Hi, I'm Dan Pramak, and welcome to Axios Recap, presented by Bridge Bank. Today is Friday, September 18th.

Movie theater popcorn sales are way down, microwave popcorn sales are way up, and we're focused on the fate of TikTok.

President Trump now has until Sunday to decide whether or not to ban TikTok or allow it to

keep operating under a tech partnership with Oracle.

Trump did hold a press conference this afternoon where we were expecting a decision,

but we didn't get one.

Hanging in the balance here are hundreds of

U.S. jobs and the social media diet of around 100 million Americans, plus the livelihoods of so-called

TikTok creators. So what happens next? Well, first, expect TikTok to ask for an emergency

restraining order, probably today because courts aren't open

on the weekend. If TikTok loses, we learned this morning from the Commerce Department that there

will be no new downloads of TikTok allowed in the U.S. beginning Sunday, with the service to stop

altogether on November 12th, which if you've got a calendar is about a week and a half after the

election. In the interim, TikTok would not be allowed to push forward any software updates,

something that would stop it from potentially introducing malicious code, but also something

that would stop it from fixing security holes. It's also possible, by the way, that

ByteDance and Beijing could reconsider

their decision to stop negotiating an outright sale of TikTok, either to Oracle or Microsoft

or someone else, but that doesn't seem likely. While we wait, we wanted to speak with New York

Times tech reporter Taylor Lorenz about how this political saga has played inside of TikTok's

vibrant user and creator community. That conversation, which we taped shortly before

Trump's presser in 15 seconds. We're joined now by Taylor Lorenz tech reporter at the New York

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