If it’s true that all publicity is good publicity, then TikTok is the celebrity of the month. Initially launched internationally in 2017, it has enjoyed increasing popularity, but that fame also caught the attention of national security organizations.
With 60% of it’s 2.05 billion users being in the United States, and the belief that its parent company has closed ties to the Chinese government, legislation was passed banning its use in the U.S. That law is now not being enforced per an executive order by President Trump.
The U.S. government is concerned with several issues, including data collection, individual tracking, and purposeful disinformation.
The April 2024 law, gave TikTok owner ByteDance until January 19th, 2025 to sell the social media platform, divesting control to outside of China. ByteDance took the matter to the Supreme Court, citing the First Amendment which guarantees freedom of expression, but lost in a ruling announced on December 6th.
Technically, President Biden could have implemented the law, banning TikTok in the U.S. on January 19th, but since it was his last day in office, and Trump has indicated that he would intervene, Biden decided not to. (TikTok did shut down U.S. operations for about 12 hours.)

On January 20th, his first day in office, President Trump signed an executive order directing that no action be taken in regard to the ban for 75 days.
While the topic has not been so newsworthy in Canada, the federal government did order TikTok to close its offices in Toronto and Vancouver last November, following a national security review in 2023. But the government didn’t say when TikTok was to do that, so basically, they didn’t.
Dr. Emily B. Laidlaw is a Canada research chair in cybersecurity law and an associate professor at the University of Calgary’s Faculty of Law. She believes that TikTok is a national security risk and that most Canadian’s aren’t fully aware of “the profiling and targeting enabled through TikTok.” Laidlaw qualifies though, that all social media platforms are doing the same thing – collecting extensive amounts of data – and current Canadian law isn’t addressing the risks inherent in aggregating such vast volumes of information.
So, TikTok continues to operate in Canada and the United States, at least for the time being.