A real false start. The social network TikTok announced this Sunday, January 19, that it was working to restore access to its application in the United States, just a few hours after having suspended it to comply with a law passed in Congress. In a message posted on X (formerly Twitter), the group thanked President-elect Donald Trump for assuring Internet service providers and application stores that they would escape heavy penalties under the law.
Earlier in the day, the president-elect declared his intention to issue an executive order once inaugurated on Monday to suspend the law banning TikTok in the United States. This, passed in Congress in the spring of 2024, came into force this Sunday, making the short video platform inaccessible in the country to more than 170 million American users.
The text provides for the possibility for the Head of State to postpone the implementation for 90 days while finding a buyer, an alternative offered to the parent company of TikTok, the Chinese ByteDance, in place of the ban. ByteDance has so far refused to sell this platform launched barely ten years ago and which has become essential for a large majority of young Internet users.
“Don’t leave TikTok in the dark!”
Donald Trump also encouraged internet providers and application stores to immediately restore access to TikTok, promising that his decree would retroactively protect them against possible sanctions. The law provides for very heavy fines for these technical service providers, up to $5,000 per user for application stores. “I ask companies not to leave TikTok in the dark!” urged the Republican on his Truth Social network.
Donald Trump also revealed the outlines of what appears to him to be a solution to the sensitive issue of control of the TikTok subsidiary in the United States by Chinese interests. “I would like to see a joint company 50% controlled by Americans,” the president-elect wrote. “Without an American agreement, there is no TikTok. With our validation, it is worth several hundred billions, even thousands of billions.”
As it stands, TikTok has disappeared from the application stores and Internet users who had already downloaded it can no longer open it. Since Friday, the group had asked the Biden government to send a clear signal to internet providers and application store managers to dissuade them from suspending downloads and updates. But White House spokesperson Karine Jean-Pierre called the TikTok calls a “maneuver.” “We see no reason for TikTok or other companies to act before the Trump administration takes office on Monday.”