Stop sweating — TikTok probably won’t go dark this weekend

Content creators working to find other platforms for their videos amid the TikTok ban may want to take a breather. There’s a chance that TikTok won’t go dark this weekend after all.

According to a report from NBC News, President Joe Biden’s administration is exploring ways to keep TikTok in the U.S. despite the ban being scheduled to go into effect on Sunday. In other words, it’s trying to delay the ban on the video-sharing app provided that the Supreme Court doesn’t issue a ruling on the law before the holiday weekend is over.

“Americans shouldn’t expect to see TikTok suddenly banned on Sunday,” one of the administration officials said.

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In April 2024, President Biden signed the law forcing ByteDance to sell TikTok to a U.S.-based company for a face a ban in the country over national security concerns stemming from the fact that TikTok’s parent company is based in China, where the app is ironically banned. The law also allowed the president to enact a 90-day extension of the ban’s deadline if ByteDance has made any progress on the sale.

Now that the deadline is drawing near, the law calling for the sale or ban of TikTok has faced growing backlash from over 170 million of the platform’s users — more than half of the U.S. population — to the point that Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) and a few other senators proposed a bill that would give ByteDance 270 more days to divest TikTok to someone within the U.S. to avoid the ban on Monday. When Markey introduced the bill to the Senate floor, he said that, while TikTok has its fair share of problems, banning the platform “would impose serious consequences on millions of Americans who depend on the app for social connections and their economic livelihood. We cannot allow that to happen.”

Meanwhile, ByteDance is weighing options to either shut down U.S.-based TikTok servers on Sunday or keep the app going beyond January 19 without any future updates or bug fixes. In the meantime, TikTok users have migrated to RedNote (or Xiaohongshu), a lifestyle platform that is also based in China, out of protest, and has become the most downloaded app on the iOS App Store since Tuesday. RedNote may face a ban in the U.S. as well due to privacy concerns.

There’s a lot of uncertainty surrounding the future of TikTok in the U.S. because of the looming ban. We don’t know whether the app will actually be saved from the ban. Regardless of what happens, make sure you download your data from TikTok so you can preserve your videos and spread them on other platforms.