Sapna Maheshwari

And now we're going to see, you know, how can this actually stand up if the president has decided he may not like this law.

I mean, the future of this app is still so up in the air. Just in the time that we've been talking, TikTok is now offering a pop-up message that's thanking Trump for saving the app. Oh, my goodness.

Literally, in the time that we've been talking. And we really just don't know what's going to happen this week. And this does feel like quintessential Trump. Welcome back to the Trump administration. He is the rare politician that can kind of hold a contradiction like this. Look what he did in 2020. Look what he's doing now. For so many TikTok users, they don't care about the China of it all.

They want the app back. The last 12 hours have been really hard for a lot of them, and they're hoping that it doesn't go away again. But it also raises this other big question, which is, you know, if TikTok does go away, what does that mean for the future of the US and China relationship, two countries that rely on each other so much?

It's incredible to think that this app, which up until now has been known for dances and recipes and fun and entertainment, may also be remembered as a real turning point in an increasingly fraught relationship between the US and China.

I'm not counting on it.

So yes, it was a huge deal last night when TikTok went dark. It stopped working for people. Nobody knew what was happening. And you saw people posting tearful goodbye videos at first. Then you couldn't see anything. You saw the app store just start changing as people started rushing to this new Chinese app called Red Note.

You saw people posting to Instagram on Instagram Reels on Blue Sky Instagram. just turning to everywhere they could to share how stunned and shocked they were.

Yeah, exactly. It was like digital refugees just trying to figure out where do we go to post now that this app that we use so much is suddenly gone.

And people have been freaking out. They're really excited.

But the situation is really fluid. We don't know what's going to happen. We're talking early afternoon Sunday. And when I wake up tomorrow, I really don't know what the situation will be.

Right. So last year, Congress passed this law saying that TikTok had to be sold by ByteDance, their owner, to a non-Chinese company. And this law offered this deadline to make sure that ByteDance and TikTok did it, said it has to be sold by January 19th or some sort of talks have to be underway or the company will face a ban in the United States.

So for years, lawmakers have had these national security concerns around TikTok. They're kind of in two camps. One, they've said that U.S. user data could be handed over to the Chinese government based on laws that apply to companies in China. The other piece of it is lawmakers have said that there's a chance that TikTok could spread Chinese propaganda online.

to millions of Americans without their knowledge. And the governments had these concerns for years dating back to at least 2020. And this is the first time they really passed a law that was going to do something about it.

That's right. TikTok said from when this legislation was first introduced that they would beat it, that it was unconstitutional, that it violated the free speech rights of TikTok users in America. And they gambled all the way to the Supreme Court.

And astoundingly, the Supreme Court decided on Friday unanimously that the government had the right to implement this law and to ban TikTok if it didn't sell.

The court comes out with this decision on Friday, January 17th. This law is supposed to go into effect two days later on January 19th. So Saturday night, users of TikTok start seeing this pop-up message appear. And it says that specifically, we are fortunate that President Trump has indicated that he will work with us on a solution.

That's right. This is a complete turnaround from how Trump felt about TikTok in 2020.

So if you rewind your memories back then, Trump was very anti-TikTok.

And he said that it needed to be owned by American companies, and he tried to ban it.

And he brought up the same national security concerns that we've heard from lawmakers recently. They were really focused on the data. He said Beijing could find a way to get U.S. user data from TikTok, and that was unacceptable. So he wrote this executive order trying to ban the company, but it actually didn't hold up in federal courts.

They said essentially he didn't have the authority to ban TikTok at the time. But this idea never went away. And his efforts actually gave rise to this law several years later that we're looking at now that basically demands this sale or ban of TikTok.

That's right. So this law was inspired by Trump and the company was really caught flat footed. It had been hearing talk of a ban for years and it had thought it was in pretty good shape heading into the new year. They had fought back a sort of ban effort the year before. President Biden joined TikTok around the time of the Super Bowl. But then this law passes and the company scrambles.

It's trying to figure out how to protect its huge operation in the U.S., its thousands of employees. The U.S. is its biggest market. And they think of Trump. They think of him as someone who, despite his efforts in 2020, might actually be willing to go to bat for the company this time.

Right. So Trump had seemed to kind of change his tune on TikTok. He'd spent a lot of time in the past bashing one of the company's big competitors, which is Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram. And clearly, President Biden was willing to sign this law. And the company was thinking, you know, maybe you should try its luck with a new Republican nominee.

