On twitter or Instagram there is a limit for how much you can scroll.

The app does have bad security, but so does every other app like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Reddit and others. The problem with TikTok was that it was based in China and could have been a very big national security risk. Now that Walmart has bought it the app is hopefully here to stay.