Trump Administration Gives TikTok More Time to Reach Deal

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration gave TikTok’s Chinese owner more time to reach a deal to sell the app, after demanding that it divest its interest in the social media service over national security concerns.

President Trump had signed an executive order in August requiring that TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, sell any assets that allowed it to operate the app in the United States by Thursday. That deadline was extended 15 days until Nov. 27, according to a document that TikTok filed Friday in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.

The extension keeps in limbo a deal that was aimed at preventing the U.S. government from banning the popular video app. ByteDance has offered to sell stakes in TikTok to the American cloud computing firm Oracle and Walmart. Under the deal, Oracle would supervise TikTok’s data to mitigate concerns that the app could feed customer information about Americans to the Chinese government.

The Trump administration has put pressure on TikTok, where people share lip syncing and other videos, as part of its campaign against China’s influence in the global technology industry. American officials have limited the use of Chinese equipment in 5G wireless networks, taken issue with U.S. companies’ backing undersea internet cables into mainland China and increasingly targeted consumer apps like TikTok and WeChat, a messaging app owned by the Chinese internet giant Tencent.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/13/technology/trump-tiktok.html