“Black” is expected to drop TikTok in the United States on January 19, after years of discussions with lawmakers and judges over what its fate will ultimately be.

On Friday, the Supreme Court upheld a federal law that bans the wildly popular social media platform from the U.S. unless its China-based parent company, ByteDance Ltd., is sold to an approved buyer.

Despite the decision of the court TikTok’s fate remains uncertain with Donald Trump ultimately deciding what her future will be, according to the Associated Press.

Trump, who is set to return to the White House the day after the ban takes effect, has credited TikTok with helping him win over more young voters in last year’s election. A Trump adviser said this week that the incoming administration “will take steps to prevent TikTok from going dark.” But what these measures will be remains unknown.

The rise of TikTok

TikTok is one of more than 100 apps developed in the past decade by ByteDance, a technology company founded in 2012 by Chinese entrepreneur Zhang Yiming and headquartered in the northwestern Haidian district of Beijing.

In 2016, ByteDance launched a short-form video platform called Douyin in China, followed by an international version called TikTok. It then bought Musical.ly, a lip-syncing platform popular with teenagers in the US and Europe, and combined it with TikTok, while keeping the app separate from Douyin.

Soon after, the app boomed in popularity in the US and many other countries, becoming the first Chinese platform to break into the West. Unlike other social media platforms that focused on cultivating connections between users, TikTok tailored content to people’s interests.

TikTok grew significantly during the COVID-19 pandemic, when short dance moves that went viral became a mainstay of the app.

The challenges

Challenges came alongside TikTok’s success. US officials have raised concerns about the company’s roots and ownership, focusing on China’s laws that require Chinese companies to hand over data requested by the government. There was also concern about a proprietary algorithm that records what users see in the app.

During his first term, Trump issued executive orders in 2020 banning TikTok and the Chinese messaging app WeChat. India banned TikTok — along with other Chinese apps — the same year after a military clash along the India-China border killed 20 Indian and four Chinese soldiers.

In 2021, the Biden administration rolled back Trump’s orders but left in place a national security review of TikTok by a little-known government agency known as the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, or CFIUS.

Negotiations falter

Between January 2021 and August 2022, TikTok representatives engaged in serious negotiations with the Biden administration about the app’s future in the U.S. The talks resulted in a 90-page draft app security agreement that the company presented to CFIUS in August. 2022. The two sides then broke off substantive negotiations, according to TikTok’s lawyers, although some meetings were held in the following months.

A copy of the draft agreement submitted to the court showed that TikTok’s US platform should have been open to inspections as it implemented security rules and that it should have blocked access to US user data from China. The company says it has already implemented some provisions of the agreement, including routing US user data to servers powered by Oracle software.

In its lawsuit the company said it spent more than $2 billion to implement aspects of the plan, which it calls Project Texas. However, the Justice Department and administration officials argued in court filings that the proposal failed to create sufficient separation between TikTok’s operations in the U.S. and China. They also said the opacity of TikTok’s algorithm, combined with the platform’s size and technical complexity, made it impossible for the US government – ​​or technology provider Oracle – to effectively guarantee compliance with the proposal.

In February 2023, the White House directed federal agencies to remove TikTok from government devices. Other countries followed and also banned the use of the app on official devices.

The following month, lawmakers grilled TikTok CEO Shou Chew during an hours-long hearing in which he tried to reassure a House committee by saying the platform prioritized user safety and should not be banned because of of Chinese connections.

According to court documents, TikTok representatives had their last meeting with CFIUS in September 2023. Later that year, criticism of the platform grew among Republicans in Washington who claimed the platform promoted pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel content. , a charge the company has vehemently denied.

Law of Prohibition or Sale

Efforts to ban TikTok resurfaced in Congress early last year and quickly gained bipartisan support among lawmakers who expressed the platform’s potential to monitor and manipulate Americans.

Legislation upheld by the Supreme Court passed the House and Senate in April. A lower court upheld the statute in early December. The legislation gave ByteDance nine months from the date of enactment to sell TikTok, and a possible three-month extension if the sale was underway.

The fact that the deadline expires a day before Trump’s inauguration makes things difficult. Only the sitting president can issue a 90-day stay on the ban, and he can only do so if the buyer has taken specific steps toward a purchase.

While experts said the app won’t completely disappear from existing users’ phones on Sunday, new users won’t be able to download it and updates won’t be available. That would ultimately render the app unenforceable, the Justice Department said in court filings.