TikTok owner to get another 7 days to seel its US business

TikTok's deadline to finalize a US buyer has been extended for the second time in less than a month.
November 28, 2020 | 10:30
tiktok granted temporary reprieve as judge halts trump download ban TikTok granted temporary reprieve as judge halts Trump download ban
chinas bytedance says tiktok will be its subsidiary under deal with trump China's ByteDance says TikTok will be its subsidiary under deal with Trump
us bans downloads of tiktok and wechat as of this sunday US bans downloads of TikTok and WeChat as of this Sunday
The Trump administration gave TikTok one more week to conclude a proposed takeover deal by Oracle and Walmart (Photo: CNN)
The Trump administration gave TikTok one more week to conclude a proposed takeover deal by Oracle and Walmart (Photo: CNN)

The Trump administration on Wednesday gave the short-form video app's Chinese owner, ByteDance, until December 4 to conclude a proposed takeover deal by Oracle and Walmart, according to a spokesperson for the Treasury department.

"The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) has granted ByteDance a one-week extension...to allow time to review a revised submission that the Committee recently received," the spokesperson said.

As reported by CNN, in an executive order this summer, Trump set November 12 as the hard deadline for ByteDance to divest TikTok, which has more than 100 million users in the United States. But as the deadline came and went, confusion reigned over what consequences might be in store for TikTok. Trump's executive order did not say that TikTok would be banned if it missed the deadline; in fact, it outlines no consequences at all.

Earlier this month, the US government quietly extended that deadline by two weeks to this Friday, November 27, and has now kicked the can further down the road.

TikTok did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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(Photo: NBC News)

Trump has labeled TikTok a danger to national security — a claim the company has denied and cybersecurity experts doubt — he issued another executive order in August that would have made it illegal to have any business dealings with the company.

The US Commerce Department tried to enforce that order by attempting to ban downloads of the app in September. The agency also said that by mid-November, internet companies would be banned from carrying TikTok's traffic.

Both of those measures have been temporarily blocked by federal judges after TikTok and TikTok content creators sued in separate cases to prevent them from going into effect.

ByteDance's proposed solution to the order, the deal with Walmart and Oracle, would see TikTok reorganized as a new, global company headquartered in the United States, with US investors accounting for a majority of the new company's ownership.

Trump tentatively approved that deal in September when it was announced. But the arrangement has yet to be finalized by the US government. (It would also still need to be greenlit by Chinese regulators.)

For now, until next Friday, TikTok users will still be able to access the app while the Trump administration's ban remains suspended due to litigation.

Earlier in mid-October, Pakistan became the lastest country to ban TikTok app, citing a circulation of videos that it deemed “immoral and indecent.”

The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority said in a statement that it was banning TikTok “in view of number of complaints from different segments of the society against immoral/indecent content.” It said it had already informed the company about complaints about its content, but TikTok’s administrators did not address their concerns, according to NY Times.

Pakistani information minister Shibli Faraz recently told media that Prime Minister Imran Khan believes social media applications, particularly TikTok, should be banned because they are harming societal values.

With the issuance, Pakistan joined the long list of country that ban China’s TikTok app.

In August, Hong Kong passed a sweeping security law earlier this year that caused TikTok to discontinue operating there, according to Axios.

Indonesia, one of TikTok's more popular markets, temporarily banned the app in 2018 for "inappropriate content." The ban was quickly overturned once the company agreed to censor “negative content,” per Reuters.

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Jasmine Le
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