How TikTok found itself on the brink of a US ban

FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr once assured me in an interview that “the tide is moving out on TikTok.” He made that pronouncement a little over two years ago, insisting to me that the popular video sharing app represented too much a potential national security threat — which is why he was already convinced, even then, that its days in the US were numbered.

By this time next week, we’ll see whether Carr, President-elect Trump’s new pick to chair the FCC, was right about the app’s fate.

I say next week, because as of this writing we’re only six days out from when enforcement of a TikTok ban is supposed to begin in the US, the result of a bipartisan law signed by President Biden. Barring an 11th-hour rescue, the immediate effect of that ban will be to remove ByteDance-owned TikTok from the app stores of Apple and Google. At that point, the only way to use TIkTok in the US would presumably be to rely on a VPN that’s connected to a non-US server. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

At this point, it’s obviously still unclear how the dust is going to settle before the ban’s deadline, especially with Bloomberg dropping the following bombshell on Monday: Reportedly, Chinese officials have gamed out that it might be wise to curry favor with the incoming Trump administration by selling TikTok’s US operation to one of his allies — current Twitter owner Elon Musk (read the full Bloomberg scoop here).

As far as tactics go, that would certainly be a sound move on the part of the Chinese. Especially since Trump, whose digital acolytes have built up a significant presence for him on TikTok, has done a complete 180 on the app since he first proposed banning it in 2020.

ByteDance, for its part, has waved off the Bloomberg report about China selling to Elon as “pure fiction,” but you’ve got to chuckle at the Bloomberg story also noting that it’s not clear how much ByteDance actually knows about the Chinese government’s plans. (“My point exactly!” said Carr. Maybe.)

For now, though, let’s set all that aside. Because I think it’s worth stopping to consider how exactly TikTok got here in the first place — specifically, how the app known for viral dances and lip-syncing found itself on the precipice of being kicked out of its largest non-Chinese market.

Here’s a brief look back: