If you blinked, you might have missed that TikTok was temporarily offline in the United States.
One of the longest-running and most bizarre storylines in technology news has continued to deliver twists and turns as ByteDance, the Chinese-linked company that owns the app with 170 million US users, blocked Americans from using the platform.
The company cited the half-truth that “a law banning TikTok” had come into effect in its goodbye message to users. In 2024, US Congress indeed passed a law that required ByteDance to find a US buyer for its American operations or have its providers, like the app stores and server hosts, face fines for each user who accesses the app.
But then, less than a day after switching it off, ByteDance switched TikTok back on.
What changed in those hours of darkness? Did the company find a US-based buyer to avoid a ban? Did the Supreme Court overturn the law? Did TikTok decide to rely on its non-US infrastructure to serve its American users, which would mean essentially normal operations from a user’s perspective (at least for the time being)? Or was it and its US providers thumbing their noses at the US government, daring it to operationalise a largely unpopular law that both sides of politics seem increasingly unconvinced about enforcing?
No, nothing changed. There was no unexpected Hail Mary or deus ex machina. But in another sense, everything changed. In a word: Trump.
Set to take office the day after the law came into effect, it was clear that the 47th president of the United States wanted to avoid a TikTok ban. At least, as clear as it can be from a man who himself tried and failed to ban the platform in 2020.
Late last year, his lawyers asked the Supreme Court, then deliberating an appeal to the TikTok ban, to delay the law so Trump could make a “political resolution”. His advisers were saying publicly that the president-elect would stop the law. I mean, the TikTok CEO is set to sit with the other tech oligarchs at Trump’s inauguration!
On Sunday, Trump pledged to delay the law so that at least half of TikTok could be sold to an American company or, perhaps, the government itself. In return, ByteDance turned the lights back on with an obsequious message: “As a result of President Trump’s efforts, TikTok is back on in the US!”
The most obvious outcome was what happened. Trump did what he said he was going to do.
Considering the hand it was dealt, ByteDance played an incredible game to get here. In mid-2024, the company’s platform was scheduled to be banned in six months by law unless it found a buyer. The Chinese government said it wasn’t going to permit any sale, so that wasn’t an option. And the next leader of the free world, the only person who could really do something about this, was either going to be the man who signed the law, Joe Biden, or the man who a few years earlier had tried to ban it himself.
ByteDance had a narrow, maybe impossible, path to make it out of this mess. It drew directly from the strongman’s playbook to win over Trump. To save TikTok, ByteDance acted like a cyber-dictator and a bully.
Firstly, ByteDance did away with the soft power approach. Rather than limp on if its US providers pulled their services, the company took down TikTok as well as a number of its other popular apps. This show of might and power plays well with Trump who, throughout politics, has always shown respect and even a bizarre submissiveness towards authoritarians like Russian leader Vladimir Putin.
Secondly, it lovebombed Trump like authoritarian leader Viktor Orbán has done in the past. After joining TikTok mid-last year, Trump’s follower count quickly overtook the Biden-then-Harris campaign, ultimately tripling the other campaign’s following. His online base was both native to TikTok and used the platform to great effect during the campaign. When Trump first tried to ban the platform, TikTok was home of the youth resistance to Trump. But by 2025, the tables had turned. Democrats were now facing an increasingly hostile user base due to issues with Israel-Palestine, whereas the right-wing experience of TikTok was like a Trump party. (This isn’t to say that ByteDance put its finger on the scale for Trump, but there are counterfactuals. The company could have banned him! Instead, it let the platform grow into an asset that he didn’t want to lose).
Finally, ByteDance gave Trump an opportunity to win. In an incredible act of political judo, Trump gets credit for letting TikTok come back online even though he started the push to get rid of it and his party led the support for this law. The Biden administration was left embarrassingly taking responsibility for a law it only half-heartedly backed. Like North Korea did with Kim Jong-Un’s meeting with Trump in 2018, ByteDance gifted Trump an opportunity to seem like the president he pretends to be — even if there was little actually achieved. Plus, the “author” of Art of the Deal gets a chance to squeeze TikTok himself. With a coterie of billionaires hanging around him like vultures, now Trump can guide the sale of the platform to an ally as a reward for supporting him.
It is incredible that Trump — who previously tried to ban TikTok, who is reigniting trade wars with China, and who is the leader of a vehemently anti-China political party — will halt a law that would have kneecapped one of China’s most valuable exports and a potential soft-power weapon with direct access to half of America. And yet it also makes complete sense. Keeping TikTok online in America is entirely in Trump’s self-interest — at least for now.
Have something to say about this article? Write to us at letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication in Crikey’s Your Say. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.
