(This story has been updated to add new information.)
TikTok users in the U.S. got some good news Saturday from President-elect Donald Trump.
Trump told NBC News he expects to “most likely” give TikTok a 90-day reprieve from a potential ban once he’s taken office on Monday.
The popular video-sharing app TikTok, used by 170 million Americans, faces a ban from a bill passed by Congress and signed by President Joe Biden in April 2024. The bill addressed concerns that the Chinese-owned TikTok posed a serious threat to national security. To keep running in the U.S., TikTok would need to divest its U.S. operation, the bill required.
After the Supreme Court denied Beijing-based parent company ByteDance’s argument that a ban on the app infringes on users’ free speech, TikTok said on Friday that it would “be forced to go dark” on Sunday without more clarity from the Biden administration and the Justice Department that the ban will not be enforced starting on Sunday.
The Biden administration has said it doesn’t plan to enforce the ban, and Trump has said he would look for a way to keep TikTok going, including perhaps finding a buyer or someone to operate TikTok’s U.S. operations.
A 90-day hold on the ban would give the Trump administration time to find a solution. “I think that would be, certainly, an option that we look at,” Trump said in the phone interview Saturday with NBC News’ “Meet the Press” moderator Kristen Welker. “The 90-day extension is something that will be most likely done, because it’s appropriate. You know, it’s appropriate. We have to look at it carefully. It’s a very big situation.”
“If I decide to do that, I’ll probably announce it on Monday,” Trump told Welker.
USA TODAY has reached out to TikTok for comment.
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White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre called TikTok’s Friday night statement seeking clarity from the Biden administration “a stunt.”
“We see no reason for TikTok or other companies to take actions in the next few days before the Trump Administration takes office on Monday,” she said Saturday. “We have laid out our position clearly and straightforwardly: actions to implement this law will fall to the next administration. So TikTok and other companies should take up any concerns with them.”
There have been potential buyers for TikTok’s U.S. assets, including a bid from Frank McCourt, billionaire and former owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers, and Kevin O’Leary, one of the hosts of the ABC reality series “Shark Tank.”
Another bidder emerged on Saturday: artificial intelligence search engine company Perplexity AI, CNBC reported.
Since the ban goes into effect on Jan. 19, the app could be inoperable as soon as 12:01 a.m. ET Sunday.
In TikTok’s statement Friday night it said it needs to “go dark” out of concerns for enforcement of the ban on its service providers. Among them: Oracle, which hosts much of TikTok’s data on its servers and reviews the app’s source code and delivers the app to the app stores. Other providers include Amazon Web Services and Akamai, distributors of the app’s content, The New York Times reported.
New users would likely not be able to download the app from Apple or Google’s app stores, either.
What and when anything happens remains to be seen. “Despite the Supreme Court’s affirmation of the ban, we are entering into a sort of no man’s land with regards to how the ban will take effect,” said cybersecurity expert Theresa Payton, who served as the first female White House chief information officer former, in a statement.
Ironically, it’s Trump who called for a ban on TikTok in his first term over concerns it gathered data on U.S. citizens that could be shared with the Chinese government. TikTok has said it has never been asked to provide U.S. user data to the Chinese government and wouldn’t if asked.
Trump issued a national emergency related to TikTok in August 2020, saying the app gave Beijing access to “Americans’ personal and proprietary information – potentially allowing China to track the locations of federal employees and contractors, build dossiers of personal information for blackmail, and conduct corporate espionage.”
Trump’s efforts to get the app banned during his first term were eventually blocked by multiple judges.
Then in 2021, President Biden issued a new executive order, saying ByteDance “continues to threaten the national security, foreign policy and economy of the United States,” and charging the Commerce Department with reviewing and evaluating the risks TikTok and other apps may present.
In December 2022, Biden signed a bill prohibiting the use of TikTok on government devices, and subsequently, legislation was crafted to ban the app in the U.S. unless conditions were met.
Before voting on the ban, lawmakers raised concerns about the possibility of Beijing spying on Americans and spreading propaganda via TikTok. After Biden administration intelligence briefings, senators – Democrats and Republicans – said they were convinced TikTok posed a serious threat to national security.
TikTok users may be “skeptical” about the need for action on TikTok, but “they’ve not seen what Congress has seen,” Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said on the Senate floor ahead of the April 2024 vote.
“They’ve not been in the classified briefings that Congress has held, which have delved more deeply into some of the threats posed by foreign control of TikTok,” Warner said.
Contributing: Riley Beggin, Greta Cross, Maureen Groppe, Jessica Guynn, Joey Harrison, Bailey Schulz and Mary Walrath-Holdridge of USA TODAY, plus Reuters.
Follow Mike Snider on Threads, Bluesky and X: mikegsnider &@mikegsnider.bsky.social &@mikesnider.
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