We have known that there was a possibility that TikTok could be restricted in the United States since early last year. But when Congress and Senate declared that TikTok would be banned in the U.S. unless its parent company ByteDance sold it, we all knew that when the time came there would be either a sale, or a ban. Or at least, I thought we did.
I cannot stress enough just how many times the legislation that aims to ban TikTok has been covered in the national media: print, online, TV, radio, and every imaginable medium. And yet still, the audience who this ban will affect—most U.S. TikTok users—remained blissfully ignorant until now, when it’s too late to save their beloved app.
These past few weeks, I have seen countless posts claiming with full confidence that the app will not get banned, simply because the topic has come up before and it never ended up banned then. People are seeing headlines discussing a TikTok ban and thinking, “Oh, I’ve seen this before and it never happened, so this is just another unfounded rumour,” without drawing a single connection between the two events.
It takes only a couple minutes of reading into an article about this week’s Supreme Court decision to figure out that today’s resurgence in discussion of a ban is in fact, not a trend, but a long time coming; discussing the very same legislation that was proposed the first time a potential nationwide TikTok ban graced headlines, all the way back in 2020. But people don’t seem to be taking the time to draw those connections because they’re not really reading past the first paragraph.
There is no doubt about it: the U.S. is a headline nation. Our attention spans are ever shortening due to the influx of information and algorithms that run our lives in this digital era. Slowly, we are losing our ability not only to distinguish fake news from actual news, but to read news at all past the headlines, real or fake.
And I don’t claim to be special: like most people, I’m far more likely to scroll TikTok in my free time than peruse The New York Times for the latest policy update. But the ban didn’t surprise me at all. And this isn’t about understanding the legal jargon—it’s about understanding basic facts. We have forgotten that we should confirm facts and news for ourselves. We have forgotten how to research, and how to wade through warring perspectives and draw our own conclusions.
I’ve written about our waning attention spans before, but nothing seems to be changing. As far as I can tell, it’s only getting worse. I used to lament someone asking a question they could easily search up on Google themselves in a TikTok comment section. Now, I lament people asking questions in the TikTok comment section that are answered in that very video, just not within the first ten seconds if they even make it that far.
We have a serious problem and no one seems to care. College students are forgetting how to read books, and according to the National Literacy Institute 54% of American adults have a literacy level below 6th grade. The average American has no idea what the government is actually doing. Yet, people will crusade to save an app that consciously keeps them numb and increasingly less connected to the real world
Whether TikTok will be banned or not is the least of our concerns. If it is banned, some new social media sites will undoubtedly step in and take TikTok’s place in the spotlight. What we should be concerned about is the fact that the news of the potential ban took so many people by shock in the past few weeks, when the story has been the same since last year.
People relying on social media for news rather than traditional news sources is having an incredibly detrimental effect on our understanding of current events and the world around us. It’s only getting worse. Algorithms are leading to a gap in public knowledge: TikTok only shows us the news we want to see, whereas comparing newspapers reveal no such exceptions.
With Meta becoming increasingly conservative as we enter a second Trump presidency, I am scared of the ways social media will continue to manipulate the news and eventually mold our global perspectives. This, combined with how uncommon it seems to be for us to refer to news sources to back up what we see on social media, means that we are incredibly at risk of believing propaganda and fake news now more than ever.
