
I hope you survived the Great TikTok Shutdown of 2025. For a few hours last Sunday, the popular social media app went dark in the United States. The company wasn’t required to shut down this way, but acted in response to an impending ban that had been upheld in a rare unanimous Supreme Court decision.
President Trump signed that ban during his first term, but it’s fitting that no one remembers or cares. Social media provides instant gratification, changing narratives at will. The memes tell us what’s true, so when TikTok says that Trump rescued the app the night before his inauguration, well, that’s what many believe. The showy, legally ambiguous ceremony of it all (literally) trumps everything else.
The brief outage provided an interesting window into our society. A large number of people went blissfully unaware of this event, perhaps even to this day. Let’s call them the lucky ones. Others faced an uncomfortable question.
“Why do I keep reaching for my phone when I know the app is shut down?”
People poured onto other social media networks to complain. I saw many intelligent, capable individuals get pretty worked up. Something about this TikTok issue reminds me of the first time someone told my dad he couldn’t smoke in the mall. He said a lot of stuff about rights and tradition, but what he really needed right then was a drag on that heater.
TikTok is addictive. All social media is addictive. This is the very design of it. If you keep coming back, you keep interacting with advertising. If you post and share things that other people like or share, you get a hit of dopamine that changes your mood. So you do it again. As you chase the drug, the drug dealer makes money on every transaction.
In aggregate, social media is more harmful than good. Documented mental and physical health risks are growing. The amount of information that companies gather on us is staggering. Where that information goes is unknowable.
But like any addiction, we all tell stories about why we need to keep going with it. I’m no different. Yes, I use social media. I keep in touch with a number of friends that way, and as a writer it’s often helpful in sharing my work. As a person who’s battled addiction in other areas of my life, I know what it is to tell stories about my addiction.
For instance, during the TikTok darkness, conspiratorial thinking ran thick. To some, this wasn’t about the Chinese government collecting an unusually large amount of personal information from American citizens (the reason for the ban), but rather about the government silencing *them* and the TikTok-based content creators they’d come to rely upon.
I even saw a couple people recite literal Chinese propaganda, saying things like how the U.S. government wanted to block people from seeing that things aren’t so bad in China.
This would be a good thing to check on, if it weren’t so difficult to communicate directly with Chinese people in a way that wasn’t monitored by their government or ours. For what it’s worth, most American social media and several large news sites are blocked in China.
Some of the most heartrending stories came from content creators. It takes a lot of work to make quality TikTok videos and to build a following sufficient to make any money. When the app ends, all the work is destroyed. Like the Library of Alexandria, a civilization’s worth of dance challenges burn away, dissipating like smoke in an ocean zephyr.
This is the peril of creating content for any third-party app like TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, X, or YouTube.
I don’t use TikTok, but I’m familiar with social media. For many years, my wife and I ran websites that augmented our family income. Mine covered local news, hers personal finance. As such, social media became an important part of our business plan. It’s also what upended our business plan.
From 2006-2011, we built content on our own websites, trying to develop a following that would subscribe to our blogs (yes, a cringe-worthy word in 2025). Google advertising and some private ad sales made it a worthwhile, if not entirely lucrative pursuit.
But when Facebook, Twitter and YouTube began to dominate the marketplace, we spent many hours building new followings on other people’s websites, hoping that followers would still click to read our articles.
The nuts of the problem is that most people who see a post on social media don’t click to read the article. They react, comment or share, often based on the headlines, short descriptions and comments. I have receipts on this. So do most of the nation’s newspapers, which now struggle to maintain their own revenue in the “freescape” created by social media.
Ironically, people who post meaningful content on social media are now swallowed up by the addictive short videos popularized by TikTok. I remember when 2-3 minutes was an optimal video length. Now it’s 9 seconds. The people just keep scrolling. You can find great content. Courageous content. Subversive content. And mixed in with all of it is misinformation, hate, and plain old garbage. Few can reliably tell the difference.
So, ban TikTok, or don’t. It’s like flushing a pack of cigarettes down the toilet. They sell more at the store. Until we deal with the unsavory reality of how social media influences our personal, economic and civic lives, the problem remains.
Aaron J. Brown is an author and college instructor from northern Minnesota’s Iron Range. He writes the blog MinnesotaBrown.com. This piece first appeared in the Saturday, Jan. 25, 2025 edition of the Mesabi Tribune.
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