TikTok declared that its services would be restored. Following President-elect Donald Trump’s announcement on Sunday that he would issue an executive order to temporarily halt the ban on the immensely popular app.
Hours before an app ban was scheduled to go into force, TikTok shut down its activities late Saturday night. A brief notification appeared when someone opened the TikTok app, leaving them with no further options.
The first statement said, “We regret that a U.S. law banning TikTok will take effect on January 19 and force us to make our services temporarily unavailable.” We value your help as we strive to quickly restore service in the United States. Stay tuned, please.
One social media user saw after the ban that everyone was scrolling through Twitter because TikTok was no longer available, but every tweet was about TikTok.
The message was modified a few hours later to read: We are lucky that President Trump has said he will collaborate with us to find a way to bring TikTok back once he assumes office.
Trump, who will take the oath of office on Monday, has fluctuated throughout his political career on TikTok. He stated in June 2020 that he was thinking about banning the app, and in August 2020 he issued an ambiguous executive order regarding it.
However, Trump began claiming that if elected, he would save TikTok after President Biden signed the actual prohibition into law in April 2024 after it passed Congress with bipartisan backing.
He announced on social media on Sunday morning that he would stop the law and grant a 90-day extension. His suggested remedy, however, was for ByteDance, the owner of TikTok, to sell a 50% share in the app to American companies.
In the past, ByteDance has stated that it has no intention of selling TikTok. There have been a number of planned transactions that would see American companies take over the app, but none of them have been finalized.
Trump wrote on Sunday morning that Tik Tok would not exist without U.S. approval. It is worth hundreds of billions, if not trillions, with our agreement.
Many were surprised when TikTok abruptly shut down on Saturday night. According to tech experts, the so-called TikTok prohibition law only barred the program from application stores rather than preventing it from operating in the United States. TikTok is no longer available for download through popular outlets after being taken down from the Google Play Store and the Apple App Store.
TikTok posted just after noon on Sunday, stating that it is currently working with its service providers to restore service. We appreciate President Trump giving our service providers the clarity and assurance they need to know that they won’t be penalized for giving TikTok to more than 170 million Americans and enabling the success of more than 7 million small businesses. It is a resolute defense of the First Amendment and an opposition to capricious censorship. We’ll collaborate with President Trump to find a sustainable solution that retains TikTok in the US.
(New York Daily News (TNS), Joseph Wilkinson)
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