What’s at stake
TikTok is in limbo after a Saturday deadline came and went without a firm proposal from President Donald Trump’s administration to avert a US ban.
Trump said Friday that he would sign a directive ordering another 75-day extension for the company, citing “tremendous progress” on a possible deal. On Sunday, he confirmed that trade tensions with Beijing due to his tariffs got in the way of a breakthrough.
A bipartisan law passed by Congress and signed by then-President Joe Biden last year effectively banned TikTok in the US after 270 days if its Chinese parent company ByteDance doesn’t sell the popular video app.
Despite a failed effort to ban the app during his first term, Trump has more recently embraced TikTok, seeing it as key to his 2024 victory.
The president already tried to get around an earlier deadline in the law: He issued an order to delay a planned Jan. 19 deadline for the app in order to buy his administration more time to save TikTok in the US.
Trump’s involvement in the search process — including his administration’s decision to entertain a deal that would leave TikTok’s algorithm under ByteDance control — has revived questions about what role the US government can and should play in any deal.
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Who’s making the case
Michael Sobolik, senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and former legislative assistant to Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, says it’s appropriate for the US administration to be involved so long as any deal fulfills the national security goals of the law:
“The main issue that Congress zeroed in on with the legislation was making sure that TikTok is no longer controlled by a foreign adversary entity, and they empowered the president to negotiate a divestiture to make sure that is the actual outcome. If the Trump administration is doing that, then not only am I perfectly happy for them to be involved, I want them to be involved, because the end state that matters from a national security perspective is making sure that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) doesn’t control a social media app that over half of Americans have on their phones.
“I think that’s a core function of the US government, it’s a core national security function of the executive, and Congress was right to point out this threat. And so, I invite and welcome the administration’s role, so long as they actually negotiate a qualified divestiture that separates TikTok from CCP control.”
Anupam Chander, a Georgetown University law professor and expert on global tech regulation, raises free speech concerns about the US government’s involvement in the search for a new TikTok owner:
“Having the president of the United States handpick the owners of a company seems to run counter to the tenets of capitalism. But here it is even worse than that, because in this case the president is choosing the new owners of a massive speech platform, thus undermining not only capitalism, but free speech. Surprisingly, it was the Biden administration that handed the incoming president this enormous power to approve or disapprove a sale of TikTok. Perhaps the Biden team miscalculated that Biden would win, or that TikTok would sell much earlier.
“And to make it worse, President Trump seems likely to use the power handed to him by President Biden to transfer control of this speech platform to corporate leaders who are his political allies. The Biden team’s targeting of TikTok is an act that will go down in the annals of political malpractice.”
Notable
- The US could ease tariffs on China if it were to greenlight a TikTok sale, Trump recently suggested.
- Trump’s delay of the ban put congressional Republicans who overwhelmingly backed it in an awkward position, Semafor wrote earlier this year.