There is a TikTok trend running right now built on the premise that 2026 is the new 2016. Creators are pulling out decade-old sounds, filters, and dances and repackaging them with minimal modification. The comment sections are full of people who were teenagers in 2016 responding as though they have been shown something precious that they had forgotten existed. Ten years, apparently, is the threshold at which recent pop culture tips into nostalgia.

The TikTok situation in the US has become so legally and politically tangled that a clear summary is genuinely useful.

Congress passed a law requiring ByteDance, TikTok’s Chinese parent company, to divest its US operations or face a ban. The law survived a Supreme Court challenge. The deadline passed. TikTok went dark briefly in the US, then came back when the incoming Trump administration signaled it would not enforce the deadline immediately, seeking instead a negotiated outcome. The app has been operating in a legal grey zone since.