Senator Says US Companies Working With TikTok Could Face Billions in Liability

Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) speaks at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing about oversight of the Department of Justice in Washington, on Oct. 27, 2021. Tasos Katopodis-Pool/Getty Images

Two senators on Sunday dispelled the idea that TikTok could be brought back early after President-elect Donald Trump signaled he would issue an executive order to keep it online, with one warning that U.S. companies that do business with the Chinese-owned app could face “ruinous liability.”

“Any company that hosts, distributes, services, or otherwise facilitates communist-controlled TikTok could face hundreds of billions of dollars of ruinous liability under the law, not just from [Department of Justice], but also under securities law, shareholder lawsuits, and state [attorneys general],” Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) wrote in a post on X Sunday. “Think about it.”

Cotton wrote the comment in response to a statement from TikTok that it was in the process of restoring service following Trump’s message.

In a separate statement, Cotton and fellow Sen. Pete Ricketts (R-Neb.) celebrated that TikTok had gone offline, as the app shut down on Saturday night before it resumed operations on Sunday afternoon.

“We commend Amazon, Apple, Google, and Microsoft for following the law and halting operations with ByteDance and TikTok, and we encourage other companies to do the same. The law, after all, risks ruinous bankruptcy for any company who violates it,” Cotton and Ricketts said Sunday.

“Now that the law has taken effect, there’s no legal basis for any kind of ‘extension’ of its effective date. For TikTok to come back online in the future, ByteDance must agree to a sale that satisfies the law’s qualified-divestiture requirements by severing all ties between TikTok and Communist China,” they said.

Google and Apple removed the app from their digital stores to comply with the law, which required them to do so if TikTok parent company ByteDance didn’t sell its U.S. operation by Sunday. The law, which passed with wide bipartisan support in April 2024, allows for steep fines for companies that do not comply.

The law that went into effect Sunday required ByteDance to cut ties with the platform’s U.S. operations due to national security concerns posed by the app’s Chinese ownership, noting that the company is collecting Americans’ data, a national security risk. However, the statute gave the sitting president authority to grant a 90-day extension if a viable sale was underway.

In the 270 days since the law was passed, ByteDance has said that it would not sell TikTok and no clear buyers have emerged. Trump, in a social media post, indicated that he would issue an executive order after taking office on Monday to keep TikTok afloat and that his administration could facilitate a deal to keep the app online in the United States.

It’s not clear how his proposed action would stand up in court after the U.S. Supreme Court last week ruled to uphold the law that bans the platform. After the Supreme Court decision, the Biden administration said that it would not implement or enforce the ban before Trump takes office.

During his first presidential term, Trump in 2020 issued executive orders banning TikTok and the Chinese messaging app WeChat, moves that courts subsequently blocked. In 2024, Trump changed his tune on the app and has credited his social media presence on TikTok as a way to reach out to younger voters during his campaign.

Also Sunday, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) told NBC News in an interview that he would allow the law to go into effect and warned that TikTok’s algorithms are being manipulated to distribute “terrible messages” to American children, including posts that encourage suicide, violence, and eating disorders. He suggested that the app is doing so at the behest of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which operates an office inside ByteDance.

“It’s not the platform that members of Congress are concerned about,” Johnson told the outlet. “It’s the Chinese Communist Party, and their manipulation of the algorithms.”

The Associated Press contributed to this report.