TikTok Had a Tumultuous Year. What’s Ahead in 2025?
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Welcome to Tech News Briefing. It's Tuesday, December 31st. I'm Julie Chang for The Wall Street Journal. We're hearing from our reporters and columnists about some of the biggest companies, trends, and people in tech and what could be in store for 2025. TikTok faces an uncertain future in the U.S.,

The Supreme Court is set to decide whether a law that would ban the app over national security concerns violates the First Amendment. Oral arguments are set to begin days before the ban is supposed to take effect on January 19th.

The law would ban TikTok if it doesn't shed its Chinese ownership. TikTok's parent company ByteDance has said that it can't and won't sell its U.S. business. Last week, President-elect Donald Trump asked the Supreme Court to stop the ban from taking effect, saying he wants to pursue a negotiated resolution to prevent a nationwide shutdown of the social media giant. Meanwhile, TikTok has continued to accrue cultural capital, attracting the likes of politicians, legacy media outlets, and of course, influencers.

But what could happen to the app in the next year? Our tech reporter Georgia Wells covers social media and she spoke with her colleague Belle Lin about this. Here's their conversation.

So give us a bit of an overview of how we got to this point where TikTok is again fighting a ban or a forced sale in the U.S. So TikTok is owned by a Chinese company called ByteDance. And so basically for years TikTok has faced this scrutiny about its ties to China. And so like even way back in 2020, Trump tried to ban TikTok with an executive order, but that fell apart in court. But that kind of set the stage for

for the scrutiny TikTok was going to be under kind of throughout its existence in the US. And so for years, they were negotiating with this panel called CFIUS that looks at foreign investment in the US.

They were hoping to come to some sort of agreement with them, but that didn't happen. And then late last year and continuing into earlier this year, lawmakers in Congress quietly put together this legislation to require TikTok's parent company to sell them or to face getting banned in this country.

And what about President-elect Trump nowadays? Where do we think he stands on a TikTok ban in the U.S. or a forced resale? So Trump recently asked the Supreme Court to pause this whole TikTok shutdown process. And he said that keeping TikTok operating would preserve the First Amendment rights for the tens of millions of Americans who are using TikTok.

So this is clearly quite a reversal from his stance towards TikTok way back in 2020 when he sought to engineer a ban. Yeah. Another interesting sort of tidbit is that the journals reported that TikTok's CEO has sought Elon Musk's counsel on the incoming Trump administration. What's the significance of this? Well, it's super interesting because Elon Musk has...

At a time when it's been really hard for many American business owners to do business in China, Elon Musk has done business in China through Tesla. And so Elon Musk has some of the strongest American business ties to China.

And so we don't know what's going to happen. But if TikTok sees an ally in Elon Musk, clearly that's like a way to get to Trump. One of TikTok's challenges is not only do they have to satisfy kind of American concerns about their ownership, but any action TikTok takes also will have to ultimately get approved by the Chinese government. And so they're caught in this political bind, in this like geopolitical crosshairs. And Trump...

And potentially, if he's going to be an ally for TikTok, that could be really super powerful because there aren't that many prominent business people who have been successful or managed to do business and also like create strong ties in both countries.

That's right. And for American users, if a ban does happen, would the app just disappear? The way we understand it would be implemented initially is it could remain on devices where it's currently downloaded, but the app stores, so Google and Apple, would have to delist it so they wouldn't have new people coming on. So initially it would be a regular version of TikTok on your phone, but they wouldn't be able to update it. So it would increasingly become old, clunky, and

And also when apps can't get updated, sometimes like security flaws are discovered. So that can just be a thorny mess. So we don't know how that would look in the long term, but it wouldn't disappear completely overnight. Right. But to your point, a mess is still frustrating for TikTok's huge user base in the U.S. And so

So far, it seems like its base of mostly younger people haven't seemed too phased about larger issues surrounding it. So potential user privacy concerns, a ban or a forced sale. What can you tell us about how users have responded to these things?

Yeah, many of the concerns that the U.S. government has laid out are more around national security. So ways that they believe the Chinese government could lean on ByteDance or TikTok for user data is like one type of concern. And that's a concern that for a lot of regular users just doesn't resonate as a top of mind fear in their life. And so it makes sense to me that a lot of users are just kind of like shrugging,

in the face of these national security concerns. This has also been going on for so long with TikTok, these concerns about its ownership, that for users, I think many of them have become sort of desensitized. Because back in 2020, we thought TikTok could go away instantly if Trump wanted it to. That didn't happen. Coming up, what else 2025 might hold for TikTok? We'll find out after the break.

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What about the other challenges that TikTok has faced this year? Slowing growth has been one of the issues for TikTok as a business. And it's sort of an unexpected thing for TikTok to face. Just, you know, when companies are young and entering a new market, they tend to expand really quickly. And so for the first time in TikTok's history, its user growth has started to stagnate.

in the US market. And also ad sales have been hitting growth targets but not exceeding them. So it's just like in the context of all these geopolitical issues TikTok has had to battle, it's interesting to see that the company is also just having to face some of the more cut and dry business challenges that other social media companies tend to face as they get bigger and run up against competitors.

Right. Its parent company, ByteDance's valuation reached $300 billion this year, too. Any idea what that means for TikTok? One of the big questions about ByteDance's valuation is how much this geopolitical risk has been weighing on some of its assets.

And so TikTok, with all of these question marks surrounding it, a lot of investors, they don't know quite how much less it's valued at. But if all of these geopolitical issues went away for TikTok, if they found a way to remain in the U.S. that also seemed to satisfy other countries that might have similar concerns, we could expect to see their valuation grow even further. But it's a complicated thing for them to sort out.

And what about elsewhere in the world? Is TikTok facing similar sort of regulations or bans outside of the U.S.? The Canadian government took a different tact. So they're working on shutting down TikTok's offices in Canada while allowing the app to remain for users in the country, which is sort of an interesting way of trying to address geopolitical risk.

And then previously, years ago, India banned TikTok from operating there. And so our understanding with the U.S. market, at least previously, was that TikTok could survive without the U.S. market. But if the U.S. market became like a bellwether, like a domino effect among other countries and other markets like the EU or the U.K. or Japan, then TikTok would have a really serious problem on its hands.

And Georgia, what are you keeping your eye on the most as we head into 2025 around TikTok? I'm keeping my eyes squarely on the Supreme Court because they've said they're going to hear the case about whether or not TikTok should be banned or have a forced divestiture. And so this is a really interesting moment for Americans to watch the Supreme Court kind of grapple with

a lot of these kind of novel issues. And there are also issues that aren't going to be going away because there's more and more popular apps that are coming out of China. And so to hear what the Supreme Court thinks about this ban will be really, really interesting. That was WSJ reporter Georgia Wells speaking with Belle Lynn. And that's it for Tech News Briefing. Today's show was produced by me, Julie Chang, with supervising producer Catherine Millsap. Thanks for listening.