So that we’re 100% clear, the site and app only stopped working in the us.

If you were in the us on a browser and used a fresh cache and a vpn in another country it worked fine, famously Canadian users used the time to shit talk American users while they “couldn’t” hear.

While there’s an argument to be made that the law only explicitly prohibits new downloads (distribution) it also makes reference to maintaining the service. A company that wanted to continue running the company without any ability to gain American users could attempt to skirt that, but eagle eyed readers of law will recognize that sec2.a.1.B pretty much squashes that. Not only does it make datacenters in the us and elsewhere culpable, but the generally held legal definition of words like “internet hosting services”, “distribution”, “maintenance”, “updating” and “application” are not the narrow often colloquial meanings we’re used to, but broad definitions intended to give the maximum applicability to laws regardless of specific technology involved.

So I think unless bytedances strategy was to explicitly skirt the law and try to keep the servers up for the American users then the “correct” decision was to follow the letter of the law until the new regime that had promised to offer a stay was in power and made that offer officially and in writing.

From a business perspective, for a company caught between two regimes, giving the “win” to the one you’ll definitely be working with longer is a no brainer.

I haven’t seen significant right wing or pro trump content on TikTok after it came back on. I have seen plenty of users saying thank you president trump with a whole spectrum of intonation and doing thinking emoji at the message when it came back on. I also haven’t seen decent analysis of its algorithms behavior since then, which makes sense because making a decent analysis of such a black box would take time.

Changes to a persons recommendations take time. The way that 小红书 surfaces this by changing the “reels” offered to the users explore page when they’ve accumulated enough information to make a change and finished processing it.

Part of what made TikTok’s algorithm and recommendations seem so magical is that it had a really good way of spicing things up and not getting stuck in a rut and because there was only one scrolling feed, changes to recommendations were just suddenly there.

Just having said that and having experienced the rinky-dink recommendations after the downtime I don’t think it was a shut down specifically for changes (although they definitely did, why would t you take the opportunity to update everything if you’re doing mandated spin down?) but because it was the smart legal choice.