For about 14 hours, TikTok went dark in the U.S. as roughly 170 million Americans were denied access to the popular social media app. Although the threat of suspending the app loomed over American users for months, some University of Iowa students were in disbelief.
The app’s brief hiatus evoked a range of emotions for university students, ambivalence, slight gratitude, and raised conversations about free speech, the First Amendment, and national security threats.
“It was a mixture of thankfulness because so much of my time during the day kind of goes towards TikTok,” Anna Sanderson, a second-year student at the UI, said. “But also, I was [thinking], why is this the biggest thing that our government is focusing on right now?”…