TikTok Is Running Out of Options. Trump May Be Its Best Hope for Survival
TikTok’s future in the United States is in serious jeopardy, and Donald Trump may be the only person who can save it.
The president-elect told reporters at Mar-a-Lago on Monday that he would “take a look” at the situation surrounding the platform’s future, before meeting with TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew a few hours later. It’s unclear what Trump could or would do to stop the law that will ban TikTok in the U.S. if its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, doesn’t sell it. The law is currently slated to go into effect Jan. 19, one day before Trump takes office.
President Joe Biden signed the legislation in April, citing national security concerns related to China’s control over the data of the estimated 170 million Americans who use the platform. The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals earlier this month upheld the law in the face of challenges from TikTok and a group of creators on the platform. On Friday, lawmakers told Apple and Google that they need to be ready to remove the platform from their app stores on Jan. 19. Americans will still be able to use TikTok if and when this happens, but as the Justice Department put it in a filing last week, the move would ultimately “render the application unworkable.”
TikTok’s options for staving off a ban are dwindling. The platform on Monday made an emergency request to the Supreme Court, asking it to delay the ban while reiterating its argument that the ban violates the First Amendment. TikTok noted that if the law goes into effect as scheduled it “will shutter one of America’s most popular speech platforms the day before a presidential inauguration.” TikTok asked the Supreme Court to act by Jan. 6.
The Supreme Court could be interested in the case given its unique and high-profile nature, but legal experts are skeptical the justices would overturn the D.C. Circuit’s unanimous decision to uphold the ban. TikTok’s emergency appeal to the nation’s highest court comes a week after the platform asked the D.C. Circuit Court to block the ban from taking effect, arguing Trump should have a chance to save the platform once he takes office.
Trump’s position has been a little hard to pin down. He pushed for a ban while he was in office, but seemed to cozy up to the app this year. He said during the campaign that he opposed the ban and promised to save the app — but he didn’t seem as enthusiastic during an interview with Meet the Press earlier this month. “If you do do that, something else is going to come along and take its place — and maybe that’s not fair,” he said when asked about the D.C. Circuit Court’s decision to uphold the ban. He only offered that he’s “going to try and make it so that other companies don’t become an even bigger monopoly” when pressed about whether he would take action to save the app.
Trump was pressed about what he’ll do to prevent the ban from taking effect again while speaking with reporters at Mar-a-Lago on Monday. “We’ll take a look at TikTok,” he said, adding that he has a “warm spot” in his heart for the platform because of how he outperformed expectations with young people in November.
Trump’s promise to save TikTok may have been campaign bluster, but The Washington Post reported after he won in November that his advisers do indeed expect him to intervene. It may not be easy, as halting bipartisan legislation intended to crack down on Chinese influence wouldn’t be a great look. ByteDance could also sell TikTok to a U.S. entity, and Trump could potentially help facilitate such a transaction, but this route also presents complications. ByteDance has already said they aren’t going to sell, and companies like Google or a Meta would likely run into antitrust trouble if they were to acquire the platform.
So, what’s left?
Frank McCourt, the billionaire former owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers, believes ByteDance selling TikTok to him is the most viable way the platform can continue to exist in the United States. “Like President-elect Trump and like the creators, we don’t want to see this ban,” he recently told Rolling Stone. “We think this could be an awesome platform, and be a catalyst for a new, upgraded internet.”
McCourt believes he and his team are the “frontrunners” to acquire the app. ByteDance says it doesn’t want to sell, but McCourt thinks he may be able to pry it from them given that he’s not interested in TikTok’s algorithm. “We don’t want the algorithm,” he says plainly, adding that he believes the $20 billion he says he’s raised should be enough to bring TikTok, sans algorithm, and its user base into American hands.
McCourt isn’t interested in the algorithm in part because he has aspirations for the platform that go far beyond ensuring it continues to exist in the United States. Five years ago, he launched an initiative called Project Liberty in service of fixing what he deems to be a “fundamentally broken” internet by ensuring users can control their own data. Project Liberty has since been developing the technological framework for a decentralized social networking apparatus. The missing ingredient is a sizable user base, and McCourt believes the 170 million Americans on TikTok would do just fine.
