The social network TikTok announced on Sunday that it was working to restore access to its application in the United States, just hours after suspending it to comply with a law passed in Congress.
In a message posted on
The law provides, in fact, for very heavy fines for these technical service providers, up to $5,000 per user for application stores.
Earlier on Sunday, the future head of state committed to issuing a decree once invested on Monday to suspend the law banning TikTok in the United States.
The text adopted in 2024 opens the possibility of postponing 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.
“We will work with President Trump on a long-term solution to keep TikTok in the United States,” the company explained.
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.
Donald Trump revealed on Sunday 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 controlled 50% by Americans,” wrote the president-elect. “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 spokeswoman 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.”
– Hunting for VPNs –
-Seized by TikTok as a last resort, the American Supreme Court unanimously refused on Friday to suspend the law.
The nine senior magistrates considered that Congress's concerns “in matters of national security” were “well-founded”.
American elected officials had justified the passing of the law by the need to prevent the Chinese authorities from accessing the data of American users or from manipulating opinion in the United States.
But if the platform was the subject of frank hostility from many American elected officials a year ago, the tide has since turned and a political consensus has emerged in recent days, favorable to the preservation of TikTok.
Postponing the entry into force of the law is only theoretically possible if tangible elements make a sale credible.
Businessman Frank McCourt said he was ready to put $20 billion on the table with other partners for the application's American activities, without its powerful algorithm.
On Saturday, artificial intelligence (AI) start-up Perplexity AI submitted a merger proposal to ByteDance with TikTok's US subsidiary, which would value the social network at least $50 billion.
In addition to TikTok, all ByteDance applications in the United States were taken offline, including another social network, Lemon8, to which struggling TikTokers had migrated.
Many TikTokers lamented on Sunday the dormancy of their favorite app, very popular for the effectiveness of its algorithm in offering relevant content.
Zach King, one of the ten most followed TikTokers in the world (82 million subscribers), published a humorous video on YouTube showing him leaving TikTok for the Chinese platform Xiaohongshu (little red book), currently the most downloaded on the Apple app store.
Edison Chen, founder of Clapper, a competitor to TikTok, told AFP of more than two million downloads of the application in recent days.
Among the most downloaded applications on Sunday in the United States were several VPN companies, software that allows sites and application stores to be deceived about the user's geographic location.
