On April 5, 75 days after Donald Trump took office as President of the United States, the question of Tiktok's ownership must be resolved. Otherwise, it will be shut down. The 75-day deadline is not included in the law that was adopted in the country last autumn. But on the first day on the job, Trump signed a presidential order to give Tiktok's owner Bytedance more time to find an American buyer.
However, no such buyer has emerged yet. Various companies, groups, and individuals have expressed interest, including Microsoft, Amazon, Oracle, Walmart, and Onlyfans founder Tim Stokely.
Chinese Connection
The background to the shutdown threat is Tiktok's ties to China. The company itself claims that there are no connections to the Chinese state, especially not for the version of Tiktok on the American market. But several investigations have pointed out that Bytedance in China can access data from American Tiktok users.
The concerns culminated last autumn when a law was adopted in the USA that forced the company to sell to American owners - or shut down.
Donald Trump himself has swung on the issue of Tiktok's presence on the American market. During his first term, he wanted to ban the app citing national security, only to later try to get it sold.
In 2024, Trump shifted tone and promised instead to "save Tiktok", a strategy that is said to have won over young voters according to him.
"Harry Potter's Wand"
Tiktok's future has in recent days been linked to Trump's trade war. The President has previously said that he is willing to ease the tariffs he imposed on Chinese goods if Bytedance agrees to a sale of its operations in the USA.
I might give them a small tariff reduction or something to get it done, he said then.
Exactly how a potential sale of Tiktok would work, and what it would technically entail, remains to be seen. Much of the sale speculation has revolved around Tiktok's recommendation algorithm, which is seen as crucial to the app's enormous popularity.
Tiktok without its algorithm is like Harry Potter without his wand - simply not as powerful, says Kelsey Chickering at analysis firm Forrester to BBC.
Tiktok was launched in 2016. The app allows users to create and share short video clips, often with music. TikTok's Chinese parent company Bytedance has a separate version of the app in China called Douyin.
Tiktok is one of the world's largest social media platforms and is particularly popular among children and young people (the age limit is 13 years).
The exact number of users is difficult to define, but Tiktok is estimated to have around one and a half billion active users. Facebook, for comparison, has nearly three billion active users. In the USA, Tiktok is estimated to have 170 million users.
Douyin, in turn, is estimated to have around 600 million active users.
The USA and several Western governments have long expressed concerns about Tiktok and whether Bytedance can be controlled or influenced by the Chinese Communist Party, which Tiktok denies. How user data is handled is also a matter of debate.
