There’s a lot of change in the United States around the time of a presidential inauguration, new cabinet members, new furniture in the Oval Office and this year there’s a lot of change happening on social media too.

Last week we had Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg move toward an Elon Musk style system of labelling fake content, using the broader community of users instead of paid fact-checkers.

But the real issue for social media users in the USA is the shutdown of TikTok.

When the US Congress ruled overwhelmingly to ban the Chinese owned social media app in the USA they put in place a long delay before it would be implemented.

That delay places the ban on TikTok on January 19, around 32 hours before Donald Trump is sworn in as the next President of the United States of America.

Joe Biden oversaw the congressional hearings and legislation which labels TikTok as a National Security risk.

US users of the video sharing platform have been farewelling their followers over recent days, even directing them to new apps which are also strictly Chinese owned but not banned in the USA.

The impact on the US will be strong, given the amount of individuals and businesses who make money or drive revenue from having a TikTok presence, and it’s that backlash that an incoming Trump Administration is looking to turn around.

However, that commitment doesn’t cover the period between the Ban coming into force (Around 4pm Sunday AEDST – Sydney time) and the Trump Inauguration (Tuesday Midnight Australian time) and thus there’s a “grey area” legally for any company to potentially ignore the legislation which is in place.

Adhering to the ban would be Apple and Google who would be required to remove the app from their App Stores in America, additionally it’s likely other third party service providers working with TikTok may be exposed to legal action without any government assurances, something TikTok is now calling for from the outgoing Biden Administration.

An official from the Biden administration says “Americans shouldn’t expect to see TikTok suddenly banned on Sunday,” going on to say that they were looking at options for how to implement the law without TikTok going dark (becoming unusable to users)

However, TikTok say that does not go far enough, issuing their own statement to say “The statements issued today by both the Biden White House and the Department of Justice have failed to provide the necessary clarity and assurance to the service providers that are integral to maintaining TikTok’s availability to over 170 million Americans.

“Unless the Biden Administration immediately provides a definitive statement to satisfy the most critical service providers assuring non-enforcement, unfortunately TikTok will be forced to go dark on January 19.”

US TikTok users will be watching with interest, but it should be noted there is no impact on Australian users, other than the possibility of US video Creators they follow no longer being visible to Australian followers on the platform.