Inside TikTok’s Frantic Scramble to Halt U.S. Ban

The Washington Post

12:26 JST, January 24, 2025

TikTok embarked on a desperate scramble during President Joe Biden’s last hours in office to stave off a nationwide ban, deploying lawyers and lobbyists as part of a “Hail Mary” onslaught to stall the bipartisan law.

Worried a ban could tarnish Biden’s legacy, outgoing administration officials had made a striking concession, telling TikTok’s China-based owner, ByteDance, that there was “no reason” to comply with the law when it took effect on the last day of Biden’s term.

But TikTok demanded more. The company said its service providers, who under the law face hundreds of billions of dollars in fines for helping the company, were preparing to revoke their support unless the administration made it clear they would not be punished, according to text messages and interviews with five people involved in the negotiations, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss internal talks.

Biden White House and Justice Department officials rejected those requests, saying it would be a “stunt” for TikTok to go offline on the day the law took effect. The app was unusable for 14 hours and remains delisted on Apple’s and Google’s app stores.

The high-stakes brinkmanship, details of which haven’t been previously reported, ended Monday evening when President Donald Trump signed an order halting the law. The tense exchanges in Biden’s last days in office punctuated a bitter, years-long battle between his administration and the wildly popular video app where 170 million U.S. users, including top Democrats, spend their time.

The timing of the squabble and Trump’s near-instant rescue have led some to speculate that the episode was orchestrated to deliver the new president an early win. But the date setting up the drama, at least, appears to be an awkward coincidence: The law Biden signed in April called for a 270-day timeline, which ended one day before the next presidency began.

TikTok’s consultants and political allies called and sent messages to Democratic staffers and “anyone in the White House with a pulse,” one of the people said. But Biden officials questioned the propriety of going further to undercut the law, and some remained suspicious of the app’s public appeals to Trump for aid.

Trump had said he was considering an executive order and other measures to overturn the law before it took effect, fueling hope inside the company for a reprieve. But the law’s starting date, before Trump’s tenure began, led some to worry about the threat of legal exposure and deepened their frustrations over Biden officials’ stance.

“You have two sides who just hated each other and fundamentally didn’t trust each other,” another person said.

When Biden signed the sale-or-ban law in April, Democrats and Republicans celebrated that Congress had “finally” taken a stand against an app that Trump had tried and failed to ban during his first term, and that Biden officials had warned repeatedly could be misused to spread propaganda and spy on Americans online.

Many in the administration said they didn’t want a ban but thought their tough stance would push ByteDance to relent and sell – a divorce the company had argued in a legal challenge would be torturously complicated and disruptive, if not impossible.

Biden’s solicitor general, Elizabeth B. Prelogar, arguing before the Supreme Court, had described the administration’s strategy as “a game of chicken.” “When push comes to shove and these restrictions take effect,” she said, they “will fundamentally change the landscape with respect to what ByteDance is willing to consider.”

But as the last days of Biden’s term ticked closer, and with ByteDance still openly defying a sale, administration officials began to worry TikTok had called its bluff. The company’s attorney had told the Supreme Court the app would “go dark” once the Jan. 19 deadline hit.

Congressional Democrats who had helped pass the law, including party leader Sen. Charles E. Schumer (New York), told Biden that banning TikTok could be the last official act many Americans would remember about his time in office, two of the people said, an exchange earlier reported by the New York Times.

In a speech on the Senate floor, Schumer backed an unsuccessful measure introduced by Sen. Edward J. Markey (D-Massachusetts) calling for a 270-day extension and said more time was needed so as not to disrupt the lives and livelihoods of “so many influencers who have built up a good network of followers.”

Company allies also warned administration officials that the threat of a shutdown was real. Modern internet giants rely on a “stack” of separate companies to host, distribute, defend and power their operations, and providers at every level were telling TikTok they would have to sever their work with the company for fear of hefty fines. The law, as written, allows the government to punish any companies that work with TikTok after the deadline, threatening penalties of $5,000 per user – which, given the app’s 170 million U.S. users, could amount to $850 billion in fines.

“They are panicked,” one company consultant wrote to a Biden adviser, in a text exchange reviewed by The Washington Post.

On Jan. 17, the Supreme Court unanimously upheld the law as constitutional, allowing it to take effect two days later. The Justice Department released a statement celebrating the decision but offering no further detail as to how the law would be enforced in the day between its effective date and Trump’s Jan. 20 inauguration, saying only that “the next phase” of the effort would be “a process that plays out over time.”

Soon after, the White House released its own statement, saying Biden’s position was that “TikTok should remain available to Americans” under new ownership but that “given the sheer fact of timing … actions to implement the law simply must fall to the next administration.”

TikTok’s attorneys and allies had pressed the White House and Justice Department to explicitly state what some company consultants were calling the “magic words”: that providers and app stores would not face “enforcement or penalties” once the law took effect, two of the people said. Without that assurance, they argued, the providers’ lawyers weren’t willing to risk the potential penalties and court battles that could come with noncompliance.

