President Joe Biden reportedly won’t enforce the U.S. TikTok ban, leaving it up to President-elect Donald Trump to make the final call on the popular video-sharing app’s immediate future.
In a statement to ABC News, a White House official indicated that the current administration will leave the implementation of TikTok’s ban to the incoming Trump government. Even so, this isn’t a stay of execution, as TikTok will still have no legal authority to continue operating in the country. The Biden administration just won’t be jumping down its throat as soon as the ban begins.
“Given the timing of when it goes into effect over a holiday weekend a day before inauguration, it will be up to the next administration to implement,” the official said.
TikTok ban countdown: See the latest updates as time runs short
This alleged decision to leave the matter to Trump isn’t all that surprising. Barring the Supreme Court intervening in TikTok’s favour within the next few days, the U.S. TikTok ban is currently scheduled to take effect from Sunday, Jan. 19 — just one day prior to Trump’s presidential inauguration on Monday, Jan. 20. As such, it seems likely that Biden and his staff will be preoccupied with other issues on his last full day in office.
Trump previously issued an executive order banning TikTok in 2020, however blocks by the courts meant it never took effect. The then-president subsequently appeared to lose interest in the ban, with Biden eventually dropping the order altogether after he took office in 2021.
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Now it seems the roles are reversed, with Biden having approved a TikTok ban which Trump may try to thwart.
Fortunately for TikTok’s U.S. users, Trump appears to have softened his stance on the app since his first term in office. Speaking at an event last December, the billionaire mused that “maybe we gotta keep this sucker around for a little while,” seemingly swayed by the millions of views his videos have received.
Less than a week later, Trump submitted an amicus brief in TikTok’s appeal against the ban, requesting that the Supreme Court issue a stay on it so he can “pursue a political resolution of the questions at issue” once in office. Trump also met with TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew in December, and has reportedly invited him to Monday’s inauguration alongside fellow tech executives Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and Elon Musk.
It seems few people truly want TikTok banned altogether. Many politicians and business people have been expecting that TikTok’s parent company ByteDance will simply sell its U.S. operations to an American company, with everyone from Musk to former Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick being suggested as potential buyers. Even the White House official told ABC News that the Biden administration’s position is that “TikTok should continue to operate under American ownership.”
“I don’t think TikTok is going to be banned,” then-North Carolina Congressman Jeff Jackson said after voting for the ban last March (ironically speaking in a TikTok video). “The bill that just passed the House was about telling TikTok they have to sell to another company…. If it [passes the Senate], TikTok will be sold for billions of dollars and will continue to operate.”
However, it seems as though such baseless confidence may be misplaced. ByteDance has given little indication it would be willing to sell, with a complete U.S. TikTok shutdown reportedly planned for when the ban comes into effect on Sunday. This would prevent people from downloading the app, while current U.S. users who open TikTok will be shown a pop-up directing them to a website with information about the ban.
Even if the outgoing Biden administration has stated that it won’t enforce the TikTok ban, continuing to operate without official authorisation is a risk ByteDance is unlikely to take. If it does so, TikTok could be hit with a fine of around $850 billion, incurring penalties of up to $5,000 for each of its 170 million U.S. users (a cohort which hypocritically includes Biden, Trump, and Attorney General Jackson). ByteDance was valued at $300 billion last November.
