That didn’t take long. Soon after taking office, President Donald Trump signed a swathe of executive orders. Among them was a temporary pause on the law that banned TikTok in the US.
With the executive order, Trump’s Justice Department will not enforce the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act for 75 days, effectively extending the amount of time the company has to reach a deal. In a statement, Trump said that the “unfortunate timing” of the law, which went into effect during President Joe Biden’s last hours in office, “interferes with my ability to assess the national security and foreign policy implications of the Act’s prohibitions before they take effect.”
He wrote that he would review “sensitive intelligence” related to the national security concerns raised by the app’s critics and “evaluate the sufficiency of mitigation measures TikTok has taken to date.” The company previously undertook a years-long effort, known as Project Texas, to move US user data to servers hosted by Oracle. The arrangement was made after years of negotiating with the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), but those talks halted last year.
TikTok (and other ByteDance apps) went offline late Saturday ahead of the law taking effect on Sunday. The TikTok outage only lasted a matter of hours, however. Service was gradually restored after Trump pledged to sign an executive order to suspend the law after he was sworn in on Monday. He affirmed that there would be “no liability for any company that helped keep TikTok from going dark before my order.” Trump also proposed a joint venture that would see US interests take a 50 percent stake in TikTok.
Earlier on Monday, China (where ByteDance is based) signaled an openness to striking a deal with the US that would allow TikTok to remain active there for the long run, despite previously saying it would block a forced sale of the app. “When it comes to actions such as the operation and acquisition of businesses, we believe they should be independently decided by companies in accordance with market principles,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning said. “If it involves Chinese companies, China’s laws and regulations should be observed.”
During his first administration, Trump sought to ban TikTok in the US. He signed executive orders to that effect, which included an attempt to force ByteDance to sell its US business. That didn’t come to pass at the time. But pressure on TikTok mounted during the Biden Administration, with the former president signing a bill last year that called for ByteDance to sell TikTok or face a ban in the US.
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