On Saturday, TikTok finally went dark in America, a development that seemed to bring a seven-year drama to a close. But within hours, the app was lighting up again—a fitting postscript to the most chaotic of careers. Such twists and turns have been a feature of TikTok’s existence since 2020, when fears first emerged that the video-hosting service was in fact a Chinese Communist Party propaganda tool; one of the so-called “magic weapons,” wielded by the CCP for global influence.

In 2020, Donald Trump announced that the app would be banned unless it parted ways with its Chinese owner, ByteDance. This prompted howls of protest about free speech from some unlikely quarters. ByteDance announced a sale, paused the sale, cancelled the sale, and then Joe Biden revoked Trump’s ban in June 2021. But national-security concerns continued to mount, and some Democratic senators admitted that Trump had been right. In April 2024, Biden signed a new bill to ban TikTok. But Trump had already changed his mind: “If you get rid of TikTok,” he explained in a Truth Social post last March, “Facebook and Zuckerschmuck will double their business.” (Washington Post journalist Josh Rogin has suggested that the president is now beholden to Republican megadonor and ByteDance stakeholder Jeff Yass.)

After spending millions of US dollars lobbying against the legislation, ByteDance made a final legal bid in recent days, hoping that the proposed ban might constitute a violation of TikTok’s First Amendment rights. But the Supreme Court rejected that argument, time ran out, and TikTok finally went offline, before abruptly returning. Following a phone call with Xi Jinping, during which TikTok was apparently discussed, Trump has directed the Department of Justice not to enforce the ban for 75 days.