President Trump tried to ban TikTok during his first term, but now he’s being hailed as the app’s savior. WSJ’s Georgia Wells explains the saga to make a deal with the Chinese-owned social media app. Further Reading: -TikTok Restoring Service for U.S. Users, After Trump Signals He Will Save It -What Happens Now That TikTok’s Gone Dark? Further Listening: -The TikTok Ban Goes to the Supreme Court -Readers Can’t Get Enough of BookTok. Publishers Are Cashing In. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: What was President Trump's initial stance on TikTok?
On Monday, just hours after he was sworn into office, President Donald Trump signed a stack of executive orders. One of them delayed enforcement of a ban on TikTok in the U.S.
The president signed that executive order to delay the ban on TikTok for 75 days in hopes of giving the app's Chinese owner enough time to sell off its U.S. assets.
Wasn't it President Trump who, back in 2020, was the person who sort of kicked off this whole effort to ban TikTok in the first place? Yes, the very same President Trump. Our colleague Georgia Wells reports on TikTok.
This has been utter whiplash. That Trump, in his first term, the president who tried to ban or take away TikTok in this country... is now the person who's spearheading an attempt to bring it back. So much so that in the push alert to users, TikTok thanks President Trump for his work on this.
So TikTok is still functioning. It's thanking President Trump. But is the story really over? Is it really actually saved now?
So this is a company that has been facing the prospect of a ban for years. and seems to have potentially shifted the tide on this ban attempt, but it's not done. We are very much still in a wait-and-see. TikTok still has this law hanging over its head. It has a brief reprieve, but this is not done for TikTok.
Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Ryan Knudsen. It's Tuesday, January 21st. Coming up on the show, the TikTok ban that wasn't?
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Chapter 2: Why did Trump attempt to ban TikTok?
officials who were considering this proposal at the time as will Project Texas kind of satisfy our concerns. And for many of those officials, the answer was no.
And then when Hamas launched a surprise attack on Israel in October of 2023, the pressure on TikTok picked up again.
It suddenly mobilizes a chunk of U.S. lawmakers who, while China national security concerns weren't necessarily top of mind, the U.S. relationship with Israel was top of mind for many of them. And the reason this came up was because on the TikTok app, there were more pro-Palestinian videos than pro-Israel videos on the app. And many of the pro-Palestinian videos went quite viral.
Is that a proven fact, or was that just a feeling that some lawmakers had, that there were more pro-Palestinian views on the platform?
There were analyses that third-party data scientists did that showed the views that these pro-Palestinian videos were getting were receiving far, far more views than the views that the pro-Israel videos were getting. There's no evidence that TikTok was putting their thumb on the scale to influence in any way the, like, ratio of pro-Palestinian versus pro-Israel content on the app.
But this nonetheless kind of activated... a certain group of lawmakers in the U.S. who hadn't really paid much attention to TikTok before. So after this moment, Republican Mike Gallagher and others in Congress really pushed through this law around forcing a divestiture of TikTok or a ban. So a divestiture would mean that ByteDance would need to sell TikTok or TikTok could not continue to operate.
That bill, which had overwhelming bipartisan support, sailed through Congress and was signed by then-President Biden last April. It gave ByteDance a deadline for divestiture, January 19th, 2025. Meanwhile, Trump started signaling that he had changed his mind about TikTok. He warned that banning it would only serve to help Meta, a company Trump had been critical of after it kicked him off Facebook.
And that timing was soon after he had met with Jeff Yaz of Susquehanna. Susquehanna is a major investor in ByteDance, TikTok's owner. So we don't know exactly what occurred in that meeting, but he left that meeting with this person who has a lot of money riding in ByteDance and then says, we don't want TikTok going away.
Trump also joined TikTok this summer, and he has said it helped him win support among young voters. Regardless, the options for TikTok were dwindling. The Chinese government kept signaling that any deal was off the table. TikTok and a group of creators challenged the law on First Amendment grounds, but the Supreme Court ruled on Friday that the ban could go ahead. And then a twist.
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