But White House and Justice Department officials argued they had gone far enough and were hesitant to publicly instruct companies not to follow a law they had just passed. Some in the Justice Department also balked at the idea of bending over backward for a company they had spent years labeling a national security threat.

Some in the administration were aggravated that it had gotten this far at all: The law had given ByteDance nine months to comply and allowed Biden to extend the deadline only if the company had made “significant progress” toward a sale. Tom Malinowski, a former Democratic congressman from New Jersey, echoed their agitation when he chided the company on X, writing, “You had 268 days to begin divestment talks, and didn’t try.”

Their frustrations compounded when, on Friday, TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew took to TikTok to thank Trump for his “commitment to work with us to find a solution” – and to flatter him, as a “president who truly understands our platform” and “has used TikTok to express his own thoughts and perspectives … generating more than 60 billion views” in the process.

TikTok allies have argued they had no choice but to curry favor with Trump: The entering president had vowed to “save TikTok,” while the departing one had signed a law that would shut it down. Chew, who is based in Singapore, spent the weekend in Washington at Trump inauguration events and had personally called some service providers to seek their continued support, two of the people said.

Worried their back-channeled pleas in Washington were going nowhere, TikTok officials late Friday said the White House and Justice Department statements had “failed to provide the necessary clarity and assurance” and that they would be forced to shut down on Sunday unless the Biden administration gave a “definitive statement to satisfy the most critical service providers.” Jeffrey Fisher, a lawyer representing TikTok creators in their challenge of the law, also sent Biden and Attorney General Merrick Garland a letter seeking “definitive guidance” for fear of “substantial and avoidable disruption.”

The next morning, however, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre fired back, calling TikTok’s go-dark plans a “stunt” and saying officials saw “no reason for TikTok or other companies to take actions in the next few days.”

“We have laid out our position clearly and straightforwardly: Actions to implement this law will fall to the next administration,” she said. “So TikTok and other companies should take up any concerns with them.”

Late Saturday, a tech news outlet called the Information reported that Oracle, which hosts TikTok’s U.S. user data, had instructed employees to prepare the servers for a shutdown. TikTok consultants sent the news item to administration officials and congressional Democrats to rebut the “stunt” claim.

That night, around 9 p.m., TikTok sent a notification to users expressing its “regret” that the law would “force us to make our services temporarily unavailable.” Around 10:30 p.m., the app officially went offline. “A law banning TikTok has been enacted in the U.S.,” a prompt said, above a “close app” button. “We are fortunate that President Trump has indicated that he will work with us … Please stay tuned!”

On Sunday morning, the day the law took effect, Apple said in a guide that it would no longer list TikTok and other ByteDance apps on its app store and writing that the company “is obligated to follow the laws in the jurisdictions where it operates.”

Later that morning, in a post on his social network Truth Social, Trump posted the “magic words” TikTok had been pressing the Biden administration to say, pledging that “there will be no liability for any company that helped keep TikTok from going dark before my order.”

“Americans,” he added, “deserve to see our exciting Inauguration on Monday, as well as other events and conversations.”

The app was offline for 14 hours, an independent traffic analysis shows, and when it returned on Sunday, TikTok displayed an in-app prompt thanking Trump for his efforts. The next day, during Trump’s inauguration, Chew, TikTok’s chief, sat in a place of honor in the Rotunda next to Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s pick for intelligence chief.

On his first night back in the Oval Office, Trump issued an executive order directing the Justice Department to take no action against TikTok’s service providers for 75 days so that the government could “determine the appropriate course forward … while avoiding an abrupt shutdown.” The order has drawn criticism, including from Republicans, who say such an action isn’t enough to undermine a law passed by Congress with bipartisan support and confirmed by the Supreme Court.

Company insiders have disputed the idea that a blackout helped their case. In an emergency motion last month seeking to halt the law, TikTok had decried the “burdensome spectacle” of fighting the law in court “only for the new administration to halt its enforcement mere days or weeks later.” The company had also warned that even a brief shutdown would have “devastating effects” on its business, given that creators and viewers might switch to other platforms and not switch back.

Some in Trump’s party have warned that they would keep fighting to ensure the law is enforced, including the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Republican Tom Cotton of Arkansas, who warned that companies helping TikTok could still face “ruinous liability under the law.” And notably, Trump’s order hasn’t led Apple and Google to restore TikTok to their app stores.

But Trump’s allies have chalked up the episode as a major public-relations victory: a moment in which Trump appeared to rescue a popular speech platform, right in the nick of time. After TikTok returned, the account for Trump’s presidential campaign posted a video of Trump outside the White House alongside the app’s thank-you note.

“WE ARE SO BACK,” said the caption on the video, which has been viewed nearly 20 million times.