American Tiktok ban explained

CGTN Europe

CGTN’s John Terrett explains the possible permutations behind the latest news surrounding the impending U.S. ban in Tiktok. But will President-elect Donald Trump, who pushed for a ban, change his mind again?

Transcript

00:00The story of this is that President Trump, when he was in office before,

00:03initiated a ban against TikTok, but it fell apart in the courts.

00:07So the Congress took it up, based on security grounds, and that's where we're at now.

00:11And that ban, which is United States law, will kick in on the 19th of January.

00:17Now, in order to try and stop the ban from happening, TikTok and ByteDance went to court

00:21here in America, using the court system. They turned to the appeals court in Washington,

00:25D.C., and within the last half hour, the appeals court in D.C. has refused to block the ban,

00:32refused to block the ban. So the ban stays, and it will kick in on the 19th of January.

00:38So what can TikTok do about this now? Well, its only option is to turn to the Supreme Court of

00:44the United States, also in Washington, D.C. It's not clear to me whether the Supreme Court

00:49would take the issue up. If it does, it probably won't report until June or July of 2025.

00:56In the meantime, that ban will kick in on the 19th, and when it does kick in,

01:00what's going to happen is companies who have TikTok on their servers or who have them in

01:05their app stores are going to be told to take it off or face a very, very hefty fine.

01:12Big fines coming for these companies. So is it all bad news for TikTok? Well, on the face of it,

01:18but, but, there is incoming President Donald Trump, who initiated that ban initially

01:26because he wanted really to get back at meta platforms and TikTok. He changed his mind.

01:32And so now, in order to basically, his thinking was to get at meta platforms and Mark Zuckerberg,

01:40who he's now friendly with, if you're following this, he changed his mind. So Trump has said

01:45very vocally that he now doesn't support the ban, and the ban kicks in on the 19th,

01:50one day before his inauguration in January. So it is perfectly possible that President Trump

01:56will say to his Department of Justice, look, the ban's in place, but ignore it. Just don't do

02:00anything about it. So once again, with this story, we have a ruling, a decision, but the future is

02:06still very unclear. It could all go away if ByteDance were to sell TikTok to an American

02:12organization. ByteDance has said that's not going to happen. And if it were to happen at all,

02:17in any way, then whoever bought it in America would not get access to the algorithm,

02:22but they would only get access to the clients. So that's where we're at at the moment. The ban

02:27kicks in on the 19th, but it's all eyes on President Trump,

02:30bearing in mind all those people on TikTok and his forthcoming inauguration.

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