Chelsea Jia Feng/BI
Remember TikTok?
Let's make that more specific: Remember how the US government passed a law that says ByteDance, TikTok's Chinese owner, has to find a new owner for its US operations or shut down?
That law still exists. And as of now, TikTok's American arm is looking at a January 19, 2025 deadline before it has to go dark.
But inside the company, The Information reports, most US TikTok employees are behaving as if nothing is going to happen at all. They're chasing ad sales and user growth, hosting events for creators, and looking to hire thousands of people.
TikTok employees aren't the only ones acting like they're not going anywhere. When I was at the Cannes advertising festival in June, I kept asking ad buyers what their fallback positions would be if TikTok went away in a few months. I got a series of shrugs in response. Not because they didn't care, but because it didn't seem likely.
Instead, the TikTok-is-here-to-stay crowd seems to be banking on some combination of legal maneuvers or political action to overcome the ban.
You can see their logic: TikTok's lawyers are fighting the would-be-ban on First Amendment grounds, and are making oral arguments in their case next week. At a minimum, they're hoping for an injunction to push that January deadline back for months.
And "company leaders also believe there is a possibility for TikTok to negotiate a solution with the next presidential administration, but they are waiting until after the US election in November," Kaya Yurieff and Juro Osawa report.
That second option seems harder to pull off since the law forcing TikTok's owners to hand over the app or shut down is, you know, a law. Passed by Congress, signed by the President and everything.
Still, it doesn't seem like a law that's occupying a lot of headspace in American politics right now.
You don't hear either the Trump or Harris presidential campaigns talking about a TikTok ban — instead, both candidates' campaigns are embracing the app through their own accounts and with proxies. And now, just a third of Americans support a ban, compared to half of the country in 2023, according to Pew Research.
It is possible that the TikTok-isn't-going-anywhere mindset is a bad misjudgment — just like it was when the TikTok ban bill first arrived earlier this year.
But either way, we're in an extraordinary time: One of the country's most popular services could theoretically disappear in a few months — and you're not hearing a peep about it.
