President Donald Trump on Friday gave China-based ByteDance yet another reprieve ahead of a looming deadline for the company to divest its business in the United States under threat of app stores pulling its flagship app TikTok.
The original deadline was in mid-January, but was delayed to April 5 after Trump signed an Executive Order delaying the deadline in order to give China and unknown American stakeholders more time to effectuate a deal.
The orders are rooted in a law passed last year that requires ByteDance to divest its stateside business following unspecified security concerned raised by federal lawmakers and other officials. Some accuse ByteDance of collecting information on American users, then sharing that data with government officials in the Chinese Communist Party. No evidence has been presented publicly to support those claims.
Federal lawmakers rolled the ByteDance issue into an appropriations bill meant to provide funding to Israel and Ukraine for ongoing military conflicts in those countries. Then-President Joe Biden signed the measure into law last June, effectively starting the clock on a sale.
ByteDance chose to fight the law in court, and lost at every step. The Supreme Court declined to support an injunction that would have put the law on hold while ByteDance’s legal challenges continued, giving the company until January 19 to sell its business.
With no deal in place, Trump signed an Executive Order in January that gave ByteDance more time to work things out with American stakeholders. Still, app stores operated by Apple and Google pulled TikTok, making the app unavailable on devices where it was not already installed. That situation lasted a few weeks until the U.S. Department of Justice assured both tech companies that they would not face fines or otherwise be sanctioned for making the app available during the Trump-imposed moratorium. The app has since returned.
TikTok faced a new app store ban on April 5. On Friday, Trump wrote on his social media platform Truth Social that he was extending the moratorium by another 45 days through a new Executive Order, which was meant to give ByteDance more time to work things out.
“The deal requires more work to ensure all necessary approvals are signed,” Trump wrote, adding that it was not his intention to see TikTok “go dark.”
“We have made tremendous progress,” Trump claimed, without providing specifics.
Some news reports released late this week indicated that ByteDance and American officials were close to a deal that would have allowed the company to retain a stake in TikTok while divesting most of its business to American investors. But that deal was iced after the Trump administration announced tariffs on a broad array of imported goods, including those from China, which triggered retaliatory tariffs on American exports.
ByteDance has since informed the American government that Chinese officials will not approve any deal to divest its stateside business until the tariff situation is resolved, CBS News reported on Friday.
While TikTok has faced numerous assaults from officials over security concerns, some federal lawmakers — members on both sides of the political aisle — have amassed a sizable audience on the short-form video sharing app. A number of Republican and Democratic lawmakers have supported the idea of putting the law on pause indefinitely, or revoking it altogether, which would effectively allow ByteDance to continue operating TikTok in the country without a sale.
