The possibility of the U.S. outlawing TikTok kept influencers and users in anxious limbo during the four-plus years that lawmakers and judges debated the fate of the video-sharing platform. The moment its fans dreaded arrived late Saturday when the platform went dark in response to a federal ban.
By midday Sunday, TikTok said it was restoring services to users in the United States after President-elect Donald Trump announced on Truth Social he would issue an executive order giving TikTok’s China-based parent company extra time to find an approved buyer before a ban goes into full effect.
Trump's authority to hit pause on a law that passed by wide margins in Congress, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously upheld on Friday, and which took effect on Sunday is uncertain. Trump, who is set to return to the White House on Monday, has credited TikTok with helping him win the support of more young voters in last year’s election.
In the case the court decided, TikTok, parent company ByteDance and some of the platform's devoted users argued the statute violated the First Amendment. The Biden administration sought to show ByteDance’s ownership and control of TikTok posed an unacceptable national security threat.
Here’s a look at how TikTok became a global cultural phenomenon and the political wrangling that followed the app's commercial success:
The rise of TikTok
TikTok is one of more than 100 apps developed in the past decade by ByteDance, a technology firm founded in 2012 by Chinese entrepreneur Zhang Yiming and headquartered in Beijing’s northwestern Haidian district.
In 2016, ByteDance launched a short-form video platform called Douyin in China and followed up with 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 U.S. and many other countries, becoming the first Chinese platform to make serious inroads in the West. Unlike other social media platforms that focused on cultivating connections among users, TikTok tailored content to people’s interests.
The often silly videos and music clips content creators posted gave TikTok an image as a sunny corner of the internet where users could find fun and a sense of authenticity. Finding an audience on the platform helped launch the careers of music artists like Lil Nas X.
TikTok gained more traction during the shutdowns of the COVID-19 pandemic, when short dances that went viral became a mainstay of the app. To better compete, Instagram and YouTube eventually came out with their own tools for making short-form videos, respectively known as Reels and Shorts. By that point, TikTok was a bona fide hit.
TikTok encounters critics
Challenges came in tandem with TikTok’s success. U.S. officials expressed concerns about the company’s roots and ownership, pointing to laws in China that require Chinese companies to hand over data requested by the government. Another concern became the proprietary algorithm that populates what users see on the app.
During his first term in office, Trump issued executive orders in 2020 banning TikTok and the Chinese messaging app WeChat, moves that courts subsequently blocked. India banned TikTok — along with other Chinese apps — the same year following a military clash along the India-China border that killed 20 Indian and four Chinese soldiers.
In 2021, the Biden administration dropped the Trump-era orders but left in place a national security review of TikTok by a little-known government agency known as Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, or CFIUS.
Negotiations falter
Between January 2021 and August 2022, representatives for TikTok 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 security agreement that the company presented to CFIUS in August 2022. The two sides then ceased substantive negotiations, according to TikTok’s attorneys, though some meetings also took place in following months.
A copy of the draft agreement submitted in court showed that it would have opened up TikTok’s U.S. platform for security inspections and blocked access of 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 operated by software giant Oracle.
In its lawsuit to overturn the sell-or-ban law, the company said it spent more than $2 billion to implement aspects of its appeasement plan, which it calls Project Texas.
But the Department of Justice and administration officials argued in court documents that the proposal failed to create sufficient separation between TikTok's U.S. operations and China. They also said the opacity of TikTok’s algorithm, coupled with the size and technical complexity of the platform, made it impossible for the U.S. government – or TikTok's technology provider, Oracle – to effectively guarantee compliance with the proposal.
In February 2023, the White House directed federal agencies to remove TikTok from government-issued devices, mirroring some other countries that also prohibited the use of the app on official devices.
The following month, lawmakers grilled TikTok CEO Shou Chew during an hours-long hearing in which he sought to reassure a tense House committee that the platform prioritized user safety and should not be banned due to its Chinese connections.
According to court documents, TikTok’s representatives had their last meeting with CFIUS in September 2023. Later that year, criticism against the platform increased in volume among Republicans in Washington who claimed the platform amplified pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel content, an accusation the company vigorously denied.
Ban-or-sale law
Efforts to ban TikTok resurfaced in Congress early last year, and quickly gained bipartisan support among lawmakers who voiced about the potential for the platform to surveil and manipulate Americans.
The legislation the Supreme Court upheld passed the House and the Senate in April after it was included as part of a high-priority $95 billion package that provided foreign aid to Ukraine and Israel. President Joe Biden quickly signed it, and the two companies and a group of content creators quickly sued.
A lower court upheld the statute in early December. The legislation gave ByteDance nine months from the enactment date to sell TikTok, and a possible three-month extension if a sale was in progress.
The deadline's arrival the day before Trump’s inauguration made things tricky. Only the sitting president can issue a 90-day stay on the ban and can do so only if a buyer has taken concrete steps toward a purchase.
The White House and the Justice Department emphasized Saturday that implementing and enforcing the law would fall to Trump and his administration.
Haleluya Hadero, The Associated Press
