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Since Saturday night, TikTok, the short video app owned by Chinese company ByteDance, has been unavailable in the United States due to a new law banning the company from operating in the country. On Sunday around noon it came back again.
Although ByteDance is required by law to sell TikTok to non-Chinese owners or face a ban starting Sunday, TikTok said it was responding to new “clarity” from President-elect Donald J. Trump as it retaliated the service.
Mr Trump vowed on Sunday morning to suspend enforcement of the ban to give TikTok more time to make sales that satisfy the law. How it can do this is still unclear.
What’s happening on TikTok this weekend?
The TikTok feed stopped working in the US on Saturday night. Instead of a video, the app showed a pop-up message to users that said a law banning TikTok had been issued in the US and “President Trump has announced that he will work with us on a solution to bring TikTok back when take his job.” He added, “Please!”
Then around noon on Sunday the app worked again.
“In agreement with our service providers, TikTok is in the process of restoring its services. We thank President Trump for providing the necessary clarity and assurance to our service providers that they will not face penalties for providing TikTok ,” the company said in a statement.
In practice, the law penalizes app stores, such as Apple and Google, and other Internet companies, such as Oracle, for distributing or reproducing TikTok content.
Can President-elect Donald J. Trump reverse the ban?
It is not clear whether Mr. Trump can suspend the ban under law, but he has vowed to do so. Mr. Trump said on the social media platform Truth Social on Sunday that he would issue an executive order on Monday that would “extend the period before the ban goes into effect, so we can make an agreement to protect our national security.” . “
He also said he planned to negotiate a deal that would give the United States 50 percent ownership of the new TikTok company, but it was not clear what form that would take. “Without US approval, there is no Tik Tok,” he wrote. “On our approval, it’s worth hundreds of billions of dollars.”
Can he do it?
The new law has provisions that state that a president can issue a 90-day ban, if he certifies to Congress that there is a “qualified exclusion” and can be done during that time. But it is not clear whether he can make that choice now that the law is in effect. The law was passed by Congress with bipartisan support, signed by President Biden and now upheld by the Supreme Court. Therefore, a simple manipulation will raise serious questions.
Sarah Kreps, director of the Tech Policy Institute at Cornell University, said Mr Trump’s choice was now “unchartered legal territory”.
What is the government’s concern about TikTok?
US officials have long been concerned about ByteDance’s ties to the Chinese government. They pointed out that ByteDance could hand over sensitive US user data to Beijing, such as location information, noting laws that allow the Chinese government to secretly demand that Chinese companies and citizens be in intelligence gathering activities.
They also worry that China may use TikTok’s content offering to promote disinformation, a concern that has grown in the United States since the start of the Israel-Hamas war and during the presidential election.
TikTok has long maintained that it has never used data or spread propaganda at the behest of Beijing in the United States. He tried to distance himself from ByteDance, which is considered one of the most valuable startups in the world, by saying that TikTok is headquartered in Singapore and Los Angeles, and that ByteDance is owned by global investors. But there are still workers in China working on TikTok, even though TikTok is not used in China.
Didn’t Trump start it all?
Yes. Mr Trump tried to regulate the sale of TikTok to US companies in 2020 and tried to ban the app – an effort that was eventually struck down by a federal court. He publicly changed his views on TikTok last March after meeting Jeff Yass, the Republican billionaire and megadonor who owns a majority stake in ByteDance, although Mr Trump said he had not discussed the company. they are.
He also enjoyed success with the app during the 2024 election, where he now has more than 14 million followers. He said the app helped him reach young voters. In his message on Sunday, he pointed out that he wants TikTok users to enjoy his dedication to the application.
