The ban on TikTok in the US, as part of a multimillion-dollar aid package to Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan, has already reached President Joe Biden’s desk, who will sign the law in a matter of hours. That signature will start a countdown of 9 months, extendable to a year, after which the Chinese-origin social network faces its ban in the US. This is the fine print of the law and the possible scenarios that follow.
The new scenario facing TikTok is, in principle, simple: it has 9 months, which the president can extend to 12, to sell its business in the US to an American company or a allied country. Former US Treasury Secretary under Donald Trump, Steve Mnuchin, has already announced that he is preparing a consortium of investors to make an offer to the Chinese company. If the parent company of the social network, ByteDance, and the Chinese government were to accept that option, the problem would disappear easily. But it doesn’t seem like that’s going to happen.
Most likely ByteDance will go to court to challenge the measure. Among the ideas that have already been put forward is to argue that a specific ban on a social network is unconstitutional, that its closure would affect the free expression of its users, that it would harm companies that advertise or sell their products through TikTok, and that the company already stores the personal data of its users in the US, so China does not have access to them.
The complaint would go to the second most important court in the country, the DC Circuit Court of Appeals. And the ruling that would come out of there would go straight to the Supreme Court, which would halt the countdown for its ban for at least a year, and probably longer.
It is possible that by then the political majorities have changed, but it is not very likely that a hypothetical victory by Donald Trump, who already tried to ban TikTok by decree in the last months of his term, would turn this situation around. What could happen is that the Republican would try to use TikTok as a bargaining chip in broader trade negotiations with the Xi Jinping government.
In the event that the courts uphold the law, and ByteDance refuses to sell its social network, the immediate consequence would be that TikTok would be removed from Android and iOS ‘app stores’, and its website would be blocked in the US. Users who already have the app installed could continue to use it, but they would not be able to install updates or migrate the application to a new phone they bought later, which would practically lead to its demise in a few years.
An intermediate option would be for China to approve the sale of the social network, but without the algorithm that decides which videos to show users, and is considered the “secret ingredient” of TikTok. The Asian country approved a measure in 2023 to prohibit the sale of algorithms to foreign countries, which clearly brings this option to the table. The problem is that without that mechanism, the value of the social network would plummet. And it remains to be seen if the new owners would be able to crack the code that has made TikTok the big success of the decade, or if the ‘new’ version would deflate its popularity.