TikTok users could control and even profit from their data, in McCourt’s vision, while curating and owning their online communities. “If they decide to leave TikTok and go to some other platform, they can take their relationships with them,” he explains. “That’s very powerful. That’s liberty, that’s agency, that’s being able to own something. … We’re not talking about owning an inanimate piece of property or a thing. We’re talking about regaining ownership of ourselves.”
McCourt has lofty ideas for remaking the internet to serve users rather than users serving Big Tech. He referenced Thomas Paine on two separate occasions over the course of our conversation, essentially drawing a through line from the dawn of American democracy to his endeavor to correct an “out of whack” internet. His bid to keep TikTok up and running in the U.S. is in service of these ideas, not necessarily of preserving the platform as its 170 million users have come to know it.
When Rolling Stone spoke with the eight TikTok creators who sued the government over the ban earlier this year, they spoke of how integral the platform’s algorithm is to its value. It’s the secret sauce, and the platform simply wouldn’t be the same without it. “It really does boil down to the algorithm,” Chloe Joy Sexton, a creator on the lawsuit, told us. “[On TikTok] my content is going to hit people who care about it, and it’s not doing that through whatever algorithm is used by Instagram or Facebook.”
McCourt isn’t worried. “There are a lot of people who really understand how to create fabulous algorithms,” he says, adding that he’d work to develop an algorithm that operates similarly to how TikTok’s algorithm does currently. McCourt’s plans for TikTok are ambitious and retaining the platform’s massive audience is anything but a given, but the entire reason he’s interested in this is to shake things up and change how users consider social media. “I think it’s naive for any of us to think that there’s not a better version of TikTok available,” he says.
McCourt could be TikTok’s best hope for survival in the United States, but he also may not be. The billionaire’s conversation with Rolling Stone was part of a media tour meant to bolster his profile as a buyer, but other suitors could still emerge. ByteDance could also be committed to its vow not to sell the platform under any circumstances — which would render McCourt’s quixotic quest to use TikTok to unleash a new internet utopia moot.
Trump could soon be in a position to do something about all of this, but as is always the case with the former and future president, there’s no way to predict which course he’d take. Alan Rozenshtein, an associate professor at University of Minnesota Law School who has long been skeptical of the viability of the effort to overturn the ban, theorized last month that the most likely way Trump could save the platform would be to take advantage of the degree to which the law empowers the president to determine what constitutes a “qualified divestiture.” ByteDance could “go through the motions of reshuffling some details of its ownership stake in TikTok,” as Rozenshtein puts it, which Trump could use as a basis to deem the Chinese company sufficiently divested.
Why would Trump do this? Possibly because he’s not really as tough on China as he claims. Possibly to further endear himself to the young Americans he falsely claimed on Monday voted for him by 34 points. Possibly for the same reason many suspected he announced his opposition to the ban in the first place: Jeff Yass, a billionaire MAGA megadonor, has a heavy stake in ByteDance and TikTok through his investment firm Susquehanna International.
Trump allowing TikTok to skirt a ban by deeming ByteDance divested after a few nominal nips and tucks could lead to outrage from the China hawks who passed the ban in the first place, and maybe even a few lawsuits. Such obstacles haven’t stopped Trump in the past, of course, and giving ByteDance his blessing may be easier than helping push a sale to a third party like McCourt over the finish line.
TikTok is currently slated to be banned from app stores on Jan. 19, but Rozenshtein believes the Supreme Court will ultimately decide to stay the law and take up the case themselves. “Even if they simply reaffirm the D.C. Circuit opinion, having a Supreme Court version of that is extremely valuable for the development of the law,” he tells Rolling Stone. “Given that the Supreme Court has taken a lot of these digital First Amendment cases in the last couple of years, I think that’s a signal that they care about this body of law and they want to develop it.”
If the Supreme Court takes action before Jan. 19, it would clear the floor for Trump to take action of his own, and McCourt or another interested party would have more time to try to convince China to sell them the platform. Given the uncertainties surrounding such a sale, many view the president-elect as the best hope to preserve the platform as its users know it. “Do I feel like this would be the only possible reason that I would ever agree with [Trump] being in office again?” Steven King, another TikTok creator who sued the government over the ban, said speaking with Rolling Stone last week. “If it saves my career, then, hey, he’s done something for me.”
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