Trump Executive Order Hits 75-Day Pause Button on TikTok Ban
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President Trump’s latest bid to get TikTok unstuck for its 170 million-plus US users dropped hours after his inauguration on Monday: an executive order telling the Department of Justice to ignore the law banning US app stores and other platforms from hosting ByteDance apps.
The EO—Application of Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act to TikTok—directs the Attorney General “not to take any action to enforce the Act for a period of 75 days from today” and instructs the DOJ to “take no action to enforce the Act or impose any penalties against any entity for any noncompliance with the Act.”
That second directive also bars the department from applying the law to violations committed between Jan. 19, when it went into effect, and Trump’s swearing-in on Monday. It directs the AG to send letters to each of those liable firms "stating that there has been no violation of the statute and that there is no liability for any conduct."
A start date of Jan. 19 was "unfortunate timing" and "interferes with my ability to negotiate a resolution to avoid an abrupt shutdown of the TikTok platform while addressing national security concerns," the EO says.
It does not suggest or sketch out a resolution that would comply with the law’s requirement of a "qualified divestiture" intended to stop China’s government from exercising its leverage over TikTok’s Beijing-based parent company ByteDance.
President Biden signed this law last April as part of a large supplemental spending bill (PDF). The passage of the bill followed years of bipartisan concern over the potential of the Chinese Communist Party abusing its leverage over ByteDance to collect data on Americans—a vulnerability made vastly wider by the ongoing failure of Congress to pass a comprehensive privacy bill—or push CCP-preferred messages.
The law survived two court challenges that concluded with the Supreme Court holding unanimously that its provisions targeting TikTok did not raise First Amendment problems.
Trump’s pre-inauguration assurances to US hosting firms apparently sufficed to get them to put TikTok back online Sunday. The Washington Post reported that “Trump’s team privately reached out to some of TikTok’s business partners, including Oracle, to assure them they would not face penalties for bringing the platform back online,” citing “a person familiar with the conversations.”
On Tuesday morning, however, Apple and Google’s app stores remain bereft of TikTok, leaving the app in a bit of a zombie existence. A copy of the App Store on an iPad mini 6 linked to a support note that begins, “Apple is obligated to follow the laws in the jurisdictions where it operates,” while a copy of the Play Store on a Pixel 9 Pro showed a note saying “Downloads for this app are paused due to current US legal requirements.”
Analysts pointed to the risks of Apple and Google or any other commercial partner remaining vulnerable after Trump leaves office: The law both mandates fines of $5,000 per user inside US borders and has a five-year statute of limitations, observed Alan Z. Rozenshtein, a law professor at the University of Minnesota, in an analysis posted Friday at Lawfare.
“Given these risks, corporate counsel would be hard-pressed to advise their CEOs to continue doing business with TikTok under any of these scenarios,” he wrote. But, he added, some executives might “see sufficient value in currying favor with Trump.”
The tech-industry research firm MoffettNathanson shared a similar observation in a Jan. 17 research note: “Noncompliance could expose these companies to penalties under a future administration inclined to enforce the law more strictly.”
The TikTok executive order—an about-face from a 2020 Trump EO that sought to ban TikTok—came among more than three dozen “Presidential Actions” that included such legally and scientifically questionable measures as an attempt to rewrite the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of birthright citizenship and declare that transgender and nonbinary people do not exist.
The tech-specific measures on that list include an order ending “federal censorship” of social-media platforms (as in pushing social platforms to enforce their own rules against misinformation, something the Supreme Court held last summer did not rise to the level of censorship) and repeal the executive order about AI safety that Biden issued in October 2023 with industry backing.