The great TikTok shutdown is looming in the United States. On Friday, the US supreme court said it would uphold a divest-or-ban law that targeted the ByteDance-owned platform. The company is facing a deadline of January 19th to separate its US business from its Chinese owners.
The supreme court has done its part. Now it is up to the government to enforce, if they have the political will to do so. Outgoing president Joe Biden, who signed the law that gives effect to the ban, has said he will leave it to Donald Trump. Whether the new president will do so, however, is unclear.
Trump wasn’t always so opaque on the subject. Once in favour of a total ban, he signed an executive order to do so but was prevented from carrying it out by a court. In the past year, Trump has changed his tune. In March 2024, he came out against a ban on the app.
The chief reason for the U-turn appeared at the time to be his animosity towards Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg, who was considered an enemy of the Maga state. A ban on TikTok would lead to a boost in business for its rivals, Zuckerberg included.
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Less than a year on, that view has changed. The Facebook founder, who recently announced his platforms would stop fact checking in the US, gutted diversity initiatives and made some questionable choices around what language it will or won’t allow, has been a return visitor to Mar-a-Lago.
Both Zuckerberg and his erstwhile sparring partner Elon Musk have been touted as possible buyers for TikTok’s US business. But ByteDance has always been clear: TikTok is not for sale. Nor is its algorithm, arguably the most valuable part of the whole shebang.
Earlier this week, sources said ByteDance was preparing to shut off the app in the US if the ban was upheld.
The US is not TikTok’s biggest market, although it is a profitable one for the company. It has 170 million users in the US, out of a total monthly active user base of more than one billion at the last count.
Many of those users are already looking for an alternative home. But rather than Instagram or X, they are landing on RedNote, a Chinese app that may find itself suffering the same fate as TikTok given its ownership, or Lemon8, which ironically is also owned by ByteDance.
It seems that the US might simply be swapping one app for another, and all the problems that go with it.
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