Well, they said it would be banned and here we are. TikTok is effectively inaccessible in the United States of America to protect our interests and for National Security sake. You’re seeing this notice super early in the morning if you’re still awake but I can say that I lost access to my account at around 10PM EST after I had updated the profile just a little bit. Let’s review the timeline of this.
The Timeline:
4/23/2024: The Senate passed legislation to force the Chinese owned TikTok to be sold to a US Owner or be banned in the coming months.
4/24: President Biden signs the legislation for TikTok to be banned in the United States unless its sold by ByteDance to a US owner.
1/17/25: Supreme Court Unanimously upholds the Federal Law to ban TikTok with only hours to go before its Official Ban Date.
1/18/2025: TikTok goes offline in the United States. A few hours on the day before it was supposed to. A message seen on the application informs its 170M strong user base that now President Donald Trump would look to working on solution to resolve this.
Now I had mentioned my update of the profile because that was going to be important going forward. I wanted any visitors from around the world where TikTok was not banned to be able to see a short “Thanks for Watching” video and to know that by a simple Google search of the #kenpiercemedia hashtag would find everything else that we are up to. I can say that the normally easy upload took more than thirty minutes which to me as a tech meant that some changes were happening behind the scenes. I also noticed in the links that I was prompted to sign up for something called LEMON8 which I did for good measure and after configuring that I tried to share the “Thank You” video around. When I figured I might as well enjoy some of the other creators for the last few hours I began scrolling and liking videos and then at 10PM this stopped working. The message you’d get was the one displayed in the graphic up above and while there was promise to the closing it was still a disappointment.
The other interesting notion is that the aforementioned “Lemon8” network was also inaccessible and the graphic design program Capcut as well. I am a casual user of Capcut and while there are more than 170M users of TikTok in the USA, I think there are something like 200M users of Capcut. Their message is placed below for reference sake.
So you might be asking what are your options and truth be told while you have a couple, you also don’t have too many things to use as a workaround. The first thing I’d advise you to do is to download your data, I think you’d need an external drive with sufficient space if you are a hardcore user. I am not sure if I will be looking to download my 921 videos because all of that content also lives elsewhere like on Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts for both PiercingMetal and Piercing Ken. My TikTok was set up under Ken Pierce Media to be able to speak to both sides of that creative coin. While not trying to sound or be too political about this, I do think the Federal Government has much more important fish to fry. The borders are a mess, we are dishing out far too much money to other countries when our own citizens are starving and cannot make ends meet and let’s not even get talking about the state of healthcare. Sure National Security is a big issue but when you carry around a personal tracking device that you also call your mobile phone, and use platforms like Facebook and services like Google, you’ve already given away the farm.
I remain hopeful for a return but I imagine that it won’t be immediate at all. Trump is not yet inaugurated into the Office of the President and Biden hasn’t seemed to waiver on his decision about signing this during his own final hours in the office so let’s see. If it’s gone for the long haul, I do hope that my profile continues to grow in the countries that see it. I know I will miss seeing all of the bands that I first learned about on TikTok along with some of the other fun stuff. If you have friends that are abroad please tell them about your own account and heck tell about mine as well. For the time being I will be continuing the posting over on the Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts. I cannot see myself looking on doing any more than that. See you next time my friends.
Official Linktree: http://www.linktr.ee/kenpiercemedia
Official Linktree: http://www.linktr.ee/piercingmetal
Official Linktree: http://www.linktr.ee/piercingken
