MELBOURNE – Tennis star Coco Gauff mourned the loss of TikTok’s app back home, writing on a TV camera lens “RIP TikTok USA” and drawing a broken heart right after winning a match at the Australian Open to reach the quarterfinals.
Gauff’s three-set victory in the Grand Slam tournament’s main stadium finished on Sunday afternoon local time in Melbourne — about an hour after TikTok could no longer be found on prominent app stores on Saturday in the United States.
A U.S. federal law that would have banned the popular social media platform was scheduled to go into effect. Apple and Google app stores are prohibited from offering TikTok under a law that required its China-based parent company, ByteDance, to sell the platform or face a ban in the U.S.
When users opened the TikTok app, they encountered a pop-up message from the company that prevented them from scrolling on videos.
Gauff frequently has posted on TikTok, often mimicking popular trends.
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AP tennis: https://apnews.com/hub/tennis
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