How to prepare for a TikTok ban, including how to save your content
TikTok has cemented itself as a quintessential entertainment app, offering everything from funny skits and makeup tutorials to social commentary and news.
Without a sale to an approved buyer, the platform is expected to vanish from U.S. app stores by Sunday now that the Supreme Court unanimously upheld the the ban.
The decision came against the backdrop of unusual political agitation by President-elect Donald Trump, who vowed that he could negotiate a solution. It’s unclear what options are open to Trump once he is sworn in as president on Monday. An official in the Biden administration told the Associated Press on Thursday that the outgoing administration was leaving the implementation of the law to the new administration.
TikTok has more than 170 million U.S. users. According to the Pew Research Center, that includes most teens and a third of adults. If you are an avid user, or a creator who relies on the platform for income, here’s what you need to know about the ban and how to prepare for it:
A lawyer representing TikTok told Supreme Court justices last week that TikTok will “go dark” on Jan. 19 if the law isn't struck down.
What that means in practice is unclear currently, but the law bars app stores operated by Apple, Google and others from offering TikTok beginning on Sunday. Internet hosting services also will be prohibited from hosting TikTok.
Users should continue to have access to TikTok if it’s already downloaded on their phones, but the app will disappear from Apple and Google’s app stores — so new users won’t be able to download it.
This would mean that TikTok wouldn’t be able to send updates, security patches and bug fixes to users, all of which will degrade the quality of the app and likely lead to security issues. Eventually, the app will become unworkable.
Akin to the app, David Choffnes, executive director of the Cybersecurity and Privacy Institute at Northeastern University in Boston, says the TikTok website should continue to work even after the ban goes into effect.
The statute would prohibit domestic internet hosting providers from hosting the platform, Choffnes said, but companies could theoretically use servers outside of the U.S. That likely will make content on the platform load more slowly and lead to worse performance on the app and the TikTok website, he said.
Yes, but some tech savviness is required and it’s not clear what will and won’t work.
The most common workaround that’s brought up is a VPN, or virtual private network, that allows users to mask their location. A VPN encrypts your traffic data and then routes it through private tunnels to secure servers around the world, which prevents anyone else from being able to read it.
Lauren Hendry Parsons, the director of communications and advocacy at ExpressVPN, maintains that people could access their TikTok accounts by using a VPN and making some other changes to their phone’s settings that would allow them to jump to a nearby country’s app store.
If large droves of users do that, it’s possible that tech companies, such as Apple or Google, could recognize it as a legal liability and find other ways to clamp down on the app. But they also might avoid going that route since they’re trying to forge friendlier ties with Trump, who now wants to “save TikTok” and could potentially direct his Justice Department to abandon enforcement of the law all together.
U.S. TikTok users with Android devices might also be able to continue to update the platform through third-party app stores, a method called sideloading. But bypassing the security protocols that well-known app stores have in place might also leave users more vulnerable to malware, said Gus Hurwitz, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania with expertise in telecommunications and technology.
TikTok allows you to save the videos or photos you’ve posted, or content from your favorite influencers. Any posts you choose to save will be downloaded and kept on your phone.
Many TikTok creators allow users to download their posts, but it’s possible you might not be able to save everything you want since some put limits on their content. Users also can’t download content off of private accounts or those registered to anyone under the age of 16.
If you're interested, the platform allows you to request a copy of your TikTok data, which includes things like your comment and video watching history. The company says it may take a few days to prepare that type of file.
If a TikTok ban occurs, established social media platforms, such as Meta’s Instagram, Snapchat and Google’s YouTube are expected to benefit from having one of their biggest competitors taken off of the U.S. market.
The rise of the short-form video platform led many others to offer TikTok-like feeds on their own platforms, such as Instagram’s Reels and YouTube’s Shorts. And if TikTok goes away, it’s likely that creators, and small businesses, on the app would more easily switch to Reels and Shorts since they already have large audiences and a user base that overlaps with TikTok, said Jasmine Enberg, an analyst at market research company Emarketer.
TikTok users themselves have tested the waters with several other platforms outside of the established platforms. Among the ones that have received the most buzz: China's Xiaohongshu ("RedNote") and Lemon8.
The TikTok saga will be in the hands of the incoming Trump administration, which has already said that's its exploring options to “preserve” the popular app.
“We will put measures in place to keep TikTok from going dark,” Florida Rep. Mike Waltz, Trump’s pick for national security adviser, said Thursday during an interview on Fox News' Fox & Friends. Waltz also commented that the law allows for an extension on the ban "as long as a viable deal is on the table.”
Trump, mindful of TikTok’s popularity, and his own 14.7 million followers on the app, finds himself on the opposite side of the argument from prominent Senate Republicans who fault TikTok’s Chinese owner for not finding a buyer before now. Trump said in a Truth Social post shortly before the decision was issued that TikTok was among the topics in his conversation Friday with Chinese leader Xi Jinping.
TikTok CEO Shou Chew is expected to be seated on the dais for the inauguration along with tech billionaires Elon Musk, who is CEO of SpaceX, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, according to two people with the matter. The people spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal planning.
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AP technology writer Barbara Ortutay contributed to this story.
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