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One of Donald Trump’s first acts of his second term as president was to sign an executive order extending the deadline by which ByteDance, the Chinese parent company of TikTok, would be required to divest itself of its US operations or else face a nationwide ban. In fact, that deadline had technically already passed the day before; Trump’s order actually revived TikTok after the Supreme Court upheld the bipartisan divest-or-ban law passed under Joe Biden and the app took itself offline for about fourteen hours amid heightened legal uncertainty. Trump’s extended deadline, however, is set to pass this Saturday, and the fate of the platform, once again, hangs in the balance—with bidders said to be lining up and the White House reportedly discussing a controversial proposal to “lease” TikTok’s algorithm.
Although the idea for a TikTok ban had first been floated by Trump during his first administration, over fears that ByteDance could allow the Chinese Communist Party to access American users’ sensitive data, he has softened his stance in recent years. Public opinion appears to have shifted as well: a Pew Research Center survey published last week revealed that 34 percent of US adults support a TikTok ban, down 50 percent from March 2023 (though Republicans’ support for a ban remains higher than Democrats’). Meanwhile, TikTok has launched an advertising campaign that, as described by the New York Times’ Sapna Maheshwari, portrays the platform “as a savior of Americans and a champion of small businesses.” Trump said last week that “there’s tremendous interest in TikTok,” with “a lot of potential buyers.” He added, “I’d like to see TikTok remain alive.” Vice President J.D. Vance, who is responsible for overseeing negotiations to keep the app alive, has said that there will “almost certainly” be a deal that protects national security while preserving access for the platform’s hundred and seventy million US users by the April 5 deadline.
As Cristiano Lima-Strong wrote for Tech Policy Press, saving TikTok will require the administration and those it’s dealing with to meet the divestiture criteria outlined in the law passed by Congress last year. These include limiting ownership by individuals or entities based in adversarial foreign nations to less than 20 percent; ensuring the platform is not under the influence or control of foreign actors; and making sure that ByteDance does not retain any “operational relationship” between itself and TikTok with regard to “a content recommendation algorithm” or “with respect to data sharing.” At time of writing, whether these conditions will be met remains unclear. As of yesterday morning, several companies and investors—including Oracle, Perplexity, Andreessen Horowitz, and a group led by Shark Tank’s Kevin O’Leary—had expressed interest in acquiring the platform, though ByteDance had not confirmed any sale negotiations. The New York Times has since reported interest from Zoop, a company whose leaders include the founder of OnlyFans, and Amazon, which put in a last-minute bid. Parties to the talks “do not appear to be taking Amazon’s bid seriously,” the Times reported, but it nonetheless highlighted “the 11th-hour maneuvering in Washington over TikTok’s ownership.”
Trump has also floated the idea that a newly proposed US sovereign wealth fund could acquire part or all of the app, and hinted at the possibility of easing tariffs on China in exchange for the country’s cooperation in brokering a deal. Another idea: yesterday, it was reported that a new US entity might lease TikTok’s algorithm from ByteDance, thus circumventing the need for China to agree to a sale—though as NPR notes, the proposal “has been controversial in the White House,” with China hawks debating “whether the plan truly removes ByteDance from having operational control of the app.” According to The Information, the new entity, “TikTok America,” would be half-owned by US investors, but with ByteDance retaining a stake as well. Again, it’s unclear whether any of this will pass muster.
According to CNN, any failure to finalize a deal could expose TikTok’s technology partners—such as Apple, Google, and Oracle—to significant fines should they continue supporting the platform in violation of the law. Assuming it is enforced, that is. Meanwhile, amid the uncertainty, many competitors have launched features that emulate elements of TikTok’s signature short-form video format. This week, Substack announced the rollout of a scrollable video feed designed to let writers and creators move beyond text-based newsletters. (Instagram, YouTube, Snapchat, LinkedIn, Bluesky, and even Netflix have embraced similar formats.) Instagram is also reportedly working on a competitor to TikTok’s video-editing app CapCut, which is expected to debut in the coming weeks. And Substack and Meta were among the companies that announced financial incentive programs to attract creators to publish on their platforms. Chinese companies, too, are looking to capitalize on TikTok’s precarious situation. Ahead of the initial divestiture deadline, in January, hundreds of thousands of US users created accounts on Xiaohongshu (or “Little Red Book”), a popular Chinese social app. ByteDance has been promoting another app that it owns, Lemon8, and in November, made it easier for users to link their TikTok and Lemon8 accounts.
