Following promises from President-elect Donald Trump, 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 .
A sign of the intact vitality of the platform with more than 170 million users in the United States, TikTok was immediately flooded with videos celebrating this return.
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The law provides, in fact, for very heavy fines for these technical service providers, up to $5,000 per user for application stores.
Engagement de Donald Trump
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.
TikTok is no longer accessible in the United States, but Donald Trump promises to suspend the law on Monday
The text adopted in 2024 opens the possibility of postponing the implementation for 90 days while a buyer is found, 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.
“It’s a great success for TikTok and a political victory for Trump,” Dan Ives, an analyst at Wedbush, responded to AFP.
-This even though the billionaire was in the White House in 2020 when the decision to ban the social network was taken.
>> Read about it: Donald Trump announces he will ban TikTok in the United States
“We know that TikTok served him well during the election campaign. Donald Trump was very effective in his communication on the media, in particular on TikTok. So he possibly also changed his mind because of that,” notes Tommaso Venturini, researcher at the UNIGE MediaLab, interviewed in Forum.
>> The interview with Tommaso Venturini, researcher at the MediaLab at UNIGE, specialist in digital humanities. :
“Common society”
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.
However, 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.”
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.
Supreme Court decision Friday
Seized by TikTok as a last resort, the American Supreme Court unanimously refused on Friday to suspend the law. The nine senior judges 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.
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