President-elect Donald Trump may issue an executive order that would suspend the TikTok ban scheduled to go into effect on Sunday.
The move would prevent US officials from enforcing the law for 60 to 90 days, two anonymous sources familiar with the deliberations told the Washington Post.
Trump's inauguration is this Monday, one day after the nationwide ban is expected to be made official.
Sunday is the deadline for the TikTok's parent company, Bytedance, to sell its US assets or be pulled from US app stores due to concerns over the app's links to the communist Chinese government.
Under that ban, Americans would still be able to use the app but new downloads would be blocked and its software would slowly degrade over time due to a lack of updates.
This is not the first time Trump has expressed his interest in overturning the ban, which President Joe Biden signed into law last April.
The law requires TikTok's parent company, the Chinese tech firm ByteDance, to sell its US assets by January 19, 2025 or face a nationwide ban.
The Supreme Court heard TikTok's appeal to the ban last week, but is expected to allow the law to proceed as planned on Sunday.
Trump has repeatedly told the more than 14million followers of his own TikTok account that he plans to 'save' the app once he takes office.
But experts have said that an executive order may not be an effective way to reverse the ban, as it cannot entirely overcome a law Congressed passed by a large margin, garnering support from both sides of the aisle.
Executive orders 'are not magical documents. They're just press releases with nicer stationary,' former Department of Justice national security adviser Alan Rozenshtein told the Washington Post.
'TikTok will still be banned, and it will still be illegal for Apple and Google to do business with them. But it will make the president’s intention not to enforce the law that much more official,' he added.
There are other avenues the President-elect might take to overturn the ban.
The most direct way for Trump to try and reverse the policy would be to repeal the law that enacted the ban.
But a repeal would have to pass in both the Senate and the House of Representatives before it could be signed into effect by Trump.
Thus, he would still face the challenge of gaining congressional support.
Trump could also try to prevent the Department of Justice from actually enforcing the law, which requires distributors like Apple and Google to stop offering TikTok in their app stores, and requires service providers like Oracle to withhold the infrastructure that the app runs on.
Companies that violate these terms could be subject to a fine of $5,000 per each user who accesses TikTok.
But if Trump's Department of Justice refrains from doling out these fines, then tech companies can continue to provide access to TikTok without fear of penalty.
However, companies may opt to comply with the ban anyway to avoid any legal repercussions should the Trump administration reverse its approach.
Sources revealed Wednesday that TikTok is threatening to shut down its app for US users this Sunday if afederal ban goes into effect.
Under the shutdown, people attempting to open the app will see a pop-up message directing them to a website with information about the ban, sources told Reuters.
The company also plans to give users an option to download all their data so that they can take a record of their personal information, they said.
Shutting down such services does not require longer planning, one source said, noting that most operations have been continuing as usual as of this week.
If the ban gets reversed later, TikTok would be able to restore service for US users in a relatively short time, the source said.