Despite some initial hesitation, many news publishers have begun to recognize TikTok’s importance in reaching younger audiences in particular. This week, for instance, the BBC said that it plans to invest more resources into developing short-form video and expand its presence on platforms like TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram. Creator-model journalists have also used the platform to develop their followings. Still, according to Pew, a majority of TikTok users do not follow journalists or news outlets on the platform. Furthermore, as Brian X. Chen noted in a recent New York Times article, there are still security risks associated with the app. In 2022, TikTok confirmed that four of its employees had been fired for inappropriately obtaining the data of several US users—including two journalists—while trying to find the sources of suspected leaks of internal conversations and business documents. Matthew Green, a security expert at Johns Hopkins University, told Chen that while the threat may be overblown due to the lack of a major scandal so far, the risks remain plausible and worthy of scrutiny.
Yesterday, Trump met with senior White House officials to consider TikTok’s future. If a decision isn’t reached by Saturday, the platform could face another shutdown—though the president has suggested the deadline could be extended again if necessary. It’s far from clear that the first extension was legal under the terms of the law, or that a second one would be either, but as the Associated Press reports, no one seems really to have challenged Trump on it. “It’s as if nothing ever happened,” Sarah Kreps, the director of Cornell University’s Tech Policy Institute, told the AP, while questioning whether there’s even a constituency for the ban to be upheld. “You have 170 million Americans using the app, and they’re pretty happy to see this continue to be available to them.”
Other notable stories:
- Yesterday, Trump unveiled sweeping global tariffs during a ceremony in the White House Rose Garden; he branded the event as marking America’s “Liberation Day” and at one point brandished a big chart, putting more than one journalist in mind of a TV game show host. The markets were not wowed—Bloomberg’s Joe Weisenthal described the ceremony as among “the most memorable news events” and said he had never seen “a policy announcement [make] the stock market tank in such a direct way”—and there was no little hostile media reaction, either; The Economist unveiled a cover with the headline “RUINATION DAY” and an illustration showing Trump standing on a map of America and cutting along the edges with a chainsaw. Senior Trump officials took to TV to try and sell the tariffs yesterday, and are set to do the same today, per Politico.
- Politico also reported yesterday that Elon Musk is set to take a step back from government in the coming weeks and focus more on his businesses, including Tesla and X. The reasons are unclear; Karoline Leavitt, the press secretary, trashed Politico’s scoop as “garbage” but essentially confirmed it. Meanwhile, The Atlantic’s Charlie Warzel examined the “gleeful cruelty” of posts shared by the White House’s official account on X, noting that it is “frequently preoccupied by rapid-response engagement bait for MAGA diehards.” And the Wall Street Journal zoomed in on the highly unusual recent merger that Musk executed between X and his AI company, with one expert likening the terms to “using Monopoly money to buy Pokémon cards.”
- According to Axios, the White House has set up a “parallel press shop” to message and deal with reporters on behalf of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Department of Health and Human Services after becoming frustrated that it wasn’t communicating quickly or clearly enough on its own, not least around a measles outbreak in Texas. This week, officials began to execute massive job cuts at US health agencies, including to teams that communicate health policy to the public and handle reporters and Freedom of Information Act requests. Writing for Stat, Kevin Griffis, a former communications chief at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, blasted the cuts as dangerous.
- A new scandal is gripping Israel and its media: “Qatargate,” based on allegations that aides to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu were paid by Qatar to boost that country’s interests and image in the Israeli press—claims that are particularly sensitive since Qatar has long hosted leaders of Hamas. Now Israeli officials have said that Zvika Klein, the editor in chief of the Jerusalem Post, was questioned in the matter on suspicion that he, too, received benefits from Qatar in exchange for favorable coverage. (He has denied wrongdoing, as have Netanyahu and top officials in Qatar.)
- And CJR’s Sacha Biazzo profiled “Mr. Right,” a “masculinity consultant” with a newsletter who is actually a pair of top editors at the right-wing Daily Caller. The character “is aimed at men struggling to find partners, lagging in higher education, or having a hard time entering the job market—and offers an array of edgy, if predictably right-leaning, solutions,” Biazzo writes. Dylan Housman, the editor in chief of the Daily Caller and one of the voices behind Mr. Right, told Biazzo that “American men are undergoing an ‘extended adolescence,’ characterized by delayed traditional milestones of adulthood.”
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