Elizabeth Schulze, Devin Dwyer, and Steven Portnoy, reporting Thursday evening for ABC News:

The Biden administration doesn’t plan to take action that forces TikTok to immediately go dark for U.S. users on Sunday, an administration official told ABC News.

TikTok could still proactively choose to shut itself down that day — a move intended to send a clear message to the 170 million people it says use the app each month about the wide-ranging impact of the ban.

But the Biden administration is now signaling it won’t enforce the law that goes into effect one day before the president leaves office.

The TikTok and ByteDance ban law is set to go into effect on January 19, just a day before President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration, so the decision not to enforce the law for one day appears to be a way for President Biden to deflect blame onto the new administration. The president-elect submitted an amicus friend-of-the-court brief to the Supreme Court a week ago asking the court to issue a stay on the law before the Trump administration takes control, but it’s unclear if the high court will capitulate to Trump’s request — the court’s website says decisions are expected to be issued Friday at 10 a.m., so it might become clear then.

But based on oral arguments last week, the situation doesn’t look good for TikTok. Before Biden’s plan was reported Thursday, I was entirely certain TikTok would be unavailable in the United States for at least Sunday due to a memorandum from the company stating it would shut down operations preemptively a day before the ban is set to take place, including for existing users. (The law only states Apple and Google must remove adversary-owned apps from their app stores; it gives no directions to TikTok directly.) Now, TikTok seems to be in a temporary, weekend-long state of limbo. The company could choose to take the app offline on Sunday to plan regardless of Biden’s intentions because it doesn’t want to break a law written by Congress, or it could scrap the idea and place its hopes and dreams in Trump’s hands.

I wrote last April, when the law was passed, that I found the probability of TikTok being banned “still thoroughly unlikely” because I thought Biden would win the election. I maintained that prediction (about TikTok, anyway) internally through the election campaign, but now that Trump is the next president, I’m really unsure. Trump is a very unpredictable politician with no clear sense of direction or policy, and he could suddenly choose to enforce the law from Day 1 to act tough on China. His amicus brief could just be an attempt to dupe China into thinking it has a friendly man on the inside, or he could be entirely serious after attributing part of his electoral success to TikTok. All bets are off in Trump’s second term, and I reckon TikTok is fully conscious of that.

By choosing to defy a law from Congress because an outgoing president — and incoming rabble-rouser — promised in words only, TikTok would be taking an extraordinary risk in a country whose government has never been kind to it. That’s why my personal take is that TikTok chooses to voluntarily summon some scare screens this weekend, encouraging users to lambast their lawmakers and disregarding Biden’s vague politically motivated promise. That prediction could change in mere hours based on what Trump and TikTok say in a game of press releases, but I think it’s sensible for now. TikTok was betting on the Supreme Court giving it a reprieve up until last week when oral arguments seemed to indicate the justices were firmly on the government’s side, so now its strategy — from what I can tell — appears to be to work out some deal with Trump.

As I wrote about Meta’s week of chaos, the only way to do business in America under Trump is to bend the knee and kiss the ring. Shou Chew, TikTok’s chief executive, appears to be doing just that — he’s scheduled to be seated in a position of honor alongside Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, two other social media executives vying for Trump’s blessing. Earlier last year, I firmly believed TikTok’s fate lay in the courts; now, the company’s bets are all on Trump 2.0.

I would love for my April prediction to be proven correct — that TikTok never really gets banned. But in my defense, it was made at a very different time in American politics. Biden still hadn’t dropped out of the race, First Amendment lawyers all believed TikTok had a case in front of the Supreme Court, and Democrats still had a chance to control both houses of Congress. Anything could’ve happened on the campaign trail, and the law could’ve been moot right after November. It’s still my firm belief that if Vice President Kamala Harris won the election, she would’ve gotten Biden to issue an extension for TikTok’s divestment and then probably killed the law in springtime budget negotiations. But, alas, that future never came true, and chances are, TikTok will choose to voluntarily take itself offline in just a few days.

But on that last point, Hank Green, a famous YouTuber and TikTok creator, (correctly) wondered on Bluesky earlier Thursday why TikTok would, on its own volition, throw its creators under the bus when it could still run the app for the hundreds of millions of Americans who already have TikTok installed from before the ban. The answer is straightforward: TikTok is a psychological operation from the Chinese government to wreak havoc in American politics. TikTok wants its users to get riled up and effectively play defense for the Chinese Communist Party since none of the hundreds of millions of U.S. TikTok users have to register as foreign lobbyists. It wants to actively encourage its users to make life hell for American politicians. It’s a brilliant strategy. Here’s what I wrote about this information war in April:

Naturally, if TikTok vanishes in a year — a prospect that I think is still thoroughly unlikely — Americans will solely place the blame on their government, not on TikTok or China. And that point of contention between Americans and their government is exactly the reason why China doesn’t want to divest TikTok. The Chinese government wants power and strength; it wants to change the way Americans perceive it across the Pacific. This bill just gave China a brand-new, effective strategy. Nice work, Washington — you’ve been outsmarted by Beijing again.

Because the U.S. government is so comically useless that it can’t even write a national data privacy law, China won yet another part of this communication war. The biggest threat to the United States is not China, Russia, North Korea, or Iran — it’s the half of this country that refuses to participate in any governance whatsoever for its belief in strictly reactionary politics. Millions of Americans are falling prey to literal Chinese propaganda on Red Note (Mandarin Chinese: Xiaohongshu) — a Chinese-sanctioned version of TikTok where fan cams of Chinese police officers beating up civilians are galore and the search term “Tiananmen Square” is banned — because the U.S. government doesn’t understand how to write laws its citizens are interested in obeying.

The surge in traffic to Red Note can’t just be attributed to Western tankies being some of the most imbecilic human specimens on the planet. The United States, the stalwart of capitalism around the globe, is equally responsible.