TikTok held firm and refused to be sold, Congress blinked, and now everyone is scrambling to avoid a backlash from its younger user base.

President Trump signed an executive order on his first day in office that halts the ban on TikTok. But is TikTok actually "saved?"

TikTok’s CEO Shou Zi Chew was seated on the dais at Trump’s inauguration Monday, signaling a budding alliance with the president. Massie, the Republican who co-sponsored the bill to repeal the ban, posted a photo he’d taken of Chew from the crowd on X. “Tick tock, the TikTok ban is about to end,” Massie wrote.

We (sort of) answer the burning questions about TikTok, which is back online in the United States (sort of). TikTok is back online — sort of. But also it’s still banned. Huh? You probably have some questions about this whole thing with TikTok. I (sort of) have answers.

The popular video app went dark in the United States late Saturday and then came back around noon on Sunday, even as a law banning it took effect.

Under the deal being negotiated by the White House, TikTok’s China-based owner, ByteDance, would retain a stake in the company, but data collection and software updates would be overseen by Oracle, which already provides the foundation of TikTok’s Web infrastructure, one of the sources told Reuters.

Rep. Mike Turner, the former chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said TikTok "remains a national security threat" despite President Trump's effort to maintain access to the popular video-sharing app in recent days.

San Francisco's Perplexity AI has presented the new proposal to Byte Dance, TikTok’s parent company, as the organization searches for a U.S. buyer.

Despite all of this, Trump has decided that the best course of action is to delay the shutdown of TikTok, even though he was one of the first to endorse a ban. His reason for the delay is that he wants to broker a sale, but that doesn’t explain his flipping from leading the charge on a ban to trying to save it.

Rep. Mike Turner, R-Ohio, former chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said on Sunday that TikTok remains a national security threat and he hopes President-elect Trump can reaches a deal that leads to China-based ByteDance selling its stake in the app.

The proposal, submitted last week, is a revision of an earlier plan the artificial intelligence startup presented to TikTok's parent ByteDance on 18 January, a day before the law that bans TikTok went into effect.