TikTok is set to make its U.S. debut on Jan. 19, after years of debate with lawmakers and judges over its fate.
On Friday, the Supreme Court upheld a federal law that bars the hugely popular social media platform from operating in the U.S. unless its China-based parent company, ByteDance Ltd., is sold to an approved buyer.
Despite the court’s ruling, TikTok’s fate remains uncertain, with President Donald Trump set to ultimately decide its future, according to the Associated Press.
Trump, who is set to return to the White House the day after the ban takes effect, has credited TikTok with helping him win more support from young voters in last year’s election. A Trump adviser said this week that the incoming administration “will take steps to prevent TikTok from going dark.” What those steps will be, however, remains unclear.
The Rise of TikTok
TikTok is one of more than 100 apps developed over the past decade by ByteDance, a technology company founded in 2012 by Chinese entrepreneur Zhang Yiming and headquartered in the northwestern Haidian district of Beijing.
In 2016, ByteDance launched a short-form video platform called Douyin in China, followed by an international version called TikTok. It then bought Musical.ly, a lip-syncing platform popular with teens in the U.S. and Europe, and combined it with TikTok, while keeping the app separate from Douyin.
Soon after, the app boomed in popularity in the US and many other countries, becoming the first Chinese platform to break into the West. Unlike other social media platforms that focused on fostering connections between users, TikTok tailored content to people’s interests.
TikTok grew significantly during the COVID-19 pandemic, when short, viral dance routines became a mainstay of the app.
The challenges
Challenges have come alongside TikTok’s success. US officials have raised concerns about the company’s roots and ownership, focusing on Chinese laws that require Chinese companies to hand over data requested by the government. There have also been concerns about a proprietary algorithm that records what users see on the app.
During his first term, Trump issued executive orders in 2020 banning TikTok and the Chinese messaging app WeChat. India banned TikTok — along with other Chinese apps — the same year after a military clash along the India-China border that killed 20 Indian and four Chinese soldiers.
In 2021, the Biden administration rolled back Trump’s orders but left in place a national security review of TikTok by a little-known government agency known as the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, or CFIUS.
Negotiations falter
Between January 2021 and August 2022, TikTok representatives engaged in serious negotiations with the Biden administration about the app’s future in the U.S. The talks resulted in a 90-page draft app security agreement that the company presented to CFIUS in August 2022. The two sides then broke off substantive negotiations, according to TikTok lawyers, although some meetings took place in the following months.
A copy of the draft agreement submitted to the court showed that TikTok’s U.S. platform should have been open to inspections regarding its implementation of security rules and that it should have blocked access to U.S. user data from China. The company says it has already implemented some provisions of the agreement, including routing U.S. user data to servers run by Oracle software.
In its lawsuit, the company said it spent more than $2 billion to implement aspects of the plan, which it calls Project Texas. But the Justice Department and administration officials argued in court documents that the proposal failed to create sufficient separation between TikTok’s operations in the U.S. and China. They also said that the opacity of TikTok’s algorithm, combined with the platform’s size and technical complexity, made it impossible for the U.S. government—or its technology provider Oracle—to effectively ensure compliance with the proposal.
In February 2023, the White House ordered federal agencies to remove TikTok from government devices. Other countries followed suit, banning the app from official devices.
The following month, lawmakers questioned TikTok CEO Shou Chew during an hour-long hearing, in which he tried to reassure the House committee that the platform prioritized user safety and should not be banned because of its Chinese connections.
According to court documents, TikTok representatives had their last meeting with CFIUS in September 2023. Later that year, criticism of the platform grew among Republicans in Washington who alleged that the platform was abetting pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel content, a charge the company strongly denied.
Ban or Sell Act
Efforts to ban TikTok resurfaced in Congress early last year and quickly gained bipartisan support among lawmakers who expressed concern about the platform’s ability to track and manipulate Americans.
The legislation upheld by the Supreme Court passed the House and Senate in April. A lower court upheld the statute in early December. The law gave ByteDance nine months from the date of enactment to sell TikTok, with a possible three-month extension if the sale was in progress.
The fact that the deadline expires the day before Trump’s inauguration makes things tricky. Only a sitting president can issue a 90-day stay on the ban, and he can only do so if the buyer has taken specific steps toward a purchase.
While experts said the app won’t completely disappear from existing users’ phones on Sunday, new users won’t be able to download it and updates won’t be available. That would ultimately render the app unusable, the Justice Department said in court filings.
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