When Is TikTok Getting Banned?

TikTok is one of the five most popular social media platforms in the world. Depending on the criteria used, some authorities say it ranks as high as #2.

Nevertheless, TikTok is a controversial social app. Its parent company, ByteDance, is based in China, and there have been allegations that TikTok has been used to spy on users. Some countries believe that poses a national security concern that warrants a full ban on the app’s use.

TikTok has already been banned in a few nations; many more have prohibited its use on government devices. The greatest amount of attention has been focused, though, on an impending ban in America that has already been delayed several times by political fights and gamesmanship.

Here’s a closer look at existing and potential TikTok bans.

What Countries Currently Ban TikTok Use?

A handful of countries have instituted complete bans on the use of TikTok.

• Afghanistan’s Taliban leadership has banned the app, claiming that young people could be “misled” by its use.
• India banned all Chinese apps in 2020 after a border clash between the two countries caused twenty deaths and dozens of injuries. Byte Dance was given a chance to have the ban lifted by answering questions about TikTok’s security and privacy, but refused.
• Nepal has blocked access to the platform due to concerns about “indecent material” available on TikTok and what they say was the resulting “disruption of social harmony.”
• Pakistan has regularly instituted TikTok bans because of “inappropriate content” but then lifted them. The app is currently available to users in that nation, but the situation may again change.
• Somalia prohibits the use of TikTok in the country, saying the platform is used by terrorist groups to spread propaganda.

Security concerns have led many more nations to ban the use of the app on government-owned devices or the use of TikTok at work by government employees. They include Australia, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, the EU, Latvia, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Taiwan, and the UK. France has banned the use of all social apps on government phones.

Indonesia has instituted a different type of prohibition. TikTok can’t be used in that nation for e-commerce in an attempt to protect the nation’s small businesses.

That brings us to the app’s status in the country with the largest number of TikTok users.

When Is TikTok Getting Banned in the United States?

Nearly 150 million Americans use TikTok, making the US the platform’s #1 audience source. (The rest of the top five are Indonesia, Brazil, Mexico, and Vietnam; TikTok isn’t used in China because surfers there use the app’s Chinese version, Douyin.)

For years, US users have lived with the possibility that TikTok might vanish from their phones. That threat remains, with the latest deadlinedue to expire in April — but the long saga of America’s potential TikTok ban leads most observers to believe that the app will still be available long after that.

Here’s a brief history of the tortured relationship between TikTok and the US government.

• In 2019, a few years after TikTok launched in the West, concerns about its security and content moderation processes began surfacing. News reports detailed internal memos directing moderators to delete or reduce visibility for posts critical of China and its government’s actions, and the app was banned from all military phones.
• Controversy continued to rage, and in late 2020, President Trump issued legally-questionable executive orders prohibiting US companies from doing business with ByteDance and requiring the company to divest its American operations within three months. The deadline was extended and then rendered moot by President Biden’s election late in the year.
• In 2022 and 2023, the FBI and FCC (Federal Communications Commission) warned that the Chinese government could access TikTok user data and alter the system’s algorithms to conduct influence and disinformation operations. The company’s CEO denied those charges in Congressional testimony, but TikTok was ordered removed from all government devices.
• 2024 was an eventful year in the saga. Congress passed and President Biden signed a law either requiring ByteDance to sell TikTok to an American country, or for the app to be banned in the US. An appeals court upheld the law, but the Supreme Court made no final decision during the nation’s election season.

Everything appeared to come to a head in 2025. In mid-January, the high court upheld the sell-or-ban law, with the ban scheduled for January 19. TikTok began suspending American operations the day before the deadline but restored the app’s availability when Trump promised and then signed an executive order delaying any enforcement of the law for 75 days.

The TikTok app was unavailable in app stores for a few weeks after the flurry of activity in January, but it is now back in both the Google Play and Apple App stores. Trump has promised to negotiate a deal between China and an American company (Oracle is said to be the most likely option) to take over US TikTok operations) before the new April deadline.

What’s the Bottom Line for TikTok Getting Banned in America?

TikTok may be under new ownership or banned in the United States in early April — but given the long and complicated maneuverings that have taken place over the last few years, and Trump’s public position that he wants to keep the app available to US users — it appears unlikely that TikTok will be banned in America at all, let alone in April.