The social network TikTok is accessible again this Monday, January 20 in the United States, just a few hours after its suspension, a conclusion in the form of a political victory for Donald Trump. “Frankly, we have no choice, we must save” the platform, the president-elect declared Sunday evening during a final meeting, confirming his intention to issue a decree once invested, this Monday evening, to suspend the law banning TikTok in the United States.
He also proposed that the social network be 50% controlled by American shareholders. The law passed in Congress in 2024 came into force on Sunday, making the short video platform inaccessible to more than 170 million users in the United States.
The text provides for the possibility for the Head of State to postpone 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. 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.
In the process, the social network announced that it was working to restore access to its application in the United States, just hours after having suspended it to comply with a law passed in Congress. In a message posted on
“We hope that the American side will listen to the voice of reason and provide an open, fair, just and non-discriminatory business environment for commercial entities from all countries operating in the United States,” for its part, Beijing reacted, via a spokesperson for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Mao Ning, who underlined: “TikTok is an application very popular with American users and has been present in the United States for many years. It has played a positive role in promoting employment and stimulating consumption in the United States.”
“Don’t leave TikTok in the dark!”
Donald Trump had in fact encouraged internet providers and application stores to immediately restore access to TikTok, promising that his decree would retroactively protect them against possible sanctions. The law provides, in fact, for very heavy fines for these technical service providers, up to $5,000 per user for application stores. “I ask companies not to leave TikTok in the dark!”had urged the real estate developer on his network Truth Social.
Donald Trump also revealed 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 50% controlled by Americans”wrote the president-elect. “Without an American agreement, there is no TikTok. With our validation, it is worth several hundred billions, if not 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 “maneuver”. “We see no reason for TikTok or other companies to act before the Trump administration takes office on Monday.”
Several potential buyers
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 the concerns of Congress “in matters of national security” were “well-founded”. 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. 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.
Mass migrations to the Xiaohongshu application, “little red book”
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.
Update : this Monday, January 20 at 10 a.m., with the addition of the fact that TikTok is once again accessible in the United States.
