TikTok users in the U.S. were relieved to see the popular video-sharing app flicker back to life on Jan. 19, 2025, hours after it went dark in response to a federal ban. Claims (archived) about the reason (archived) for its return also abounded, including that TikTok was bought by Meta — the U.S.-based parent company of Facebook, Instagram, Threads and WhatsApp — enabling its return.
Users on TikTok (archived) and X speculated on an alleged "new" TikTok profile (archived) for Facebook and alleged changes (archived) to the TikTok CEO's profile bio as indicators of a deal. We have contacted TikTok and Meta to confirm whether a sale has been made or is being considered and will update this report if they reply.
The day before his Jan. 20, 2025, inauguration, U.S. President Donald Trump took to Truth Social to post (archived) about TikTok. Promising an executive order following his inauguration that would extend a much-discussed deadline for TikTok to divest — sell — its U.S. operations, Trump also promised "no liability for any company that helped keep TikTok from going dark before my order."
Under federal legislation upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court on Jan. 17, ByteDance — TikTok's Chinese parent company — had 270 days to divest its U.S. operations to a government-approved buyer. It had not done so by the act's Jan. 19, 2025, deadline. Therefore, under the act, companies like Apple and Google were prohibited from distributing, maintaining and updating TikTok from that date and the app went dark, returning only after Trump's message on Truth Social.
The claims about TikTok being sold may have originated from the second part of Trump's Jan. 19 post, which envisioned a possible divestment deal:
I would like the United States to have a 50% ownership position in a joint venture. By doing this, we save TikTok, keep it in good hands and allow it to say up. Without U.S. approval, there is no Tik Tok. With our approval, it is worth hundreds of billions of dollars — maybe trillions.
Therefore, my initial thought is a joint venture between the current owners and/or new owners whereby the U.S. gets a 50% ownership in a joint venture set up between the U.S. and whichever purchase we so choose.
However, Trump did not mention Meta or deals with social media companies specifically. ByteDance previously said it "would prefer to shut down its loss-making app rather than sell it." TikTok filed a lawsuit against the U.S. government in 2024 in which the company said that a sale would be impossible for commercial, technological and legal reasons. No credible news organizations were reporting, at the time of this writing, any indication that ByteDance had made a divestment.
Claims of a sale on social media pointed out two changes users believed proved the TikTok sale: that Facebook had just created a TikTok account and that TikTok CEO Shou Chew had removed the word "CEO" from his TikTok profile bio.
However, neither of these was true. Facebook has had a TikTok account since at least March 2022, according to the Internet Archive's WayBack Machine, a digital internet archive, and reporting at the time. Similarly, archive snapshots of Chew's TikTok profile from 2022, 2023 and 2024 do not show the word CEO in his bio, meaning it was likely never there in the first place.
Snopes has previously reported on the federal ban faced by TikTok as well as previous claims it was sold to Disney.