Update 12/06/2024: Following ByteDance’s lawsuit attempting to stop the so-called “TikTok ban,” a panel of judges for the DC Circuit Court of Appeals has decided to uphold the controversial law. The decision leaves TikTok with a little over a month to find a U.S. buyer or otherwise get the law overturned before the January 19 deadline, leaving the company with two places to turn.
TikTok could appeal the case to the Supreme Court, which seems to be in the playbook. In a statement reported by Bloomberg, TikTok spokesperson Michael Hughes wrote, “The Supreme Court has an established historical record of protecting Americans’ right to free speech, and we expect they will do just that on this important constitutional issue.”
TikTok could also ask for help from the incoming administration. Since signing an executive order attempting to force ByteDance to choose between a sale and a ban in 2020, President-elect Donald Trump seems to have changed his tune on the TikTok ban, posting to Truth Social, “If you get rid of TikTok, Facebook and Zuckerschmuck will double their business. I don’t want Facebook, who cheated in the last Election, doing better. They are a true Enemy of the People!”
Coincidentally, ByteDance investor Jeff Yass contributed more than $46 million to Republicans during this year’s election campaigns.
Trump is set to take office one day after the upcoming ban, although it’s within his discretion to choose how the law will be enforced. However, a relaxed enforcement could leave both the app and app stores in a tricky spot when it comes to future administrations.
Within the law as it stands now, the president does have the power to extend the deadline by 90 days if it seems like significant progress is being made on a sale; however, given the Biden administration’s role in signing the law, it is unlikely that the deadline will be extended before Trump takes office.
This article’s original text follows below:
It’s official: President Biden has signed a bill into law that could lead to banning TikTok in the United States. The House of Representatives passed its original bill back in March, while the Senate finally voted it in as part of a $95 billion aid package for Ukraine, Israel, and Gaza on Tuesday. The legislation was passed with overwhelming bipartisan support in both chambers, and the President quickly signed it shortly after. So, TikTok in the U.S. is dead, right? Not quite.
What is the TikTok ban bill?
First and foremost, this bill doesn’t “ban” TikTok outright. Even though the bill is now law, the app won’t disappear from your smartphone immediately.
Instead, the law demands that ByteDance, TikTok’s Chinese-based parent company, divest its stake in the app to an American-owned company within nine months of the bill becoming law. President Biden can add another 90 days to that timeline if ByteDance appears to be making progress selling TikTok. (The House’s original bill had a shorter timeline of six months.) If ByteDance were to refuse, then the app would face a ban in the U.S. It’s similar to a tactic the Trump administration took in 2020: Trump signed an executive order forcing ByteDance to choose between a sale or being banned. The courts blocked the order, however, and the Biden administration later revoked it, replacing it with an order to review more apps that could potentially compromise American security.
Lawmakers are increasingly concerned that TikTok’s direct ties to China puts American users’ data in jeopardy. These fears are not unfounded: In late 2022, ByteDance employees obtained the IP addresses of American journalists from their TikTok accounts, in an effort to discover the source of company leaks. Back in June, we learned that TikTok stores some user data from U.S.-based creators in China, after insisting the company keeps all American data within the United States.
TikTok likely doesn’t scrape more data from your smartphone than any other app you use. Congress couldn’t care less about your privacy from an altruistic point of view. The government’s concern, however, is that unlike Meta or Google apps, your data isn’t being taken by an American company; rather, it’s potentially leaking to a foreign nation, one with a complicated, if not adversarial, geopolitical relationship with the U.S. That, in addition to a potential for China to influence the content American users actually see on their feeds, is fueling an urgency with many lawmakers to do something about the massively popular app.
Where do we go from here?
All that said, TikTok’s banishment is not certain. Look, this is America: If there’s one thing we love in this country, it’s a good deal. As such, now that the bill is officially a law, you better believe the business interests in the U.S. will be trying their darnedest to be the American company ByteDance sells to.
We were seeing this play out before the Senate had even deliberated the bill: Former Activision CEO Bobby Kotick reportedly pitched the idea of buying TikTok at a dinner, which included OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman. Former Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin is building a group of investors with the goal of acquiring the app. (Is it a prerequisite to be a “former” something in order to buy TikTok?) If not, even Shark Tank’s Kevin O’Leary told Fox News in an interview he’d like to buy the app. Perhaps Microsoft, which was in talks to buy TikTok under the Trump administration, will try again.
That said, who knows if ByteDance will actually sell. But it’ll certainly have its choice of buyer if interested.
No matter what, TikTok will not be banned before the 2024 election. Now that the timeline has been extended to nine months, with a potential 90-day extension on top of that, Americans will still be able to tune into news and opinions on the app all the way through Nov. 5, 2024. How that will impact the elections is all but certain: Will TikTok prove to be the election interference machine the U.S. government seems so concerned about? Will voters punish lawmakers and President Biden for putting the app in jeopardy, or will that not have much of an impact as the app will still be working when they go to the polls? So much about this story is up in the air: The one thing we know for sure is TikTok will still be with us until at least January 2025.
