The American President Donald Trump is postponing the forced sale of TikTok for the third time. The Chinese parent company ByteDance gets another ninety days for a deal with the United States.
It is the third time he has done that. The first time was on January 20. TikTok had then just been briefly offline because it had been decided earlier that week that the app would be banned in the US. Immediately on the first day of his presidency, Trump signed a decree to reverse that. He had previously promised to postpone the ban so that he could make a deal with ByteDance.
With that decree, the ban was postponed until April. It seemed that Trump had then reached an agreement with ByteDance to split TikTok into a new company with American owners. But that did not happen: China withdrew because of Trump’s import duties. Trump again postponed the ban to get more time for the negotiations around the platform.
Now too, the president wants more time to get the deal done. It is not clear how often he can or will extend the ban.
That Trump wants to sign an order is a striking choice. He was the one who started the discussion about a TikTok ban about four years ago. He did not succeed in getting a ban around at the time. In the meantime, Trump has adjusted his opinion. According to him, a majority of the youth votes during the presidential elections were due to campaigning via the app.
US sees TikTok as a danger to security
American intelligence services call TikTok a danger to national security. They fear that data from American citizens is being passed on to the Chinese government. The services are also afraid that China is influencing users via the platform.
TikTok denies the allegations and says it does not maintain close ties with the Chinese government. In addition, according to the makers, you can’t even call TikTok Chinese, because it is mostly in the hands of international investors.
An American ban on TikTok does not mean that the app will also be banned in Europe. Dutch users will simply retain access to the video app, although they will have to miss many American videos.