On Friday, it was announced that TikTok was going to be banned from U.S. app stores. However, on Sunday, President Trump agreed to ByteDance’s deal with Oracle that will let TikTok continue operating in the United States, according to reports.
The U.S. has accused Chinese apps like WeChat and TikTok of spying on American citizens and delivering that info to the Chinese government. It’s been announced the only condition these apps would be allowed to continue to operate in the states would be if they were sold to American companies. It now looks like those American companies will be Wal Mart and Oracle. This should be the end of the talk about banning these apps but according to search data from last weekend, people aren’t taking chances.
Searches for “VPN” were up dramatically over the weekend. Inquiries from the U.S. surged by as much as 34%. A VPN allows users to conceal their location and pretend to be somewhere they’re not. If this already sounds familiar, in a now-deleted post Justin Bieber was encouraging overseas fans back in January to use VPNs to help get his song “Yummy” to #1 in the US.
If you’re in a different country, you can use a VPN to trick the servers that monitor airplay to thinking you are in the US.
In this way, with a VPN, you can pretend to be in a non-US country to continue using apps that are banned here. It’s actually pretty common. Chinese citizens use VPNs to access Facebook and Google, which are blocked by the Chinese Communist Party. It’s kind of ironic. Chinese citizens are pretending to be in the US to use certain apps. US citizens are pretending to be in China so they can continue using apps banned that are banned here.