TikTok Officially Stops Operating in the US After Government Law
The Douyin logo, the Chinese counterpart of TikTok on a ByteDance office in Beijing, China, 18 January 2025. Photo: EFE/EPA/WU HAO
January 19, 2025 Hour: 2:00 pm
The social network TikTok stopped working this Saturday in the United States after the Supreme Court upheld on Friday a law passed last year by Congress, which required the platform to separate from its parent company, the Chinese ByteDance, or face shutdown.
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The app, which has 170 million users in the U.S., sent many of them a message on their phones stating, “We’re sorry, TikTok is not available at this time,” attributing the cessation of its operations to the legislation pushed by Congress.
However, according to the Joe Biden administration, TikTok made this decision on its own initiative. After the Supreme Court ruling, the White House announced that the current administration would not enforce the law and that its enforcement would be in the hands of the new president, Donald Trump, who will take office next Monday.
Specifically, this Saturday in an interview with NBC, Trump stated that he would “probably” grant the platform a 90-day extension to avoid its ban in the United States.
The message from TikTok on users’ devices appeared about an hour and a half before the law was set to take effect at 12:01 a.m. Sunday, Eastern Time.
When trying to access the platform, users received a notice informing them that the app was blocked, with a message in which the company stated, “We are fortunate that President Trump has indicated he will work with us on a solution. Stay tuned!”
The legislation, passed in April 2024, gave ByteDance a period of nine months to sell its US operations. a buyer who was not considered an “adversary” of the country and stated that otherwise it would be banned on 19 January for reasons of national security.
The Biden administration and the lawmakers who promoted the standard consider it imperative that TikTok disengage from ByteDance because of the risk that the Chinese government could access US user data or influence public debate in the country.
In addition to TikTok, the ban has also affected CapCut, a popular video editing application owned by ByteDance and used by many creators to generate content on the platform.
Autor: ACJ
Fuente: EFE