{"id":123217,"date":"2025-01-19T06:38:30","date_gmt":"2025-01-19T06:38:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/the-rise-and-potential-fall-of-tiktok-in-the-us-the-associated-press\/"},"modified":"2025-01-19T06:38:30","modified_gmt":"2025-01-19T06:38:30","slug":"the-rise-and-potential-fall-of-tiktok-in-the-us-the-associated-press","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/the-rise-and-potential-fall-of-tiktok-in-the-us-the-associated-press\/","title":{"rendered":"The rise \u2014 and potential fall \u2014 of TikTok in the US – The Associated Press"},"content":{"rendered":"

Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.
The Supreme Court on Friday unanimously upheld the federal law banning TikTok beginning Sunday unless it\u2019s sold by its China-based parent company.
A TikTok logo is shown on a phone in San Francisco, Friday, Jan. 17, 2025. (AP Photo\/Jeff Chiu)
People work inside the TikTok Inc. building in Culver City, Calif., on March 11, 2024. (AP Photo\/Damian Dovarganes, File)
The logo for TikTok is displayed on a mobile phone, Friday, Jan. 17, 2025, in Denver. (AP Photo\/David Zalubowski)
The TikTok app logo is shown on an iPhone on Friday, Jan. 17, 2025, in Houston. (AP Photo\/Ashley Landis)
The Supreme Court on Friday unanimously upheld the federal law banning TikTok beginning Sunday unless it\u2019s sold by its China-based parent company.
A TikTok logo is shown on a phone in San Francisco, Friday, Jan. 17, 2025. (AP Photo\/Jeff Chiu)
A TikTok logo is shown on a phone in San Francisco, Friday, Jan. 17, 2025. (AP Photo\/Jeff Chiu)
People work inside the TikTok Inc. building in Culver City, Calif., on March 11, 2024. (AP Photo\/Damian Dovarganes, File)
People work inside the TikTok Inc. building in Culver City, Calif., on March 11, 2024. (AP Photo\/Damian Dovarganes, File)
The logo for TikTok is displayed on a mobile phone, Friday, Jan. 17, 2025, in Denver. (AP Photo\/David Zalubowski)
The logo for TikTok is displayed on a mobile phone, Friday, Jan. 17, 2025, in Denver. (AP Photo\/David Zalubowski)
The TikTok app logo is shown on an iPhone on Friday, Jan. 17, 2025, in Houston. (AP Photo\/Ashley Landis)
The TikTok app logo is shown on an iPhone on Friday, Jan. 17, 2025, in Houston. (AP Photo\/Ashley Landis)
The possibility of the U.S. outlawing TikTok kept influencers and users in anxious limbo<\/a><\/span> during the four-plus years that lawmakers and judges debated the fate of the video-sharing app. Now, the moment its fans dreaded is here<\/a><\/span>, but uncertainty over TikTok\u2019s future lingers.
On Friday, a unanimous decision<\/a><\/span> by the Supreme Court ended a legal battle that pitted national security concerns<\/a><\/span> against free speech rights. TikTok, ByteDance and some of the devoted users who rely on the platform for entertainment, income and community<\/a><\/span> argued the statute violated the First Amendment<\/a><\/span>. The Biden administration sought to show ByteDance\u2019s ownership and control of TikTok posed an unacceptable threat.
TikTok\u2019s app was removed from prominent app stores on Saturday just hours before a federal ban on the popular social media platform was scheduled to go into effect.
Trump, who is set to return to the White House the day after the ban takes effect, has credited TikTok with helping him win the support of more young voters in last year\u2019s election. A Trump adviser said this week that the incoming administration<\/a><\/span> would \u201cput measures in place to keep TikTok from going dark.\u201d What those measures will look like \u2014 and if they can withstand legal scrutiny \u2014 remained unknown Saturday.
Here\u2019s a look at how TikTok became a global cultural phenomenon<\/a><\/span> and the political wrangling that followed the app\u2019s commercial success: <\/p>\n

