The sequence of events as far as I can recall:
- Trump promised to ban TikTok
- TikTok was slated to be “banned” in the twilight of Biden’s term
- Trump says he’d give it 90 days to make a decision
- Biden decides not to ban it, handing it off to Trump
- TikTok goes dark
- It returns, but if you search for something anti-Trump in the United States, you can’t find it
- Using a VPN will give you that content
- Various news outlets are now calling it Trump’s “Propaganda Arm”
What the fuck is going on? From a political or technological standpoint.
TikTok wasn’t ever actually banned.A ban was signed into law. It had bipartisan support, though that may have been because it was tied in with aid for Ukraine. Biden appeared to have supported it initially but either after public backlash or them actually realizing what a massive fumble it was, Biden’s administration said they would not enforce the ban and leave it to the Trump admins.
TikTok voluntarily shut down their servers, and gave users a super dickridey message about how Trump was going to save the platform. Less than 24 hours later, severs came back up with another dickridey message about how Trump promised to save their platform.
All of this happened before the inauguration.
Edit: im trying my best to make this as accurate as possible pls let me know if I fucked up.
Pretty much summed it up.