US experts have said TikTok’s decision to remove the app in the US, only to restore it hours later, was a silly game aimed at creating a sense of panic among the app’s 170 million US users.
Ahead of a US ban legislated by outgoing President Joe Biden, the owners of TikTok, Bytedance, were told that they must break up the company and sell TikTok. If not, Biden would shut it down.
Freshly minted US President Donald Trump has been typically mercurial over TikTok – depending on how the wind is blowing, he loves it, he hates it – but as of late appears to be in its corner. After all, it helped him win a second term.
“TikTok’s early shutdown either came down to corporate incompetence or a deliberate PR stunt to encourage a manufactured sense of panic,” Joel Thayer, a DC-based tech lawyer and president of the Digital Progress Institute, told The New York Post.
“Given it’s waffling, I’m assuming it’s the latter.”
Trump said he wants the US to have a 50 percent stake in a joint venture with Bytedance.

Donald Trump poses with a Trump guitar.
““By doing this, we save TikTok, keep it in good hands and allow it to say up [sic],” Trump said. “Without US approval, there is no TikTok.”
TikTok said it would “work with President Trump on a long-term solution that keeps TikTok in the United States”.
Under the Biden laws, due to be enacted on January 19, a day before Trump’s inauguration, app store owners including Apple and Google faced a US$5,000 penalty every time they allowed TikTok to be downloaded in the US.
Those who had already downloaded TikTok would not have been banned from using it.
“This may be a game for TikTok, but it isn’t a game for Apple and Google,” Michael Sobolik, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and author of ‘Countering China’s Great Game’, told the Post.
“They need to comply with the law, regardless of TikTok’s shenanigans.”
Sobolik said “the law that Congress passed and the Supreme Court upheld requires Apple and Google to remove TikTok from their app stores if it is still owned and controlled by a foreign adversary today – which it is”.
Thayer described Bytedance leadership as “an unsympathetic and disingenuous broker” in its dealings with Congress and the public.
“The truth is that, even before Congress enacted the law, the US has told TikTok how to fix its blatant national security concerns for over five years and the company did nothing.
“Now, after it attempted to bring bogus First Amendment claims to delay the law’s enforcement and on the eve of its ban, it wants a pity party.”
Bytedance praised Trump for providing “the necessary clarity and assurance to our service providers that they will face no penalties”.
So, TikTok is back. But really, it never went away.