President Trump gave Tiktok on Friday a different delay by announcing that he would extend the deadline for when the popular app had to close a deal to be separated from the Chinese owner, bytedance or a ban in the United States.
Tiktok, who had confronted a deal for a deal, now has another 75 days to find a new owner to meet a federal law that requires that it must change its structure to resolve concern about national security. That places the new deadline for a deal in mid -June.
The delay this year was President Trump for Tiktok. He first paused the enforcement of the law in January, even after it was unanimously confirmed by the Supreme Court.
“The deal requires more work to ensure that all necessary approvals are signed,” Mr Trump wrote in a message about Truth Social on Friday, and added that “we don't want Tiktok will be” to be “.” He added that he looked out to “collaborate with Tiktok and China” to close the deal and suggested that he would consider using the app as a negotiating control with China.
Mr. Trump's newest action emphasizes the stubborn nature of the dilemma with Tiktok, which has passed years of control in the United States about his Chinese ties. Even when legislators and American officials repeatedly raised questions about whether Tiktok was safe, the app confirmed its role as a cultural Juggernaut, with more than 170 million users in the country who use it to make memes and share videos.
The expansion takes place at a particularly loaded time in relations between the US and China. This week Mr. Trump has raised a rate of 34 percent on goods from China. On Friday, Beijing took revenge with 34 percent over the entire rates for import from the United States. Mr. Trump repeatedly suggested that he could lower Chinese rates as part of a deal for the app, which needs the approval of the Chinese government.
The delay also renewed questions about Mr Trump's willingness to ask his presidential power for the rule of law. The federal law that was intended to change the ownership of TIKTOK or to have the app prohibited was adopted last year with broad Bipartisan support and came into force in January after the Supreme Court's ruling. But Mr. Trump effectively canceled the law when he paused its enforcement that month.
For the time being one thing is certain: Tiktok will continue to operate in the United States for the near future. In January the app briefly became dark around the time that the federal law came into force before he flickered back to life.
Bytedance recognized on Friday for the first time that it was involved in the Tiktok negotiations with the US government.
“There are important things that need to be resolved,” said a bytedance spokesperson in an e -mail. “Every agreement is subject to approval according to Chinese legislation.”
The delay followed on time, last-minute negotiations and a flurry of interest from potential buyers. The law requires no more than 20 percent of Tiktok or its parent company to be the property of people or companies in so -called foreign opponents, a list of China. To achieve that, bytedance could sell Tiktok or attract new investors to reduce the share of Chinese investors, among other things.
Vice -President JD Vance, who tapped Mr. Trump to supervise the deal conversations, said as recently as Thursday that a deal was imminent. Although Amazon has made an attempt to buy the entire company, a large part of the speculation in recent weeks was aimed at an option in which existing American investors in Bytedance would transfer their interests to a new independent global Tiktok company, and extra American investors would be caused. The Private Equity companies Blackstone and Silver Lake had weighed an interest in Tiktok, just like the risk capital company Andreessen Horowitz.
It is not clear whether that kind of scheme would satisfy the law, or the policy makers who have insisted on it.
Some were particularly worried about what could happen to the coveted algorithm of Tiktok, which finds out what users like and populates an adapted feed for them. According to the law, a new Tiktok entity cannot collaborate with Bytedance “with regard to the functioning of an algorithm for contents recommendation” or for sharing data.
“If this ends with a deal with the algorithm in Beijing, then the whole is a scam, it's a whole thing a fraud,” said Senator Mark Warner, Democrat van Virginia, Friday. “The law is explicitly clear.”
A group of republican legislators in two house committees – one focused on China and competition and the other on energy and trade – said on Friday in a statement that “every resolution must ensure that American law is followed and that the Chinese communist party has no access to American user data or the possibility of manipulating the content of Americans.”
“We continue to commit ourselves to maintaining the framework founded by the congress to protect the American people,” said the group, including representative John Moolenaar, Republican by Michigan, chairman of the China Commission.
The concerns about the Chinese property of Tiktok have been brewing for years. Intelligence officers and legislators have argued that bytedance could hand over sensitive American user data to Beijing, such as location information, based on laws that enable the Chinese government to secretly demand data from Chinese companies and citizens to collect information. They also claimed that China could use Tiktok's contents to feed wrong information, a concern that escalated in the United States after the start of the Israel-Hamas War and during the presidential election.
Tiktok has long pushed back on Washington's worries and tried them without tackling a sale. It has said that it has never abused data or distributed propaganda on behalf of Beijing in the United States. But despite a safety effort of millions of dollars who wanted to give the US government a unique supervision of Tiktok's activities, the company could not win the trust of Washington.
Lindsay Gorman, the director of the technology program of the German Marshall Fund and a technology advisor under the BIDEN administration, said that the support of the Trump administration for the app was a victory for China.
“That is the purest victory there is – that a democratic country that is supposed to be a nation of laws refuses to force it on pressure from a foreign government and its business intermediaries,” she said.
The law prohibits technology companies to distribute or update Tiktok under the threat of serious financial fines. Apple and Google have removed Tiktok for almost a month from their app stores until they received the guarantees from the Ministry of Justice that they would not receive fines for wearing tapping in stores.
The legislators have suggested that those companies may be confronted with shareholders in the future if they continue to distribute and hosts under the current administration in the United States in the United States.
Akamai Technologies, a company established in Massachusetts that helps to deliver Tiktok videos to telephones, recently updated the risk factors in his annual submission to note that “Although President Trump has extended the enforcement period for a ban on Chinese application, there is no insurance that we will not be exposed.”
David McCabe has contributed to reporting from Washington.
