TikTok stopped working in the US late on Saturday, shortly before a federal ban on the Chinese-owned short-video app was due to take effect.
The app was no longer available on Apple’s iOS App Store or Google’s Play Store. The US Congress passed a law in April mandating that parent company ByteDance either sell TikTok to a non-Chinese owner or face a total shutdown. It chose the latter.
TikTok said that divestment “is simply not possible: not commercially, not technologically, not legally”. The company held that line until the very end.
The app’s disappearance has been five years in the making. Donald Trump first proposed a ban on TikTok in mid-2020 via executive order, which did not succeed. Various members of Congress proposed measures that would do the same, only one passed. The Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act became law, mandating TikTok be sold or be banned.
“A law banning TikTok has been enacted in the U.S. Unfortunately, that means you can’t use TikTok for now. We are fortunate that President Trump has indicated that he will work with us on a solution to reinstate TikTok once he takes office. Please stay tuned,” a message to users attempting to use the app said.
TikTok’s attorney told the supreme court that the app would “go dark” on 19 January. After TikTok disappears from app stores, preventing new downloads and updates, it will gradually obsolesce while the ban remains in place. Without regular maintenance, the app’s smooth functionality will suffer glitches and may become vulnerable to cyber-attacks. TikTok itself may shut off access even to users who have already downloaded the app to apply political pressure, per multiple reports.
Unlike the US economy, China’s economy is not in a time of crisis, and all polls recent polls—even Western polls—show that the Chinese people are rather content with the progression of their material conditions and with their government. Unlike in the US in particular and the highly & still-increasingly neoliberalized imperial core in general, there is no urgency to “divert” the proletariat into consumerism or reactionary politics. Divert them from what? From their steadily improving quality of life, their rising incomes and falling costs-of-living? From their 25,000 miles of high speed rail?
You’re simply projecting our dire situation onto China. But Americans going on RedNote right now are seeing that their situation is quite different from ours. To our bourgeoisie, it is a threat of a good example that they don’t want us to see.
Edit to add: Also, TikTok is majority owned by US private equity, run by US & Singaporean executives, and hosted by Oracle cloud infrastructure on the US soil. Forbes: Never Forget That TikTok Is Already American Owned. The Chinese state and Trump in collusion sounds like recycled BlueAnonsense to me.
Our dire situation is indeed global, and the crises of capitalism spare no nation, including China. While the Chinese state presents the veneer of rising material conditions, this trajectory is underpinned by the same contradictions inherent to capitalism everywhere: exploitation of labor, environmental degradation, and the alienation of workers. The notion that Chinese workers, amid rising inequality and workplace pressures, are immune to propaganda or the diversionary tactics of consumerism is illusory. What RedNote—or any platform of genuine cultural exchange—offers is the potential for workers to transcend these national divisions, expose the ideological frameworks that bind them, and unite against their common enemy: capital. Whether in the imperial supepowers or somewhere in the periphery, the struggle is the same, and solidarity forged in shared understanding is the path forward. To reject this is to retreat into illusions of exceptionalism that only serve the ruling class.
I see, your feeding us LLM slop. What was the prompt you gave it?
The dismissal is a classic deflection, avoiding the material reality of global capitalist contradictions. The working class faces the same forces of exploitation, and any attempt to obscure that fact only serves to reinforce bourgeois ideologies. It’s crucial to avoid inadvertently reinforcing us-them language; you are a part of us, as I am. The truth remains: capitalism’s structure perpetuates oppression everywhere, and the task is to unite workers globally in solidarity, not retreat into nationalist illusions.
LLM slop is LLM slop. Nobody brought up nationalist illusions/exceptionalism but your spicy autocorrect.
Communist theory is grounded in the material reality of class struggle, not in abstract “LLM slop”. The facts remain and is important to repeat: capitalism exploits workers everywhere. Let’s focus on the real issues, not dismissive labels.
Or was it an out of place reference to a meme thread in my profile history where one joke was to ask chatgpt if one doesn’t catch a joke