TikTok is one of more than 100 apps developed in the past decade by ByteDance, a technology firm founded in 2012<\/a><\/span> by Chinese entrepreneur Zhang Yiming and headquartered in Beijing\u2019s northwestern Haidian district.
In 2016, ByteDance launched a short-form video platform called Douyin in China and followed up with an international version called TikTok. It then bought Musical.ly, a lip-syncing platform popular with teens in the U.S. and Europe, and combined it with TikTok while keeping the app separate from Douyin.
Soon after, the app boomed in popularity in the U.S. and many other countries, becoming the first Chinese platform to make serious inroads in the West. Unlike other social media platforms that focused on cultivating connections among users, TikTok tailored content to people\u2019s interests.
The often silly videos and music clips<\/a><\/span> content creators posted gave TikTok an image as a sunny corner of the internet where users could find fun and a sense of authenticity. Finding an audience on the platform helped launch the careers of music artists like Lil Nas X.
TikTok gained more traction during the shutdowns of the COVID-19 pandemic, when short dances that went viral became a mainstay of the app. To better compete, Instagram and YouTube<\/a><\/span> eventually came out with their own tools for making short-form videos, respectively known as Reels and Shorts. By that point, TikTok was a bona fide hit.
Challenges came<\/a><\/span> in tandem with TikTok\u2019s success. U.S. officials expressed concerns about the company\u2019s roots and ownership, pointing to laws in China that require Chinese companies to hand over data requested by the government. Another concern became the proprietary algorithm that populates what users see on the app.
During his first term in office, Trump issued executive orders in 2020 banning TikTok and the Chinese messaging app WeChat, moves that courts subsequently blocked. India banned TikTok<\/a><\/span> \u2014 along with other Chinese apps \u2014 the same year following a military clash along the India-China border that killed 20 Indian and four Chinese soldiers.
In 2021, the Biden administration dropped the Trump-era orders but left in place a national security review of TikTok by a little-known government agency known as Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, or CFIUS.
Between January 2021 and August 2022, representatives for TikTok engaged in serious negotiations with the Biden administration about the app\u2019s future in the U.S. The talks resulted in a 90-page draft security agreement that the company presented to CFIUS in August 2022. The two sides then ceased substantive negotiations, according to TikTok\u2019s attorneys, though some meetings also took place in following months.
A copy of the draft agreement submitted in court showed that it would have opened up TikTok\u2019s U.S. platform for security inspections and blocked access of U.S. user data from China. The company says it has already implemented some provisions of the agreement, including routing U.S. user data to servers operated by software giant Oracle.
In its lawsuit to overturn the sell-or-ban law, the company said it spent more than $2 billion to implement aspects of its appeasement plan, which it calls Project Texas.
But the Department of Justice and administration officials argued in court documents that the proposal failed to create sufficient separation between TikTok\u2019s U.S. operations and China. They also said the opacity of TikTok\u2019s algorithm, coupled with the size and technical complexity of the platform, made it impossible for the U.S. government \u2013 or TikTok\u2019s technology provider, Oracle \u2013 to effectively guarantee compliance with the proposal.
In February 2023, the White House directed federal agencies to remove TikTok from government-issued devices, mirroring some other countries that also prohibited the use of the app on official devices.
The following month, lawmakers grilled TikTok CEO Shou Chew<\/a><\/span> during an hours-long hearing in which he sought to reassure a tense House committee that the platform prioritized user safety and should not be banned due to its Chinese connections.
According to court documents, TikTok\u2019s representatives had their last meeting with CFIUS in September 2023. Later that year, criticism against the platform increased in volume among Republicans in Washington who claimed the platform amplified pro-Palestinian<\/a><\/span> and anti-Israel content, an accusation the company vigorously denied.
Efforts to ban TikTok resurfaced in Congress early last year, and quickly gained bipartisan support among lawmakers who voiced about the potential<\/a><\/span> for the platform to surveil and manipulate Americans.
The legislation the Supreme Court upheld passed the House and the Senate in April after it was included as part of a high-priority $95 billion package<\/a><\/span> that provided foreign aid to Ukraine and Israel. President Joe Biden quickly signed it<\/a><\/span>, and the two companies and a group of content creators quickly sued.
A lower court upheld the statute in early December. The legislation gave ByteDance nine months from the enactment date to sell TikTok, and a possible three-month extension if a sale was in progress.
The deadline\u2019s arrival the day before Trump\u2019s inauguration makes things tricky. Only the sitting president can issue a 90-day stay on the ban and can do so only if a buyer has taken concrete steps toward a purchase.
TikTok users in the United States ultimately were not able to watch videos on the popular social media platform on the evening of Jan. 18, just hours before the ban was set to take effect. The company\u2019s app was removed from prominent app stores while its website told users that the short-form video platform was no longer available.
Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.<\/p>\n

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Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.The Supreme Court on Friday unanimously upheld the federal law banning TikTok beginning Sunday unless it\u2019s sold by its China-based parent company.A TikTok logo is shown on a phone in San Francisco, Friday, Jan. 17, 2025. (AP Photo\/Jeff Chiu)People work inside the TikTok Inc. building in Culver City, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":123218,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-123217","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-us","8":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/123217","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=123217"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/123217\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/123218"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=123217"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=123217"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=123217"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}