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?
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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.