Good and bad news, TikTok fans.
As of Saturday afternoon, TikTok is now sending out a notification to U.S. users that it will indeed be forced to “temporarily” become unavailable in the region due to the U.S. Government’s forced sell-off bill.
As you can see, TikTok says that it is working to rectify the situation, but as of this stage, there’s no way around the law, which will go into effect as of midnight tonight.
TikTok’s last hope for legal recourse was the Supreme Court which ruled to uphold the rule of law in the “Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act” on Friday. Which means that TikTok must either be sold to an American company, or shut down in the U.S., and given the tight turnaround time, the latter is now the only option for the Chinese-owned app.
And as we reported recently, that’ll also apply to CapCut:
The good news is that both TikTok and CapCut (and Lemon8 as well) look set to become available to Americans again very soon, with incoming President Donald Trump noting that he’s “most likely” to grant the company a 90-day reprieve to negotiate an alternative solution, and to give Trump himself an opportunity to work out a new deal.
Reports had suggested that there may be no interruption in the app at all, with the Biden Administration looking to avoid enforcing the bill, and leave it up to the incoming Trump team to deal with it. But under the wording of the law, the app stores are the ones liable for enforcing the removal of the app. And as the Biden team couldn’t give them assurances that they wouldn’t be fined as a result, there’s no option but to cut it off.
Which sets the stage for Trump to save it.
Trump, of course, is now a fan of TikTok, after becoming a “big star” in the app, and as such, he’s keen to find a way to keep it going in the U.S., but because Trump doesn’t take the oath of office till Monday, he can’t actually do anything to stop the law from going into effect the day before.
Though this is seemingly why TikTok is now describing the situation as temporary, because it seems that Trump has made a pledge to reinstate the app as soon as possible.
It’s worth noting too that TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew will be in attendance at Trump’s inauguration on Monday.
Also, a point of clarity here: Trump did not get the ball rolling on the eventual TikTok ban by looking to ban the app himself back in 2020.
To clarify, back in 2020, Trump sought to ban TikTok in the U.S. not because of national security concerns, but in order to get back at China for the spread of COVID-19. In order to do this, Trump issued an executive order to ban the app, but the justification for such was found to be insufficient, and the Trump Administration’s approach lacked the evidence required to implement a ban on the app.
Which is why the Biden Administration abandoned the original TikTok sell-off push in 2021, but even then, security agencies were assessing the TikTok threat, and had seemingly already found evidence to suggest that Chinese-based groups were using the app to seed pro-China content, and/or extract information on users.
We don’t know exactly what they found, because they’ve opted to keep the full details out of the public domain. But it was this secondary push that eventually led to the formation of the now-approved TikTok sell-off bill.
So while Trump did try to ban it in 2020, and it seems like a major turnaround for him to go from the app’s biggest enemy to its savior, that narrative isn’t quite correct. The two actions are separate, and had separate reasoning and justification.
The eventual outcome, however, does now look set to clear the way for Trump to take control, and to either formulate a new deal on the sale of the app to a U.S. company or consortium, or somehow negotiate a new deal with China to keep it in operation as normal.
It does seem like Trump will need to arrange some new situation to appease the rule of law here, and that will likely see TikTok fall into the hands of one of his supporters. But either way, given his affection for the app, it does now appear that TikTok will only be gone for a couple of days, before returning in the U.S.
So no need to re-shape your strategy, no need to re-consider your influencer marketing plans. TikTok will be back, but as of tomorrow, it won’t work for U.S. users.
