The ban on TikTok is said to be due to privacy concerns, yet President Donald Trump seems to be using it as a way to gain political following by manipulating it to his favor whenever possible. His unjust use of TikTok for political gain hasn’t only started this year.

In September 2019, TikTok posts with the tag #trump2020 garnered over 70 million views. This showed President Trump the extent of popularity he could gain through large social media apps like TikTok.

In July 2020, President Trump claimed that he was considering banning TikTok in the U.S. because of the alleged mismanagement of the COVID-19 pandemic by China. This claim of banning TikTok seems very satirical and ironic. A social media platform doesn’t spread a pandemic.

Shortly after, in August 2020, Trump issued an executive order that banned any transactions by American companies with ByteDance along with its subsidiaries, such as TikTok. Only a few days later, he issued a second executive order that demanded ByteDance to divest TikTok from the U.S. within 90 days. Many companies tried to secure ownership of TikTok but ultimately failed. TikTok sued the Trump Administration in 2025 for “alleged violation of due process in its executive orders.”

This action by Trump to get rid of TikTok in the U.S. seems sudden. At this point, Trump had no personal purpose for banning TikTok and there were many claims circulating about TikTok using users’ information, yet TikTok continued to say they were not a national security threat, and there wasn’t any evidence showing that TikTok was actually doing something deemed as a national security threat. It just seemed as though Trump wanted to ban TikTok because it was a non-American company. He wanted to only have American-owned Social Media platforms in the U.S. so the American platforms have the most power.

Once Joe Biden was elected as President, Trump’s plans for the sale of TikTok and the ban eventually diminished. BuzzFeed released a report revealing that ByteDance employees have accessed nonpublic user information. ByteDance kept speaking out, claiming they were making changes to TikTok to protect users’ data. The U.S. government continuously pushed for all government phones to delete TikTok because of privacy concerns and released a bill requiring TikTok to be banned or sold.

Biden was seen as the villain banning TikTok. The ban built up inside Congress and was accepted by the Senate and House of Representatives, and Biden signed the bill. The Biden Administration was reported to not actually put the ban into effect, and instead left it to Trump, who was about to be sworn in. Yet, TikTok decided to suspend its own services in the U.S. before the ban would’ve gone into effect.

In a pop-up message on the site, posted Jan. 19, TikTok said, “We are fortunate that President Trump has indicated that he will work with us on a solution to reinstate TikTok once he takes office.”

Trump used this most recent TikTok ban as a political ploy for recognition, and he especially aimed it towards all of the adolescents and young adults using the app to make him seem like a hero and to trick all these Young adults into thinking he is so great to heavily increase his voter count. So many teens and young adults use TikTok as their main source of information, so clouding it with praise for Trump can be very deceiving to many, and is an unjust way of gaining control and following.