(Bloomberg) — Some TikTok staff and creators, bracing for a potential ban of the popular video-sharing platform as soon as January, have come to see President-elect Donald Trump as a possible savior.
Trump, who has suggested publicly that he thinks a TikTok ban is a bad idea, could try to thwart a law signed by President Joe Biden. That law would shut down the app—which is used by half the American population—over national security concerns unless TikTok’s China-based parent company, ByteDance Ltd., agrees to sell its crown jewel to an American owner, which ByteDance has said it’s unwilling to do.
It’s possible Trump could devise an alternative solution to a sale, urge Congress to roll back the law or instruct his Justice Department not to enforce it, but none of those scenarios are as simple as they sound. Some inside the company don’t trust Trump to deliver. They worry that he can be erratic or that he might enrage allies in Congress who crafted the law, and they question whether he even cares about TikTok now that the campaign is over.
Even so, Trump’s win “significantly improves the picture for TikTok—no question about it,” former National Security Agency General Counsel Glenn Gerstell said in an interview with Bloomberg. “They now are facing a president who is on the record as supporting a reversal of the ban.”
“There’s 100 other factors, so it’s not a done deal,” he added. “But the dynamics have changed in TikTok’s favor.” TikTok did not respond to a request for comment.
Political leaders on both sides of the aisle have long viewed TikTok as a threat to US national security because of the vast amounts of sensitive data the app collects on American users and its ability to influence public discourse. Trump tried to ban TikTok through an executive order during his last presidency, but that effort failed and eventually fizzled after he lost his bid for reelection.
The idea of better securing or otherwise banning TikTok gained fresh momentum under Biden when Congress saw clearer evidence that ByteDance had accessed sensitive US TikTok data in China and used TikTok to surveil American citizens. Congress passed a bipartisan bill to force a sale or face a ban, and Biden signed it into law in April.
TikTok and ByteDance sued the US government in May to fight the divest-or-ban measure, which they’ve argued is unconstitutional. Just as important, perhaps, was that Trump also came out to say he opposed a TikTok ban—shocking many in his own party.
“The thing I don’t like is that without TikTok, you’re going to make Facebook bigger, and I consider Facebook to be an enemy of the people,” Trump told CNBC in March, and echoed the sentiment in a later interview with Businessweek. (He denied the change of heart had anything to do with his ties to Republican megadonor Jeff Yass, who’s held a $15 billion stake in ByteDance.) Soon after, Trump joined TikTok to reach young voters in his reelection campaign.
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There’s a chance Trump will never need to get involved. The US Court of Appeals in Washington heard TikTok’s arguments challenging the law in September, and is expected to issue a ruling on whether to uphold or overturn it by Dec. 6. The September hearing didn’t go well for TikTok, though. After it was over, Bloomberg Intelligence analysts cut its projected chances of TikTok beating the ban from 70% to 30%.
That legal process could drag out if the losing side gets a review of the decision at the Supreme Court. Other legal maneuvering could also delay things well past the Jan. 19 deadline, potentially hitting pause on the law for months or longer while the court deliberates. Biden could also choose to extend the sale deadline by 90 days. (New projections from Bloomberg Intelligence say there’s just a 20% chance the DC Circuit will halt the deadline.)
Such a scenario would let Trump sit back and let the legal process play out on its own, avoiding a complete about-face on his 2020 crusade against TikTok and helping him maintain the tough-on-China stance that is central to his agenda.
If he does have to act, though, Trump has several options. He could find an American buyer—his former Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin is among those who’ve expressed interest—though ByteDance has said it’s unwilling to give up TikTok’s powerful recommendation engine.
Trump could try to find a way to keep TikTok through a new fix that satisfies both the company and the US government’s concerns about national security, like another, more effective version of Project Texas, TikTok’s $1.5 billion attempt at cordoning off Americans’ data from China with help from Oracle Corp.
In fact, the software giant offers another justification for Trump to go easy on TikTok: The social network’s Project Texas team-up means it’s now a massive Oracle customer, and Oracle was Trump’s original pick to buy the video app back in 2020 when he tried to instigate his own deal. Leaders of the company, like Chief Executive Officer Safra Catz, were close to Trump early in his first term as other tech leaders criticized him, though the picture is now blurrier as Chairman and co-founder Larry Ellison supported Trump rival Tim Scott in the Republican primaries.
Trump could also urge Congress to repeal or amend its Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, or push for entirely new legislation, both a long shot given overwhelming bipartisan support for the original bill. Trump could theoretically direct his Justice Department not to enforce the law, or to do so selectively, but that could put American tech firms in a precarious position. The existing law places the onus on companies like Apple Inc. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google to pull TikTok off their US app stores, and for web services providers to stop hosting its traffic; they’ll quickly rack up enormous fines if they don’t.
Trump could also take some other action seeking to overturn the legislation, like an executive order opposite the one he tried to deploy in 2020.
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But all of this could be moot once Trump returns to the White House and gets briefed on classified national security information from federal agencies that he simply didn’t have access to while campaigning, said Sarah Kreps, director of the Tech Policy Institute at Cornell University’s Brooks School of Public Policy.
“When he made those comments out of office, he was not privy to the intelligence that seems to have swayed a lot of members of Congress in 2023 and 2024,” Kreps told Bloomberg. “When he proposed this [ban] in 2020, it was just sheer antipathy for China without much evidence at all about what China might be doing.”
And then there’s the question of how Trump’s approach to TikTok could be swayed by confidant and billionaire X owner Elon Musk, who arguably did more than anyone else to help Trump reclaim the presidency. Trump has already promised Musk a significant role in the White House, and it’s possible he’d ask the social media owner for advice on how to handle TikTok, too, which could create a conflict of interest.
“On the one hand, Musk is much less hostile to China than the Biden administration or Trump had been,” Kreps said, pointing out that Musk’s car company, Tesla, does lots of business in China.
On the other hand, Musk’s X—which has been pushing into video this year—could benefit from a TikTok ban. “I don’t think it’s the exact competitor to TikTok the way that something like Instagram or Snap or Reels would be,” Kreps said, but “it’s people’s online time. And he’d rather them spend it on X.”
Musk, for his part, said around the time Biden signed the law that TikTok shouldn’t be banned, even if a shutdown might boost his own platform.
“Doing so would be contrary to freedom of speech and expression,” Musk wrote on X in April. “It is not what America stands for.”
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