On January 20, Donald Trump will take office as president of the United States for the second time and the deadline by which the Chinese company ByteDance is obliged, by a law signed in April by outgoing President Joe Biden, to sell the activities of TikTok in America to avoid being banned from the American market and its removal from the App Store, Play Store and every provider.
The app has more than 170 million users in the country. A considerable figure: it means that over one in two Americans uses the application, a percentage that is close to 70% among teenagers.
But to this date, January 19th, another is added, January 10th. On that day, the Supreme Court will hear arguments on the constitutionality of the federal divest-or-ban law, particularly whether the law impermissibly restricts free speech, violating the First Amendment. As he explains Guardianin his request to the Supreme Court, TikTok stated: “if Americans, duly informed of the alleged risks of 'covert' manipulation of content, knowingly choose to continue viewing content on TikTok, the First Amendment grants them this decision, free from government censorship”.
It is unclear how long the Court will take to issue a ruling and it is also unlikely to save TikTok but a possible postponement of the entry into force of the law would allow the social network to gain time, waiting for Donald Trump to take office as president of the United States.
The accusations against TikTok
TikTok it has long been considered a national security risk by Washington (due to links with the Chinese Communist Party, data management and disinformation risk). His fault would be linked to the ownership which is precisely Chinese. TikTok it has always denied any accusation and has tried to distance itself as much as possible from its parent company, which – like all Chinese companies – is subject to a law that allows the Beijing government to secretly request information for intelligence purposes. After years of back and forth, the challenge between the United States and the famous app is about to come to an end. One way out would be a step back on the part of Bytedance which should hand the application over to a company approved by the US government, as required to avoid the ban. The problem is that Bytedance seems not to have even taken this possibility into consideration, ignoring the demonstrations of interest coming from a group of investors led by the former Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, from some large US companies and from the billionaire Frank McCourt, former owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers and heir to a family of real estate developers.
Not only that: if it were forced to sell, Bytedance has already declared that it will not give up the code of the algorithm employed by TikTok, as well as dictated by the Chinese government.
Trump's bailout
Besides the fact that the US Supreme Court could postpone the law's entry into force, another wild card is represented by President-elect Donald Trump, who has tried to ban TikTok during his first term, but during the recent presidential campaign he declared that he was now against such action, something he reiterated yesterday during a speech in Phoenix.
No details were provided about how Trump plans to implement his promise to “salvare TikTok“. But spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said in a statement last month that Trump intends to “maintain” the promises made during the election campaign. And the fact that he reiterated his intentions just yesterday suggests that this will be exactly the case.
After Trump takes office on January 20, it will be up to his Justice Department to enforce the law and punish potential violators. Some have speculated that Donald might ask his Justice Department to refrain from enforcing the law or not at all. However, these are quite unlikely scenarios: the best option for the tycoon, if he really decides to save TikTokis to exploit a loophole in the law, which allows the president to determine the moment in which an app is no longer controlled by an adversary nation.
We'll see what Trump does. One thing is certain: if the ban were to happen TikTok it will not magically disappear from users' smartphones, but it will no longer be able to be downloaded from stores and will stop being updated, inevitably making it obsolete over time.
