What if the future of TikTok in the United States became clearer? The very popular application asked the United States Supreme Court on Monday, December 16, to suspend the application of a law forcing its Chinese parent company ByteDance to sell it within a month, under penalty of a ban in the States. -United. The same day, according to NBC News, TikTok boss Shou Zi Chew was scheduled to meet Donald Trump. The American president-elect assured at a press conference earlier in the day that he had a “soft spot” for the social network. “I won the youth vote and some say that TikTok has nothing to do with it,” smiles the former real estate mogul.
Congress adopted the law against TikTok by a large majority in April, with the aim of preventing the risks of espionage and manipulation of users of the platform by the Chinese authorities. As L’Express explained at the time, the ByteDance group would not have the latitude to object to the Chinese government. Immediately promulgated by President Joe Biden, the law passed in the spring therefore sets a deadline of January 19 for ByteDance to comply. The objective is to put TikTok under the American flag, and the possible forced sale whets appetites. Former US Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin was interested in the potential takeover of the social network, as was billionaire Frank McCourt, reports the American daily New York Times.
TikTok, which claims 170 million active users in the United States, has repeatedly denied having transmitted information to the Beijing government and assured that it would refuse any possible request in this regard. The social network was rejected on December 6 its appeal against this law by the federal court of appeal in Washington, which also rejected its request for suspension on December 13. As they had announced, Tiktok and Bytedance are therefore seizing the Supreme Court to ask it immediately to suspend the application of the law. They indicate that they will then present their appeal on the merits before the Court in the name of the First Amendment of the Constitution guaranteeing freedom of expression.
Trump’s about-face on TikTok
“Congress has adopted a massive and unprecedented restriction on freedom of speech,” they say in their request for suspension, stressing that the law must come into force on the eve of the inauguration of the new president, Donald Trump. He himself tried to ban TikTok in the summer of 2020, during his first term, through executive decrees which were rejected by the courts. In the background, the trade war which is being played out between the United States and China as well as the electoral campaign which is being played out, the perfect pretext to flex your muscles. Another element: the man who then positioned himself to invest in TikTok was at the time the boss of Oracle Larry Ellison, close to Donald Trump.
Four years later, the latter made an about-face, joining the application in February 2024 in order to broaden its electoral base. The Republican now sees TikTok as an alternative to Facebook and Instagram, the two Meta platforms which had temporarily banned him after his support for the Capitol riots in early 2021.
During a press conference Monday at Mar-a-Lago, the hotel complex where Donald Trump now resides, he declared that he had a “weakness” for the application and specified that his team would look into the subject. TikTok, for its part, once again denounced “massive censorship”. A ban “would cost small businesses on TikTok more than $1 billion in revenue and cost content creators almost $300 million in lost revenue, according to estimates,” the company added.
This ban would target application stores, such as those of Apple and Google. “If they distribute or update TikTok, the federal government could impose civil penalties on them. Internet hosting companies will also be prohibited from contributing to the distribution or maintenance of TikTok,” specifies the American daily New York Times. The application should not disappear from Americans’ screens overnight, but rather degrade over time, gradually becoming unusable.