And just like that, TikTok is banned — or is it?

The US government has long been concerned that because of ByteDance’s ties with the Chinese government – Bytedance is, by the way, the company behind TikTok – that the short form content app poses a risk to national security. And that came to a conclusion on Saturday afternoon, when TikTok became unavailable in the states. Just under a day later, TikTok was back, which we can thank (or resent) President-elect Donald Trump for. More on that in a second.  

Though TikTok has faced its fair share of scrutiny over the years, with security threats being shadowed by concerns around how the app is affecting the younger generation’s attention spans, by and large people were sad to see it go. All over the internet people were indulging in not just OTT goodbyes to their followers, but recounting their favourite videos posted on the app. Some were, admittedly, quite funny, and some probably just proved why it’s not too much of a sad farewell.

But, of course, this was all kind of pointless — less than twenty-four hours after it disappeared, TikTok was back. According to those highest up at the app, this was in response to new “clarity” from Trump. That clarity came in the form of the President-elect vowing to facilitate a sale of ByteDance that would satisfy US laws — in other words, one that means TikTok involves less Chinese players. It’s not clear how exactly he’ll do that. According to security experts it’s also, perhaps, not entirely legal. What’s new for Trump, though? 

In short, everything is up in the air. And if the ban does stick, it might not be too long before TikTok is unavailable in the UK, too. Analysts have pointed to the previous oustings of Chinese and Russian tech companies on similar grounds as evidence of this. 

So, the HUNGER take? Good riddance. Not on the grounds of national security, but because of the app’s role in making a whole generation, to put it bluntly, depressed. That’s not us being hyperbolic either. In simple terms, the more time you spend on TikTok, scrolling from one short video to another, your creation of dopamine becomes dependent on that. And when you’re not getting your dopamine fix in the form of, well, utter crud, you’re sad. Agree to disagree or whatever, but to us that’s rather insidious. Also, we might get a bit of a kick if the Bella Poarch’s of the world have to return to the kind of jobs they had pre-TikTok. Like nature is healing or something? We did get Addison Rae, I guess. If anything, we can thank TikTok for her.