Donald Trump has promised to delay a ban on the social media giant TikTok in the United States under a joint venture arrangement. ABC National Technology Reporter, Ange Lavoipierre, has more.
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00:00It looks like it's back online, 14 hours after it went dark, around four o'clock on Sunday
00:09Australian time, it started coming back.
00:13And that immediately followed Donald Trump, of course, posting that he would extend the
00:22period allowed for a sale, yeah.
00:24So it went dark because ahead of an official ban, a legal ban on TikTok, the US for national
00:31security?
00:32That's right.
00:33So that was the deadline for TikTok to either have been sold by its owner, ByteDance, of
00:40course, a Chinese owned company, or to kind of go off, to go dark in the US.
00:48And that ban was passed back in April.
00:50There have been attempts to ban it stretching back to 2020, but finally got over the line
00:55in April this year, because of, as you mentioned, security concerns to do with how much data
01:00TikTok and ByteDance was collecting on Americans.
01:03And there's a suggestion that there's more that we don't know, that senior officials
01:08and the president and so on would be briefed on, but that the national security risk was
01:14significant enough that it required these steps that have been taken.
01:19It's since been upheld, but most recently by the Supreme Court.
01:23And then in the last two days of the Biden presidency, we heard from that administration
01:31that they were not going to penalise anyone who, penalise any of the companies for not
01:38enforcing the ban.
01:39So that's the various service providers that help keep TikTok online and running and of
01:43course TikTok itself.
01:46And now Donald Trump has said the same thing.
01:49And yeah, we did see the platform go dark for altogether around 14 hours, but it's back
01:56online now.
01:57And what TikTok has said is that they've now got sufficient assurances from the Trump administration
02:03that they won't see some of those huge fines that could have come to pass had they not
02:09switched the platform.
02:10And in the meantime, is it still looking for a new owner?
02:14Well, ByteDance has been pretty resolute in saying that TikTok is not for sale.
02:19Now, of course, how much of that is posturing and how much of it is sincere is impossible
02:23to say.
02:25We do know, in saying that, you know, I'm going to issue an executive order that allows
02:34an extension for this sale deadline, Donald Trump did also say that there would be, what
02:42he would want to say would be a 50 per cent part ownership type model.
02:47Now this is all very kind of legally tricky.
02:50There are a range of differing opinions from legal scholars in the US as to whether an
02:55executive order, you know, how that kind of measures up against a bill that has been passed
02:59by Congress, which is in fact an act now, and, you know, whether he has the power to
03:06say that the fines won't apply.
03:09But clearly, whatever assurances he gave to those companies, to ByteDance, to Oracle,
03:14the cloud services provider, the internet service providers, it was good enough for
03:18them to be confident enough to allow TikTok to come back online because, yeah, the proof's
03:23in the pudding and TikTok is back.
03:24And finally, what does all this mean for Australian TikTok users?
03:28Well, not much at the moment, but, you know, Australia's TikTok is America's TikTok.
03:33It's a global system.
03:35And I think what we know for sure is that this is not static.
03:39We will see TikTok change one way or the other in the coming weeks and months.
03:45Thanks, Ange.
03:46Thanks.