Will Trump save me from TikTok?

I woke up on July 10th, reached for my phone and went through my morning ritual of email, texts, and a somewhat new habit I had recently formed: opening the app, TikTok.

I stared blankly into my screen, anticipating, perhaps, a McDonald’s drive-thru prank or synchronized dance between a grandma and toddler.

But, neither one came.

TikTok had pulled out of the Hong Kong market, where I was at the time, virtually overnight, following China’s new National Security Law. The app removed itself from the Apple and Google app store, essentially making itself unusable. My feed never updated that morning.

I was sad in the way one might be who is trying to lose weight and finds out their office just cancelled ‘Donut Fridays’. The sugar rush was no longer easily available and simultaneously, the sugar rush was no longer easily available.

I even became grateful for the extra time it would free up as my TikTok usage had slowly creeped up to about 30 minutes a day. After all, as a video content creator, I no longer felt pressure to post videos, nor had a potential new addiction to cure. What could I do with all that extra time every day? Read a book, meditate, more Instagram?

A month later, however, I flew to the United States where I was granted a new set of freedoms, such as the right to bear arms and the ability to use TikTok.

My relapse happened relatively quickly, only exasperated by the deprivation during my time away from the app while in Hong Kong.

As weeks passed, I posted more and more trying to decode the app’s fickle algorithm, all the while being glued to updates on President Trump’s threat to ban the app in the United States. The news story still held nearly as much uncertainty as my TikTok home feed: ByteDance, the app’s parent company, might sell to Walmart? Wow, Oracle for the win! Wait, it might, IPO?

The U.S. now has around 100 million monthly active TikTok users — an 800 percent increase in two and a half years. I can attest, now being part of the daily active users club, that its growth surge hardly surprises me.

To consume content on TikTok is addicting in the way we’re already familiar with: endless scrolling. But, where TikTok really sucked me into its vortex was as a creator, which somewhat resembles the uncertainty when one sits behind a slot machine in a casino. When I post a video on Instagram, I can confidently predict the total views it will reach within around 20 percent margin. On the other hand, I recently posted a video to TikTok that surpassed one million views, and a day later, I watched a new video struggle to reach 100 views. Not 100,000. One hundred.

This hit-or-miss mentality is both irritating yet simultaneously intriguing.

TikTok even stresses that its recommendation system on a user’s default home feed is based on each individual video, not necessarily the creator.

Similar to the psychology tied to slot machines, studies have shown that brain activity connected to uncertainty can heighten the release of dopamine, the feel-good neurotransmitter. Instagram doesn’t give me much uncertainty these days. But, TikTok is full of it.

As a video creator, I’m always open to new platforms for posting content and once I began posting consistently on TikTok, I’ve seen my account’s followers grow by more than 2,000 percent in the past month, making the app hard to ignore.

So, does President Trump’s threat to actually ban TikTok in the U.S. make me nervous?

I’ve been through it once before, and perhaps, I’m more worried that he won’t follow through.