Time has almost run out for TikTok before a U.S. ban on the app goes into effect on Sunday, January 19, 2025.
It turns out TikTok’s fate lies in a number of powerful people, entities, and country’s hands, including the Chinese government, the U.S. Supreme Court, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, billionaire Frank McCourt’s Project Liberty, and even MrBeast (although perhaps only jokingly).
It is literally anyone’s guess what happens within the next 48 hours, but one thing is clear – expect the unexpected.
As of Thursday night Americans fully expected, although some hoped against the odds, that the ban would go into effect this coming Sunday.
Then on Friday morning, January 17, 2025 the Biden administration announced they will not be enforcing the ban on TikTok, and will instead leave it to the incoming Trump Administration to decide whether to enforce the law or seek other alternatives.
Mid-morning Friday the U.S. the Supreme Court upheld the ban on TikTok, so now it’s in the incoming Trump Administration court to decide what to do.
Donald Trump, who originally signed the Executive Order on August 6, 2020 to ban TikTok, has had, shall we say, a change of heart of late. He’s now for some reason (read: $$$) against banning TikTok even though it was his idea in the first place.
Are you keeping up with all this?
Back in March of 2024 Donald Trump changed his mind on banning TikTok, now arguing that banning TikTok would make Facebook stronger. At the time Donald Trump was none too happy with Meta’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg, but that’s apparently changed a little bit ever since Meta donated $1 million dollars to Donald Trump’s inauguration. So now it turns out Donald Trump may not believe Facebook is still the “enemy of the people”, as he called them on Monday, March 11, 2024.
Speaking of Facebook, as it stands now, Meta’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who co-founded Facebook, and acquired Instagram, stands to benefit perhaps the most if TikTok is banned.
In a case of irony, or perhaps cosmic karma, Shou Zi Chew the now CEO of TikTok, was once a summer intern for Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook.
TikTok users and content creators are frantically trying to figure out what to do next. Some users are even resorting to downloading rival Chinese apps such as RedNote, while others are riding the meme wave with the latest TikTok trend ‘Goodbye to my Chinese spy’ becoming quite popular right now on TikTok itself. How very meta!
Without a lot of time left before a potential ban could go into effect, there is a legislative effort to postpone the implementation of a TikTok ban by 270 days, which could give enough time for the incoming Trump Administration to figure things out and perhaps find a potential buyer for the rumored $50 billion dollar asking price for TikTok.
I’m exhausted just recapping the latest 24-hours in this saga, but I imagine there’ll be more twists-and-turns in the next 48-hours, so stay tuned.