Users react to nationwide ban of TikTok as President-Elect Trump says he’ll grant the app a reprieve

BOSTON — Hours after it went dark, TikTok appeared on the verge of a reprieve.

Following his inauguration Monday, President-elect Donald Trump said he will issue an executive order to keep the popular social media site up and running for another 90 days -- in the hopes of finding a buyer acceptable to the U.S. government.

TikTok is owned by the Beijing-based ByteDance --- and that is the beginning and end of its problematic U.S. presence. American officials feared the company’s cozy relationship with the Chinese Communist Party represented a national security risk -- given it had access to data from 170 million Americans and counting.

Last April, President Biden signed a law putting TikTok on notice that its days operating in the U.S. were numbered -- unless it could find an American buyer. TikTok sued on the basis of free speech. But last week, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the TikTok ban and by Sunday the site went down.

Among those hurt most by the shutdown: The estimated 7 million Americans who conduct business over the site. Self-help author Ken Cadieux of Natick is one of them.

“I really thought there was a good chance it would go away,” Cadieux said. “There seemed to be a machine behind it to ban it. That being said, I thought people would look at it as a free speech issue, and that just didn’t happen here.”

Cadieux had no choice but to prepare for the end.

“I had to form a website,” he said. “I started an Instagram account, started a Facebook account. You check all the boxes just to get yourself out there. But just going to a different platform is not a quick solution, not an easy solution. It takes time.”

TikTok feared even a short shutdown would result in exactly that kind of migration to other sites.

The fate of TikTok is making for strange political bedfellows. Massachusetts Senator Edward Markey was one of a group of Democratic lawmakers calling for an extension to the Biden legislation.

“I’m urging that we create enough time to find a solution,” Markey said. “We cannot tell 170 million Americans, we cannot tell 7 million businesses that they no longer have this technology.”

Markey said the political process did not work to find a solution in time.

“The court process took 268 of the 270-day time limit in the legislation to say that the banning of the TikTok app is constitutional,” he said.

This is a developing story. Check back for updates as more information becomes available.

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