The White House opens a TikTok account less than a month before its theoretical shutdown in the US

The White House has opened a TikTok account less than a month before the theoretical shutdown of this social network in the United States, in what appears to be a shift in the dispute that Donald Trump's administration maintains with the Chinese social network and that will be prohibited in that country if there is no agreement beforehand. Just a month ago, U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick insisted that TikTok "will go dark" if Chinese authorities do not approve the creation of a new company to operate the application. And all of this while China and the United States negotiate a trade agreement, a negotiation that has been extended on different occasions. For national security reasons, Washington believes that for TikTok to operate in the United States, where it has 170 million users, the operating entity, which is now ByteDance, must separate from its Chinese parent company. Donald Trump, who initiated the battle against TikTok during his first term (2017-2021), nevertheless joined this platform during his campaign for the 2024 elections and amassed almost 15 million followers. Since then, he has emphasized that it contributed to his victory.

Threat to national security

TikTok, an application that allows users to upload videos to the platform with mobile phones and has 2 billion users worldwide, was born in China in 2016 under the name Douyin. The following year, it made the international leap and in 2018, it bought 'musical.ly' for a billion dollars, a popular app among American teenagers that helped it consolidate its expansion. It immediately began to accumulate controversy due to the questionable protection of its users' data, and in December 2019, the United States Army banned its soldiers from using the app for representing a "threat" to national security. In July 2020, the Trump administration announced that it was considering restricting its access, believing that the Chinese government was using it to monitor and distribute propaganda, and on August 6, it prohibited any business in the country with ByteDance starting September 15 of that year. However, on September 19, Trump approved a deal by the American companies Oracle and Walmart to acquire 20% of the new TikTok Global and postponed the application of its measures.

Biden's Law

The arrival of Democrat Joe Biden at the White House led to the withdrawal of Trump's executive orders against TikTok and the opening of an investigation to identify the security risks linked to China due to the data the application collects from users. However, in June 2022, Brendan Carr, commissioner of the U.S. Federal Communications Commission, asked the CEOs of Apple and Alphabet (Google) to remove the application from their stores, considering it a serious threat to national security. The pressure on the social network has redoubled since then, and in addition to the prohibitions on its use by federal officials or workers of institutions due to the risk to their privacy and security, the veto of about twenty states and various North American institutions was added. In April 2024, the U.S. Congress approved, with the support of Democrats and Republicans, a law that stipulates that ByteDance must divest itself of TikTok if it does not want to be banned in the country and gave the Chinese parent company nine months to find an investor from a country that is not considered an "adversary" of the U.S. On January 17, 2025, the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of this law and, although TikTok stopped working in the U.S. hours later, the White House announced that it would not enforce the law and that its compliance would be left to the new president, Donald Trump, who took office on January 20.

Trump's Perks

On his first day in office, Trump signed an executive order granting ByteDance a 75-day extension to reach an agreement with US companies, which he has renewed twice since then, the last time until September 17, while linking a possible easing of tariffs on China with his government's support for 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 it helped him win the youth vote in 2024. The month following his electoral triumph, the president received the company's CEO, Shou Zi Chew, at his Mar-a-Lago property in Florida, and also invited him to his inauguration on January 20. A day earlier, during a rally in Washington to celebrate the victory and after announcing that he was going to grant the platform an extension to operate, Trump declared: "From today TikTok is back" ..."We won on TikTok, and Republicans had never won the youth vote before."