Recently, the drama of Trump’s return to the palace finally came to an end.
Trump’s Musk is relieved, and TikTok’s executives are presumably relieved, too.
The TikTok ban is saved.
01 To breathe
In April 2024, Biden signed the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversaries Controlling Apps Act, which stipulates that TikTok must cut ties with its parent company ByteDance by January 19, 2025, or it will be banned.
Soon, the bill received overwhelming support in both the U.S. House and Senate. Since then, TikTok CEO Zhou Zexi has repeatedly called on users to oppose the bill, but with little effect, the news that TikTok or will be banned in the United States has become widespread.
Now, just two months from that date, Trump is back at the palace.
Anyone with discerning eyes can see that this campaign cycle, Trump’s attitude toward TikTok is completely different.
In June this year, Trump registered his own TikTok account, so far has 14.1 million followers, can be said to be one of the fastest growing TikTok followers.
Since the beginning of this year, Trump has repeatedly publicly expressed his opposition to banning TikTok, and even said that he would never ban TikTok. However, it was only four years ago, when Trump was in office, that he first proposed banning TikTok.
However, just as voting for Trump is not necessarily supporting Trump, it may also be simply hating Harris, Trump’s support for TikTok may not be supporting TikTok, simply opposing the ban of the Democratic Party to attract votes, after all, every election year, Trump is almost “every opponent will be opposed”.
But there are plenty of stories to tell between Mr. Trump and TikTok.
In fact, Trump’s support for TikTok can be seen from two aspects
One is that Trump and Facebook may have a bigger feud than TikTok.
Since 2024, Trump has repeatedly said in interviews, “Without TikTok, it will make Facebook (Meta) bigger.” “I think Facebook is the enemy of the people.”
This is because after the “war on Capitol Hill” three years ago, many mainstream social media such as Facebook and YouTube banned Trump’s account.
Therefore, Trump left angrily and developed his own Truth Social platform.
For people like Trump, since he can give up his “hostility” to new energy vehicles because of Musk’s support, he can naturally hold TikTok because of his aversion to Facebook and TikTok’s neutrality.
But that may be just on the surface.
The second is that the interests of Trump and TikTok have become increasingly intertwined over the past two years.
In the United States, there is a well-known conservative political donation organization, called the Club for Growth, at the beginning of the century, was once the largest donor to the Republican Party.
The group’s backers include PayPal founder Peter Thiel, Robert Mercer, co-CEO of Renaissance Technologies, and Jeff Yass, founder of Hainer International (SIG).
Jeff Yass is a legendary man who made his first fortune betting on horse racing and wrestling in casinos by using his mathematical mind.
It turns out that his vision is really good, because early in 2009, he gambled on Zhang Yiming this dark horse, and even voted Zhang Yiming’s project at that time, “ninety-nine room.”
That’s why Haina International invested nearly $3 million of ByteDance’s first round of $5 million in 2012.
Today, Haina International has become a major shareholder holding 15% of the shares of Word saving. Jeff Yass, who personally owns more than 7% of Byte, is worth $40 billion as Byte’s valuation has soared.
And Hainer International and Jeff Yass, Trump can be said to be very close.
This year, Yass has been donating money to every Republican Congressman who voted against the TikTok acquisition, including a large donation to Tim Scott, the only leading Republican candidate who did not support banning TikTok.
Later, Jeff Yass donated $80 million to Trump, ranking third among all donors, and may even enter the cabinet as Treasury secretary.
Tony Sayegh, head of public affairs at Hainer International Group, is a former Trump aide who is not only close to the Trump family, but also regularly communicates with TikTok executives to discuss how to deal with the U.S. government.
The deeper reason, perhaps because of the turnover of Trump’s campaign team, has changed the campaign logic.
This cycle, the Trump campaign replaced a team led by Bannon, who is close to the far right, with one led by Fabrizio, a veteran Republican pollster.
While Bannon, an activist fiercely opposed to TikTok, Fabrizio’s new strategy for Trump is “centered on economic appeals.”
Amid the layers of interest entanglements and election strategy shifts, it is not surprising that Trump would choose to support TikTok.
But will TikTok’s crisis ease immediately with Trump in office?
It should be noted that the TikTok ban expires on January 19, 2025, while the new president and vice president are sworn in on January 20.
Although the election is over and the Democratic Party’s administration has come to garbage time, the TikTok ban is definitely not the highest priority in front of Trump.
However, compared with the previous Democratic Party, now Trump also holds the Senate and the House of Representatives, the development and implementation of policies will be more rapid, and the implementation time of the bill may be delayed, so that TikTok can have breathing room and continue to appeal.
But clearly, the story between TikTok and the U.S. government isn’t over yet.
