Slop.

You overestimate the willingness of the average tiktok user to use those kinds of workarounds imo. Most people aren't going to install a VPN to use social media, they'll just go to a different app/site.

I'm not even convinced that the TikTok "ban" will meaningfully reduce its use in the US. They'll remove it from app stores, sure, but will they block the website? Will they block third party apps? Will they block people from just staying on the last official app version or downloading the app from the website directly or using a vpn to get the app?

If they want to at all yes. They can force them to withdraw any CDNs in the US, ban their technical presence and any infrastructure and any company from providing that infrastructure (doing business with them), thus even if tiktok tried to preempt this by having the apps fall-back to using foreign CDNs in Singapore or Switzerland or Mexico or something the experience would be meaningfully degraded with increased load times, latency, playback problems, etc which would tend to sap interest in continuing to use it among most people. Yes some determined people of course will still use it just as some determined people in China bypass the great firewall and access western social media but it won't be a lot. It will kill it as a force in the US over time, not over-night but over months, a year.

Add in the death of net neutrality and ISPs will absolutely throttle the shit out of it on their own because they're not getting paid to say nothing of US options for having ISPs poison the DNS records to go nowhere or just straight up blocking connections to the IPs which would take further court orders or steps but could be done very easily by the sanctions department.

Tiktok could absolutely fight this on a technical level, change the app to be a wrapper for a browser and just load a version of the website that's always up to date, but if their legal presence is banned, if they can't sell ads in the market, if they have to do cross-border internet transiting for delivering content to users in all cases and if they can't pay off ISPs which by virtue of net neutrality being killed are allowed to hold content for ransom and throttle people who don't pay them, then the question is why would they as a for-profit business? It wouldn't be profitable and would only raise more panic and rage that they HAVE to be some sort of Chinese operation otherwise why would they operate at a loss in such challenging circumstances?

Trump is only waffling now because he thinks he can get them to cut a deal or perhaps grift some corruption money out of it, but he wants to shake them down whereas Facebook and the US bourgeoisie and empire want them strangled as a competitor. US intelligence wants them strangled because they're not an asset for global spying and hacking like Zuckerbook. And for those reasons I don't see the US really letting up on Tiktok. If they can force its removal globally from global Apple and Google app stores then they've killed it. It's a real commanding heights problem the world has as the US is the gatekeeper for apps for all the global phone OSes, they are the gatekeeper for payments, for SWIFT, etc. They still have a lot of strength and are just only barely flexing it. It will take years, a decade for the world to migrate away from these western dominated commanding positions and many places will take twice that long as they're not personally impacted, Russia and China have incentivizes to do so but India doesn't, your average state in Europe, Africa, Asia has no pressing reason to want to jump from the US ship to a Chinese/Russian one.