The White House has opened a Tiktok account less than a month from the theoretical blackout of this social network in the United Statesin what seems like a turn in the contentious that the Donald Trump administration maintains with the Chinese social network and that will be prohibited in that country if there is not an agreement before.
Just a month ago, US Secretary of Commerce, Howard Lutnick, insisted that Tiktok “will go black” If the Chinese authorities do not approve the creation of a new society that operates the application. And all this while China and the United States negotiate a commercial agreement, negotiation that has been extended on different occasions.
For national security reasons, Washington considers that for Tiktok to work in the United States, where adds 170 million usersthe operating entity, which is now Bytedance, must be separated from the Chinese matrix.
Donald Trump, que The battle against Tiktok began in his first mandate (2017-2021), however, this platform joined during his campaign for the 2024 elections and accumulated almost 15 million followers. Since then, he stressed that he contributed to his triumph.
Threat to national security
Tiktok, an application that allows you to climb to the mobile video platform and has 2,000 million users in the world, was born in China in 2016 with the name Douyin. The following year he made the international leap and in 2018 he bought a billion dollars ‘musical.ly’, a popular app among American adolescents who helped him consolidate his expansion.
He immediately began to accumulate controversial for the doubtful protection of its users’ data And in December 2019 the United States Army prohibited its soldiers from representing A “threat” for national security.
In July 2020, Trump’s administration announced that he was studying to restrict his access for believing that the Chinese government was using it to monitor and distribute propaganda and on August 6 prohibited any business in the country with Bytedance from the following September 15.
However, on September 19 Trump gave good an agreement of the Americans Oracle and Walmart to acquire 20% of the new global Tiktok and postponed the application of their measures.
Biden’s law
The arrival at the White House of Democrat Joe Biden meant the withdrawal of Trump’s executive orders against Tiktok and the Opening of an investigation to identify the safety risks VIncouned to China for the data that the application collects to users.
However, in June 2022, Brendan Car, commissioner of the Federal Communications Commission of the US, asked the CEOs of Apple and Alphabet (Google) to withdraw the application from their stores for considering it a serious threat to national security.
The pressure on the social network was redoubled since then, and the prohibitions of its use to federal officials or institutions of institutions for the risk for their privacy and security, the veto of about twenty states and various North American institutions was added.
In April 2024, the US Congress approved, with the support of Democrats and Republicans, a law that establishes that Bytedabce must get rid of Tiktok if he doesn’t want to be prohibitedA in the country and gave the Chinese matrix nine months to find an investor from a country that is not considered an “adversary” of the US.
On January 17, 2025, the Supreme Court endorsed the constitutionality of this law and, although Tiktok stopped working in the US hours later, the White House announced that it would not apply the law and that its compliance would remain in the hands of the new president, Donald Trump, who assumed the position on January 20.
Trump’s extensions
On his first day of mandate Trump signed an executive order that he granted orIn the 75 -dias proprogation to Bytedance To reach an agreement with American companies, which has renewed twice since then, the last one until September 17, while linked a possible relief of tariffs to China with the support of its government to this operation.
Tump, who in June claimed to have found a buyer for the platform, has mentioned on several occasions that he has a place in his “heart” for Tiktok, because he helped him to conquer the young vote in 2024.
The next month of his electoral triumph, the president received the company’s executive director, Shou Zi Chew, in his property of Mar-A-Lago, in Florida, and also invited him to his inauguration on January 20.
A day before, during a rally in Washington to celebrate the victory and after announcing that I was going to grant the platform an extension to operate, Trump declared: “From today Tiktok is back” … “we won in Tiktok, and the Republicans had never earned the young vote.”