02 Round and round again
The game between TikTok and the US government has lasted several back-and-forth, and it is almost becoming “unforgettable” in North America.
In 2016, Byte launched Tiktok, which was seen as a copy of American social software Musical.ly. The following year, Toutiao launched TikTok, an American version of the Chinese app, and bought Musical.ly for $1 billion to merge with TikTok.
In 2019, the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) conducted a review of the acquisition, and the following year declared TikTok to have data vulnerabilities and pose a threat to U.S. national security.
As a result, then-President Trump signed two executive orders in succession, announcing that American companies were prohibited from conducting transactions with TikTok and ByteDance, and requiring ByteDance to diven TikTok’s assets and destroy relevant data and copies.
At that time, TikTok originally made two preparations, one is to appeal, arguing that Trump violated the Administrative Procedure Act and the First Amendment of the US Constitution, and this is also the appeal Angle of TikTok after Biden signed the bill this year.
At the same time, however, TikTok has been in touch with several American companies to discuss partnerships.
Then, as everyone knows, a federal court ruled that Trump’s executive order needed to be put on hold. Eventually, with Trump’s defeat and Biden’s rise to power, the Trump-era ban was lifted.
However, the target for TikTok has not been lifted, after all, “not my kind, its heart must be different.”
In 2021, Biden also proposed greater scrutiny of apps controlled by foreign companies. Since then, more than 20 states have issued administrative bans on TikTok, but only within government departments.
The governor of Montana announced a statewide ban on TikTok, but a lawsuit was quickly filed and a federal court suspended the ban.
Then came what was billed as the most draconian ban in history, a bill signed by Biden.
TikTok is not without its response.
Since 2020, TikTok has continued to recruit foreign executives, and its CEO has been replaced by Singaporean Zhou Zizi.
TikTok is also increasing its lobbying expenses, with ByteDance spending $5.38 million in the United States in 2022 and $8.74 million in 2023, the most among Chinese Internet companies lobbying politicians.
Starting in 2022, TikTok also implemented the “Texas Plan”, spending $1.5 billion to store the data of U.S. users on Oracle’s servers, and then investing $1 billion a year, and Oracle is responsible for the supervision and audit of the data to achieve physical isolation.
However, these investments have not brought the trust of the US government, but equally, the US government’s doubts have not affected TikTok’s rapid progress in the United States.
According to Statista, TikTok currently has nearly 1.6 billion monthly active users worldwide, with the largest number of users in the United States at about 150 million.
Although TikTok’s monthly activity is still only half of Facebook’s roughly 3 billion monthly activity, the latest data show that ByteDance generated $73 billion in revenue in the first half of this year, an increase of more than 35% from the same period last year. By comparison, Meta’s revenue for the same period was $75.5 billion, up 25% year-over-year.
This means that under the ultra-high growth rate of ByteDance, byte revenue has surpassed Facebook is just around the corner.
Not only that, since July this year, TikTok e-commerce has also harvested a lot in the United States market, with more than $1 billion in sales per month, and is expected to reach $17.5 billion in annual sales this year, 10 times that of 2023.
Will a government ban really keep people away from TikTok altogether?
A 2023 Pew poll found that about a third of Americans are using TikTok, reaching about 170 million people. Among them, 62% of young people between the ages of 18 and 29 use TikTok, and the vast majority of them are firmly opposed to “killing” TikTok.
After the TikTok ban was issued in Montana, many people began to download TikTok from other ways, for TikTok, the ban may follow, and every election cycle is pulled out as one of the campaign strategies, but equally, user support will not disappear.
Looking to the future, although Trump has chosen to support it now, it is already a common thing for Trump to make rash promises and break promises at will on major issues. He also has little “integrity” in politics.
So how far is forever? Maybe it’s only four years.
But could TikTok be easily destroyed by a ban? Maybe it’s hard.
After all, when it comes to apps, the most important thing is technology and users.
TikTok still has plenty of stories to tell, as long as it doesn’t tear itself down.
03 Epilogue
Every election cycle, TikTok is pulled through a process.
The ruling party banned it, the opposition party supported it, and then because of the end of the election, the ban has to be recovered from the pile of old papers before the next election.
Coincidentally, Trump, who banned TikTok in 2020, lost the election that year, Biden, who banned TikTok in 2024, withdrew from the election, and the Democratic Party, which supported banning TikTok, also lost the election.
In addition to TikTok’s influence, it may also prove that the old elitist perspective, which deviates from the wishes of the majority, is failing.
TikTok’s voice gradually overcame Facebook, just as “The Tragic Song of rural people” defeated “women without children and cats”, the rise of TikTok also represents the rise of ordinary people’s voices.
