The social network TikTok was reinstated in the United States on Sunday, 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. 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 billionaire pledged to issue 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. “We must save TikTok,” Donald Trump proclaimed in Washington on Sunday during a final meeting before his inauguration. “We have no choice,” he insisted, referring to the “many jobs” at stake.
“We don’t want to give markets to China” or “others,” he said. “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.
And now ?
Questioned Monday during a regular press briefing, a spokesperson for the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Mao Ning, called on the United States to now “listen to the voice of reason”. China attaches “great importance to data confidentiality and security,” she assured. “We have never asked and will never ask companies or individuals to collect or provide data located in foreign countries in a way that violates local laws,” stressed the Chinese official. 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, or even thousands of billions.” 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 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.”
Surge
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 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. 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.
Sami Nemli with agencies / Les Inspirations ECO
