Investing.com-- President Joe Biden’s administration is mulling over ways to keep TikTok available in the U.S., NBC reported on Wednesday evening, as a ban on the video platform is set to go into effect from Sunday.
Officials are exploring options on how to implement the ban so that TikTok does not go dark immediately from Sunday, administration officials told NBC. Any measures to keep the video streaming platform accessible will likely defer the handling of its ban to President-elect Donald Trump, who will take office on Monday.
The NBC report comes just hours after Mike Waltz, the incoming national security advisor for Trump, said he was ready to intervene to preserve access to TikTok. Pam Bondi, who Trump nominated as attorney general, also refused to commit to enforcing the ban when questioned over it during her Senate confirmation hearing on Wednesday.
TikTok’s ban was voted into effect by Congress, amid concerns that the Chinese-owned app was collecting data on American citizens and compromising national security. But the move received widespread opposition from the public, given the popularity of the app, as well as its position as a revenue source for content creators.
ByteDance- which owns TikTok- and Chinese officials were considering several last-ditch options to prevent the ban. A recent report said Beijing could broker a sale of TikTok’s U.S. operations to Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA) CEO Elon Musk, given his proximity to the Trump administration.
Still, a TikTok ban bodes well for other social media platforms with similar offerings in the U.S., given the wild popularity of its short video format. Google’s YouTube and Meta’s Instagram had rushed to roll out their own short video offerings amid heightened competition from TikTok in recent years.