President Donald Trump on Friday gave the Chinese company ByteDance 90 days to divest itself of any assets won’t to support the favored TikTok app within the us .
Trump’s executive order said there’s credible evidence that leads me to believe that ByteDance might take action that threatens to impair the national security of the us .
Trump last week ordered sweeping but vague bans on dealings with the Chinese owners of TikTok and therefore the messaging app WeChat, saying they’re a threat to US national security, policy and therefore the economy.
It remains unclear what the TikTok orders mean for the app’s 100 million US users, many of them teenagers or young adults who use it to post and watch short-form videos.
Trump on Friday also ordered ByteDance to divest itself of “any data obtained or derived” from TikTok users within the U.S.
Microsoft is in talks to shop for parts of TikTok.
White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany defended Trump’s earlier TikTok and WeChat orders Thursday, telling reporters he was exercising his emergency authority under a 1977 law enabling the president to manage international commerce to deal with unusual threats.
The administration is committed to protecting the American people from all cyber threats and these apps collect significant amounts of personal data on users, said McEnany, adding that the Chinese government can access and use such data.
TikTok said it spent nearly a year trying to interact in straightness with the United States government to deal with these concerns.
