TikTok shut down access to its 170 million American users on Jan. 18, hours before a Supreme Court ruling upholding a Congress-passed ban of the app was set to take place.
“We are fortunate that President Trump has indicated that he will work with us on a solution to reinstate Tiktok once he takes office,” a message on the app read.
Less than a day after the shutdown, the app abruptly restored service, this time thanking President Donald Trump for his efforts to get TikTok back online.
Here’s the background: On March 13, 2024, Congress passed a bill requiring Tiktok’s parent company, Chinese-owned ByteDance, to either sell the app to a non-Chinese owner or face a ban in the U.S. within 180 days. Former President Biden then signed the bill into law in April 2024. The law was brought to the Supreme Court, which ultimately upheld the ban, meaning the law would take effect on Jan. 19.
Lawmakers’ desire to ban Tiktok was motivated by a perceived national security risk from China, specifically regarding the monitoring of Americans’ data through the app.
When Katie Drummond, the global editorial director of WIRED, initially heard rumblings about a TikTok ban in the U.S., she, among other senior journalists, thought it wouldn’t actually go anywhere.
“It just seemed like such a massive overreach with regards to free speech and the First Amendment that it felt just impossible to imagine that this could possibly happen in the United States,” she said.
Drummond also believed that talks of a TikTok ban felt “paranoid” and “xenophobic” on the part of U.S. lawmakers, especially when Chinese companies are not the only ones that collect Americans’ user data.
“This [was a] bizarre, almost delusional fixation on TikTok, and the potential for TikTok to be harvesting data about Americans and giving it to the Chinese government, when the reality is every social media platform owned by every American technology company harvests ungodly amounts of data about every U.S. user,” Drummond said. “The Chinese government, if they wanted to, could just buy that data from a data broker tomorrow.”
Tensions between the United States and China over economics and technology have existed long before the issue of TikTok’s ownership.
Tufts Associate Professor of Political Science Michael Beckley focuses his research mostly on China and its relations with the United States. He explained that great powers compete for technological dominance, which translates to controlling the leading sectors of the economy.
“[Tech] is … a source of leverage. If you control, say, computer chips that can only be made within your supply chain, then that gives you leverage over trade partners.”
For arguments in favor of banning TikTok, lawmakers said that China’s access to Americans’ user data risked national security. Beckley pointed out a few main reasons as to why China would want access in the first place.
“One worry is for blackmail,” he said. “There’s actually been many documented cases where China has used access to Americans’ data to try to convince certain employees at technology companies … to make some kind of decision at work that would be in China’s interest.”
The other reason is for developing artificial intelligence, which requires data — lots of it.
“If they were training all their models solely on the Chinese population, it doesn’t necessarily scale out to global products, whereas American tech companies have a global footprint and so they have a much wider, more diverse data to work through. … So if China can just hoover up data from all over the world, it basically becomes the world’s data broker and can have the most diverse, largest data sets to train AI models going forward,” Beckley said.
A third important motivation for China to maintain a connection with a company such as TikTok is to access and influence channels of communication.
“What is much more effective [than paper propaganda], and they’ve sort of taken a page from Russia’s playbook, was [propaganda] through social media, especially if you can basically send subliminal messages or change the information environment,” he said.
But the Trump administration apparently did not find lawmakers’ arguments compelling enough to ban the app. Trump has also grown his following significantly on TikTok to over 15 million after joining in 2024.
So how did the president, who had attempted to ban TikTok in his first term, manage to forestall a law that would have effectively banned the app? Through one of his favorite presidential mechanisms: the executive order.
To Drummond, it seems that the optics of coming into the White House and “saving” TikTok were too good for Trump to pass up.
“If we know anything about Donald Trump up until this point, it’s that he really likes being liked, and he really likes being popular. And I think he is all about optics,” she said.
But Trump’s Jan. 20 executive order to stall the ban by 75 days after the law was scheduled to take effect runs contrary to the Supreme Court’s ruling.
“The reality of his sort of 75 day extension that he has granted them is a lot of smoke and mirrors,” Drummond said. “His executive order doesn’t take the teeth out of what has been ruled by the Supreme Court, so it’s a very weird situation where now he’s issued this sort of decree that actually has no legal bearing at all.”
For American tech CEOs, who have spent the last few weeks cozying up to the Trump team, there is little they can do except hope the ban goes through — for the sake of growing their numbers — or hope to gain ownership of the company themselves.
Some 170 million people in the United States have downloaded the app — and they spend plenty of time on it posting and viewing clips. According to TikTok’s data, the average TikTok user is active an average of 95 minutes every day on the app. That translates to millions of potential advertising dollars.
But there may be no reason to believe that ByteDance will come to the table.
“ByteDance has given every indication that they would be very happy to shut the app off in the United States, walk away [and] focus on all of the other markets where TikTok still operates,” Drummond said.
As she points out, the beloved app’s parent company may decide that giving up ownership is not worth retaining its millions of users in the United States.
“It’s hard for me, a little bit, to see what kind of incentive would exist for a company as big as ByteDance that operates very successfully in the massive country of China, among other markets, [to sell],” Drummond said.
Should ByteDance decide to sell or merge, there’s a long list of American tech companies waiting to jump at the opportunity. But the beloved app’s parent company may value ownership of TikTok over their large U.S. user base. While this dance plays out, the app lives on — for now.
