President Trump’s administration has tried to ban Tik Tok from the App Store and Google Play a number of times within the last few months, but it has yet to succeed.

If a Tik Tok ban goes through, it will put a lot of people’s hard work and dedication to waste in a matter of seconds, including the work of an Archbishop Carroll student.

“It would have been devastating if it got banned because the app has changed my life and I would have hated to see it leave,” said Joshua Watson, a Carroll senior who has 5.1 million followers and 68 million likes on TikTok. “I know that there are thousands of others just like me who use the app to promote their content and some who even consider TikTok as their job and who live off promotions and the income from their videos.” 

He started to gain popularity in November of 2019 with a video of a lightsaber duel. The duel video did extremely well and now has 28.8 million views. In February 2020, Watson made a dance video that used edits and special effects. It did even better than the lightsaber duel video and currently has 73.8 million views. At the beginning of September,Tik Tok verified Watson as a popular creator.

If the app ever gets banned, Watson said he would move his videos and continue to make new content on his YouTube channel: JoshVFX.

A federal judge blocked Trump’s administration from banning Tik Tok at the end of September, just before the ban was to take effect, according to a Sept. 27 story in the New York Post. The president’s reason for seeking the ban is that Tik Tok is compromising national security. TikTok has Chinese ownership and that has triggered concern over whether the Chinese could collect user data from the app, which lots of people use to make short, funny videos, according to a Sept. 28 story in Britain’s Evening Standard.

Trump gave his OK for a sale of TikTok’s US operations to Oracle and Walmart, which would own 20 percent of the app, according to the New York Post story. Trump has said the only way for the app to stay in the US is if a US based company buys it.  The deadline for the sale is sometime in November.