President Joe Biden reportedly won’t implement the US ban on TikTok, 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 the TikTok ban to the incoming Trump administration. However, this is not a stay of execution, as TikTok will still have no legal authority to continue operating in the country. The Biden administration is simply not going to jump on the bandwagon once the ban begins.
“Given the timing of it taking effect during a holiday weekend the day before the inauguration, it will be up to the next administration to implement it,” the official said.
TikTok Ban Countdown: See the latest updates as time flies
This supposed decision to leave the matter to Trump is not that surprising. With the Supreme Court ruling in favor of TikTok within the next few days, the US TikTok ban is scheduled to take effect from Sunday, January 19 – just one day before Trump’s presidential inauguration on Monday, January 20. As such, it appears that Biden and his staff will be preoccupied with other matters on his last full day in office.
Trump previously issued an executive order banning TikTok in 2020, however blocks from the courts meant it never took effect. The then-president then appeared to lose interest in the ban, with Biden eventually lifting the order altogether after taking office in 2021.
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Now it appears that the roles have been reversed, with Biden having approved a ban on TikTok, which Trump may try to thwart.
Fortunately for American TikTok 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 opined that “maybe we should keep this thing going for a while”, apparently swayed by the millions of views his videos have received.
Less than a week later, Trump filed an amicus brief in TikTok’s appeal against the ban, asking the Supreme Court to issue a stay so he can “pursue a political resolution of the issues at hand” after to be on duty. Trump also met with TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew in December, and has reportedly invited him to Monday’s inauguration along with fellow tech executives Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk.
It seems that few people really want TikTok to be banned altogether. Many politicians and business people have expected that TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, will simply sell its US 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 (poking fun at a TikTok video). “The bill that just passed the House was about telling TikTok that they have to sell to another company… [passes the Senate]TikTok will be sold for billions of dollars and will continue to operate.”
However, it seems that such an unfounded belief may be misplaced. ByteDance has given little indication that it would be willing to sell, with a complete shutdown of TikTok in the US reportedly planned when the ban takes effect on Sunday. This would prevent people from downloading the app, while current US users who open TikTok will see a pop-up that directs them to a website with information about the ban.
Even if the outgoing Biden administration has stated that it will not enforce the TikTok ban, continuing to operate without official authorization is a risk ByteDance is unlikely to take. If it does, TikTok could be hit with a fine of around $850 billion, triggering penalties of up to $5,000 for each of its 170 million US users (a group that hypocritically includes Biden, Trump and the Attorney General Jackson). ByteDance was valued at $300 billion last November.
