The social network TikTok was reinstated on Sunday in the United States, just hours after its suspension, a conclusion in the form of a political victory for Donald Trump. 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.
The rest after this ad
The rest after this ad
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.
Working with Trump for a “long-term solution”
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 a buyer is found, an alternative offered to the parent company of TikTok, the Chinese ByteDance, in place of the ban.
The rest after this ad
The rest after this ad
“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.
“The app was going to stay in the dark and Trump came to the rescue in this high-stakes political game between the United States and China,” he continued.
The rest after this ad
The rest after this ad
A boost to competitors
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.”
The rest after this ad
Mistakes
Once operational again, TikTok still did not appear in the application stores. 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 spokesperson 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.”
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”.
Political consensus
American elected officials had justified the passage 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.
Proposed merger with Perplexity AI
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. The reopening of TikTok gave rise to a surge of videos celebrating the event, featuring the most popular forms of the network, from musical choreographies to sequences dubbed by a song.
The brief suspension of TikTok will have given an unexpected boost to its competitors, first and foremost YouTube and Instagram, but also to lesser-known applications such as the Chinese platform Xiaohongshu (little red book), as well as Likee and Clapper.
