The Arbiter, Vol 2., No. 1
You will be excused for not knowing exactly what the hell is going on with TikTok this weekend. Nobody else does, either. Fear not. We’ve been obsessively following this saga so you don’t have to.
Will TikTok go dark on Sunday? Probably, the experts say, squinting and ending the word with an upward, questioning lilt. The past 48 hours have been a whirlwind of contradictory pronouncements, anonymous reports, and speculation. The bill banning TikTok was a rare bi-partisan effort; the last-minute scramble to undo it has been just as bi-partisan.
On Wednesday, two unlikely allies—progressive Senator Ed Markey and conservative Senator Rand Paul—teamed up to propose delaying the ban. That effort was promptly blocked by a single Republican senator. But if you’re trying to find an ideological angle in this fight, good luck: Senator Markey, like incoming President Donald Trump, was in favor of the TikTok ban before he was against it.
Yesterday, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer asked the Biden White House to intervene—the last real shot at stopping the ban before it goes into effect. The White House declined, offering only a tepid assurance that it would not enforce the ban on Sunday and would leave the decision to the incoming administration. But such statements carry no legal weight, leaving TikTok with little protection if it risks staying online past the deadline.
Even after the Supreme Court upheld the ban this morning—as had been predicted for a week—it remains unclear what TikTok plans to do. .
For days, media outlets citing unnamed sources have reported that TikTok is planning to shut down Sunday rather than risk enforcement. This remains the prevailing theory. Some speculated that TikTok has decided to call Washington’s bluff, gambling that going dark will spark a backlash from its millions of American users.
For weeks, it has been clear that TikTok’s best hope for salvation is Donald Trump. The incoming president and his team have said that a sale, brokered by Trump himself, could save the app. Trump’s lawyers even filed an amicus brief to the Supreme Court arguing that only Trump could pull off such a deal. The expectation has been that once in office, Trump would find a way—perhaps an executive order —to stall or de-fang the ban. The question is how: any executive order from Trump directly overriding a law passed by Congress would almost certainly be deemed unconstitutional.
So, after this morning’s Court’s decision—just a day after news broke that TikTok CEO Shou Chew would attend Trump’s inauguration alongside Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos—most observers anticipated a reassuring statement from Trump, signaling to TikTok to hang tight.
That’s not what happened.
Instead, Trump released an enigmatic statement: the SCOTUS decision was “expected,” he said, “and everyone must respect it.” He added that he had not yet decided how to handle TikTok and would announce his plans in “the not too distant future, but I must have time to review the situation. Stay tuned!”
If you were TikTok, parsing that statement might make you nervous. Hours later, TikTok’s Shou Chew broke the company’s silence with a carefully worded video thanking Trump for his “commitment to work with us to find a solution that keeps TikTok available in the United States.” Notably, Chew didn’t say such a solution had been reached.
Ultimately, the bigger questions go beyond whether TikTok will go dark on Sunday. In media reports, the 24-hour gap between the ban becoming law on January 19 and Trump taking office on January 20 is treated as a speed bump, not a barricade. But once the law takes effect, no one really knows what it will take—legally, politically, culturally, or technically—to reverse it.
Buckle up: we're heading into uncharted waters.
The Arbiter is a series of informed opinions, strategic outlooks, analytics-backed predictions, and tactical briefings from Gupta Media. Subscribe via email, Substack, or LinkedIn.