Trump promises to save TikTok from January ban

President-elect Donald Trump spent much of his first term railing against TikTok, basically claiming that the app is nothing more than Chinese spyware. He even effectively banned the app in 2020, although it was later saved by the legal system. 

Things did not improve for TikTok under Joe Biden, who shared many of the same concerns as Trump. It all came to a head in April when Biden signed a law banning TikTok unless ByteDance, TikTok’s Chinese parent company, sold its stake in TikTok by January 2025. 

Would you want to sell an app with over a billion monthly users? Neither does ByteDance.So, they are at a crossroads. Either they sell, win in court, or get banned. 

That all changed on Election Day. Trump, as it turns out, has changed his tune on TikTok. He now opposes banning TikTok. Whether that is because of a realization of how popular TikTok was with the young people who helped get him back into the Oval Office, a hatred for Facebook and Mark “Zuckerschmuck”, as Trump calls him, or influence from megadonor Jeff Yass, the billionaire who has more money than we’ll ever see in ByteDance, we’ll never know.

Perhaps even less clear is how exactly Trump will save TikTok. The ban was passed by Congress with wide bipartisan support, which these days is even rarer than making the Product Hunt leaderboard. This only gives Trump two options:

• Urge Congress to repeal the law.

• Encourage his Attorney General not to enforce it.

Of the two options, the latter seems much more likely considering the herculean effort it’d take to get the law repealed.

So, as it currently stands, it appears the fate of TikTok lies in the hands of whoever Trump picks as Attorney General.