President Trump on Friday administered to Tiktok another suspension, announcing that he would extend the deadline for when the popular application had to be separated from its Chinese owner, byTedance or face a ban in the United States.
Tiktok, who faced Saturday’s deadline for an agreement, now has another 75 days to find a new owner to comply with a federal law that demands to change his structure to resolve national security concerns. This sets the new deadline for an agreement in mid -June.
The delay was the second of President Trump for Tiktok this year. He first stopped enforcement of the law in January, even after unanimously confirmed by the Supreme Court.
“The deal requires more work to ensure that all necessary approvals have been signed,” Mr Trump wrote in a position for Truth Social on Friday, adding that “we do not want tiktok to” go dark “.
Mr Trump’s latest action highlights the disobedient nature of the dilemma with Tiktok, which has endured years of control in the United States for its Chinese ties. Even when legislators and US officials have repeatedly raised questions about whether Tiktok was safe, its cement is irritating its role as cultural juggernaut, with more than 170 million users in the country using it to make mimicry and share videos.
Extension occurs in a particularly full time in US-China relations. This week, Mr Trump imposed a 34 % invoice on goods from China. On Friday, Beijing opposed 34 percent throughout the prices on imports from the United States. Mr Trump has repeatedly suggested that he could reduce China’s invoices as part of an implementation agreement, which would need the approval of the Chinese government.
The delay also renewed questions about Mr Trump’s willingness to put his presidential authority before the rule of law. The federal law aimed at changing the ownership of Tiktok or prohibited the implementation was passed last year with broad bilateral support and entered into force in January following the Supreme Court’s ruling. But Mr Trump effectively overcome the law when he stopped imposing that month.
At the moment, one thing is certain: Tiktok will continue to operate in the United States for the foreseen future. In January, the application briefly informed the time when the federal law came into force before it returned to life.
ByTedance recognized for the first time on Friday that it has been involved in Tiktok negotiations with the US government.
“There are key issues to be resolved,” a Bytedance spokesman said in an email. “Any agreement will be subject to approval under Chinese law.”
The delay followed last -minute tense negotiations and a disturbance of interest by potential buyers. The law requires more than 20 % of Tiktok or its parent company to belong to people or companies in so -called countries of foreign opponents, a list that includes China. To achieve this, byTedance could sell Tiktok or bring new investors to reduce the rate of Chinese investors, including options.
Vice President JD Vance, whom Mr Trump brought out to help oversee the talks of the deal, recently said on Thursday that an agreement was imminent. Although Amazon has bid to buy the whole company, much of speculation in recent weeks has focused on a choice in which existing US investors in ByTedance would give their shares at a new independent Tiktok company and further US investors. Blackstone and Silver Lake private shares had weighed in with Tiktok, as well as business capital company Andreessen Horowitz.
It is not clear whether this type of regulation would satisfy the law or policy makers that prompted it.
Some were particularly concerned about what could happen to Tiktok’s coveted algorithm, who calculates what they like and users type a custom food for them. By law, a new Tiktok entity cannot cooperate with ByTedance “in relation to the operation of an algorithm of content” or for data exchange.
“If this reaches an agreement where the algorithm remains in Beijing, then the whole issue is fraud, the whole issue is fraud,” said Senator Mark Warner, a Democratic of Virginia. “The law is clearly clear.”
A team of Republican legislators in two body committees – one focused on China and competition and the other on energy and trade – stated in a statement on Friday that “every resolution must ensure that the US law is followed and that the Communist Party is not accessible to the US.”
“We remain committed to the imposition of the framework introduced by Congress to preserve the American people,” said the group, which included the representative of John Moolenaar, Michigan’s Republican, who chairs the Commission for China.
Concerns about Chinese ownership of Tiktok have been brewing for years. Information officials and legislators argued that byTedance could deliver sensitive US user data to Beijing, such as location information, based on laws that allow the Chinese government to require secret data from Chinese companies and citizens for intelligence companies. They have also claimed that China could use Tiktok’s content recommendations for the misinformation of burning, the worry that escalated in the United States after the start of the Israeli-Hamas war and during the presidential election.
Tiktok has long pushed Washington’s concerns and tried to deal with them without sale. He has said that the data has never been abused or spread propaganda with Beijing order in the United States. But despite the security of many billions of dollars that tried to give the US government a unique supervision of Tiktok businesses, the company could not gain Washington’s confidence.
Lindsay Gorman, Managing Director of the Technology Program at the Marshall German Fund and Technology Consultant in the framework of Biden’s administration, said that Trump’s support for the implementation was a victory for China.
“This is the purest victory out there – that a democratic country that is supposed to be a law nation refuses to impose it on pressure from a foreign government and corporate intermediaries,” he said.
The law prevents technology companies from distributing or informing Tiktok under the threat of serious financial sanctions. Apple and Google have removed Tiktok from their application stores for almost a month until they received assurances from the Justice Ministry that they would not face fines for transporting Tiktok to stores.
Legislators suggested that these companies could face shareholder lawsuits in the future if they continue to distribute and host Tiktok in the United States under the current administration.
Akamai Technologies, a Massachusetts -based company, which helps to deliver a Tiktok video on phones, recently updates the risk factors in its annual deposit to note that “although President Trump has expanded the deadline for the deadline for the deadline for the deadline. exposed to responsibility ”.
David McCabe contributed to the report from Washington.