So the big player here is this conservative billionaire donor named Jeff Yass. He's a big Republican, and it turns out he owns about 15% of ByteDance shares. So he has this big stake in the future of TikTok. And we know that he had talks with Donald Trump at some point in March of last year. Around that time, Trump goes on CNBC, and he's got a different message about TikTok.

But he's saying, you know, yes, I'm aware of the security risks, but it shouldn't be banned.

And, you know, maybe there's another solution. And I don't want Facebook's business to really benefit from the loss of TikTok.

And it's this really big change from what we'd seen in the past.

Yeah, and it leads to kind of the summer of Trump on TikTok, as I thought of it.

He joins TikTok itself and becomes this huge hit in about June of last year.

It was a total sensation. He got three million followers in a single day.

It goes way past Biden, who's the nominee at the time.

And a bunch of his family members joined TikTok. And it feels like there's this turn on TikTok where conservatives see this as an invitation for them to join TikTok and to start making accounts and posting there.

So legally, there's not a lot of options. This law was designed to get ByteDance and TikTok to sell. And they basically had nine months to get this done or to start talks. And it seems like there's nothing on the horizon.

But there is a part of this law, a sort of magic button, a piece of the law that says that he can push all of this out by 90 days if Congress approves, as long as there's a qualified buyer, basically someone who's willing to buy the company and real talks are underway. And so there's a chance that maybe this could push out the ban and keep it from ever happening.

But of course, that requires a buyer.

So TikTok's big problem for selling this whole past year has been this big question, which is what exactly is for sale? And let me explain that a little more. So basically TikTok's algorithm is what makes it what it is. And that's the technology that fuels the videos that people see when they open the app.

The magic of seeing something that is suddenly so funny or just totally suited to your interests, the TikTokiness of the app is the algorithm. And it's really unclear if that's for sale. And that's because TikTok's been saying for the better part of a year that it can't sell largely because it's not quite sure that China would allow it to.

And that's because in 2020, China put out this list of technology that can't be exported without the government's permission. And it seems like the TikTok algorithm is a part of that list.

So despite this for sale sign on TikTok from last year, there hasn't been a whole lot of activity, but some names have been floated. There's been speculation that Elon Musk, who bought Twitter, might have the money to buy it. And then there's this billionaire named Frank McCourt, who used to own the Dodgers, and he said he's interested in buying TikTok too.

He's teamed up with people like Mr. Wonderful of Shark Tank. Okay. And he said that he wants to buy TikTok without the algorithm. And what does that mean? Basically, he thinks he'll be able to buy it and find a way to recreate sort of the engine behind it. But he really wants to get access to the users. And he's offered a pretty low price for it, about $20 billion.

A lot of people have found that to be maybe not the most serious offer for what TikTok could really be worth, which some analysts have said, you know, around $100 billion or more.

That's right. It's been the huge question mark hanging over this from the very beginning. And there has been a lot of signaling happening. And this is where it's gotten really interesting. The CEO of TikTok, Shou Chius, has said he wants to figure something out.

And Trump posted something last week, the same day of the Supreme Court ruling, where he said he'd just gotten off the phone with President Xi Jinping from China, saying that they had a long discussion and TikTok was on the list of things that they want to solve together. We're also seeing that Trump has developed a little bit of a relationship with the CEO of TikTok.

He's invited him to the inauguration, and the Chinese vice president is also attending the inauguration. Yeah.

I mean, it seems to be a clear sign of support for TikTok. From the public statements that Trump has been making in the past week, he wants to be seen as the savior of TikTok, the person behind bringing this app to Americans and giving them something that brings them joy from day one of his presidency.

That's right. And I mean, it really raises the question of what else could be involved in these negotiations. I mean, up until now, the positions have been pretty clear. No export of the algorithm, otherwise no TikTok in the U.S. And so what kinds of elements could be brought into this negotiation, into this discussion to get TikTok running in the U.S. again? We really don't know.

There's so many legal questions around what he could actually do. I mean, just to remind you, this is a law passed by Congress, signed by the president, and now upheld by every justice on the Supreme Court. So this is going to be a little bit of a pressure test of the U.S. government in the coming days.

And Trump has been posting online even today about a sale, but it's really unclear what the specifics might be and whether it would actually comply with the law. Trump has said that he could issue an executive order that basically delays the federal ban while he tries to negotiate some sort of a deal. Experts I've spoken with aren't even sure if that holds up legally.

Already you're seeing some dissent among senators in Congress who feel that Apple, Google, tech companies should be helping to uphold this ban. So ultimately, I mean... This was done by design. The lawmakers who wrote this law wanted something bulletproof. They wanted something that couldn't be wiggled out of. And they wrote a law that they believed really served those ends.