Tiktok Ban: details on the moment and how it could happen, Trump’s options

The race is underway to find a new owner for Tiktok in the United States.

A disinvestment or bank law forces its Chinese owner to separate from its American application. The Trump administration is currently in discussion with Bytedance and potential tenderers to find a path to go for Tiktok.

Trump has paused the law until April 5 to buy time to conclude an agreement. As this period approaches, he declared on Friday that he extended an additional 75 days while they would determine a solution.

It is not yet clear what a purchase affair of Tiktok would look like. Since January, when Tiktok has briefly extinguished in the country to comply with the law, a meli-melo of bidders has emerged for the application. Among the contenders are the company of AI Perplexity, the billionaire Frank McCourt and Amazon, according to a report by the New York Times citing three people familiar with the offer. Another possibility is that a coalition of American investors could come together to buy a large enough participation in the company to meet the disinvestment requirements of the law.

Trump previously offered a joint venture that would give an American entity an property at 50% of the company. Legal analysts have told Business Insider that there was a precedent for the government which has consumer companies, such as Amtrak or the American postal service. But having a piece of a large social platform could raise new constitutional questions about freedom of expression.

Learn more about Legal issues that may arise If the government obtains participation in Tiktok.

Tiktok briefly became dark in January

The disinvestment or bank law initially gave Tiktok until January 19 to find a new owner or close effectively. That day, American service providers had to stop working with Tiktok and other Bytedance applications, including Lemon8 and Capcut, which means that the application was dark.

The power failure did not last long, while the application returned online after Trump published an executive decree ordered his Attorney General not to enforce the law for 75 days.

While Tiktok began to restore service in the United States within 24 hours, the application did not return to Apple and Google application stores until February 13.

Learn more about applications Shirt and the renewal.

Trump became Tiktok’s latest hope after a series of legal defeats

Tiktok seems to have placed his future in Trump’s hands. Users who opened the application when the service was restored to the United States has seen a message from the company that has credited Trump for the renewal. The next day, Tiktok’s CEO attended the president’s inauguration.

But the company previously sought a different path towards survival, hoping that the courts could cancel the prohibition, as happened with the previous efforts of the State to close the application.

Tiktok posted a legal challenge to the federal law in the DC circuit in May. He lost his file in December. He then appealed before the Supreme Court, which judged on January 17 that the law was constitutional and did not violate the rights of the first amendment of Tiktok or its creators.

There is no doubt that Tiktok “offers a distinctive and expansive outlet for the expression”, wrote the court in its decision “, but the congress determined that divestment is necessary to respond to its well -supported national security problems concerning Tiktok data collection practices and relations with a foreign opponent.”

The decision of the Supreme Court was largely expected. Legal analysts declared to Bi before the decision that the court Refer to the authority of the congress on national security problems.

On the campaign track, Trump said he would try to save Tiktok once in power, a switch to his position during his first presidential mandate. He met Tiktok CEO, Shou Chew on December 16, and said at a press conference that day that he had “a warm place in my heart for Tiktok”.

A sale of Tiktok also seems to be the favorite path among certain members of the Congress. Representative John Moolenaar, Chairman of the China Committee of China, told Bi in a statement that the Trump administration “would have a unique opportunity to negotiate an American platform control, allowing Tiktok users to continue to take advantage of a safer and better version of the application without foreign opponent control”.

In Congress, the Tiktok law, known as the protection of Americans against applications controlled by foreign opponents, attracted Bipartisan support. But the support of a ban has faded among the American public. In a Pew Research Center survey among American adults in July and August, around one in three respondents (32%) supported a government prohibition, compared to 50% in March 2023.

Will China let Tiktok be sold?

A sale of Tiktok can finally become a negotiation program in the largest American-Chinese commercial negotiations.

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Any agreement around Tiktok would require the blessings of the owner bytedance and the United States and the Chinese governments. In a January briefing, a spokesperson for the Chinese Foreign Ministry seemed open to leaving an agreement “decided independently”, although he added that “the law and regulations of China should be observed”.

A Bytedance spokesperson said in April that he was in discussion with the United States government concerning a potential solution for Tiktok. There are key questions to be resolved and any agreement will be subject to approval under Chinese law, they said.

Why do politicians want to prohibit Tiktok

Government representatives are concerned about Tiktok’s growing influence in the United States for years.

Its owner, Bytedance, is based in China, a country that the United States has deemed a foreign opponent. This has aroused fears among some officials that the company could be forced to hand over Tiktok sensitive American user data to the Chinese Communist Party. Some members of the Congress have raised fears that Tiktok can be used as a CCP propaganda tool.

Tiktok said that he does not share information with the Chinese government and that its content modation efforts are led by an American team which “operates independently of China”.

How creators, employees and other Tiktok partners deal with an uncertain future

Employees, creators, advertisers and Tiktok sellers who use its shopping platform were on a wild roller coaster race this year when they watched Tiktok’s political and legal battles.

The merchants of the Tiktok boutique began to prepare for “doomsday” weeks before the application was briefly dark. Some have taken an American warehouse break or taken other measures to prepare a potential application closure. Others hide against the ban by selling other markets from the Tiktok store such as Mexico.

Advertisers also planned to move expenses to other platforms such as Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts, while influenced marketing specialists put emergency plans in action, ensuring brands that creators would download sponsored publications on other short video applications.

Before the brief closure of the application in January, Tiktok wrote in an internal memo to the American members that their “employment, salary and benefits are secure, and our offices will remain open, even if this situation was not resolved before the deadline of January 19”.

For the creators of Tiktok and their teams, weeks of uncertainty have aroused a mixture of anger and exhaustion.

“Losing the majority of my audience is a difficult reality to face, and even if I do everything I can prepare, it is hard not to have the impression of starting again,” said Sofia Bella, a creator of Tiktok with around 4.8 million followers.

Learn more about how The creators of Tiktok prepared for an application stop.

While the creators of Tiktok are waiting for answers on the future of the application, the competitors of the application are not inactive. In January, Meta began to offer creators thousands of dollars to publish exclusive short videos on Instagram Reels.