Musically is an app that has existed since April 2014, and changed its name to the app that most teenagers know and love, TikTok, in September 2016. TikTok, currently the number one entertainment app in the app store with over 170 million American users, is said to be getting banned on January 19th. The ban is happening due to the Biden administration believing that it has data collection practices so they decided to give the parent company ByteDance the chance to sell the app to an American buyer but if ByteDance fails to sell the ban will go into effect.

What does that mean for American Users?

If the ban goes into effect it means that if you didn’t already have the app you will no longer be able to get it due to it being removed from the App Store. If you did already have the app you would be able to keep it on your phone without deleting it, the ban for users wouldn’t make it illegal for people to have it but the ban would make it unusable, as your phone updates the ban will make so TikTok can’t meaning the app will slowly become unusable and eventually would most likely be deleted.

How Americans are finding new ways

With this TikTok ban, Americans are finding new and different apps to substitute the loss of TikTok. Most would think that the obvious choices would be Instagram or YouTube but Americans know that this ban is due to the US Government believing in the data collection practice and believing that they are connected to China. Americans have decided to use malicious compliance or just plain spite by moving to an app called RedNote that is a Chinese version of TikTok that is also known as Xiaohongshu. When looking at the app all the words are in Mandarin, this is making people start learning Mandarin to use the app but it’s the simple interface that makes it so that you don’t even have to learn Mandarin to use the app.

All that this ban has done is move Americans from the app that they love not knowing that it was taking their data, to an app that knows that it is.