President Trump intends to again extend the deadline for when TikTok must be separated from its Chinese owner, ByteDance, or face a ban in the United States, its third reprieve this year.
Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said on Tuesday that Mr. Trump would sign an executive order this week giving TikTok 90 more days — to mid-September — to find a new owner to comply with a federal law that requires the company to change its ownership structure to resolve national security concerns. The previous deadline is set to expire Thursday.
“As he has said many times, President Trump does not want TikTok to go dark,” Ms. Leavitt said in a statement.
Mr. Trump has repeatedly declined to enforce the law, which the Supreme Court upheld in January after Congress passed it with wide bipartisan support last year. The app’s future is part of the discussion in his administration’s ongoing trade talks with China.
Mr. Trump, who issued similar delays in January and in April, has given TikTok an unexpected lifeline after its future in the United States appeared to be doomed. The president tried to ban TikTok in his first term but flipped his stance on the app last year — a shift that is credited in part to one of his donors, who has a sizable stake in ByteDance, as well as his own growing popularity on the app.
The repeated extensions have raised concerns among a handful of lawmakers, who have urged Mr. Trump to clarify his plans for TikTok or force it to stop operating in the United States. They and others in Washington worry that TikTok could hand over sensitive U.S. user data to Beijing, like location information, or that China could use TikTok’s content recommendations to sway opinions and spread misinformation in the United States.
But broadly, there does not appear to be much political appetite to force a deal or shutter the app, despite the law.
“This is just a wild situation that we’re in — the president has essentially nullified a law because he doesn’t like it,” said Alan Rozenshtein, a former national security adviser to the Justice Department and an associate professor at the University of Minnesota Law School. “What’s crazier is the U.S. companies are going along with it. Since they’ve gone along with it so far, they may as well keep going along with it.”
The law had called on ByteDance to sell TikTok to a non-Chinese owner by Jan. 19. It targeted app store operators and internet hosting companies with steep financial penalties if they distributed or maintained TikTok after that date, but Mr. Trump’s administration assured them in letters that his Justice Department would not assess those penalties while his delays were in place.
A deal, orchestrated by Vice President JD Vance, seemed imminent in April. It would have spun TikTok into a new company with new American investors, reducing the ownership stakes of Chinese investors. The private equity giant Blackstone and the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz had both expressed interest. But the talks fell apart over the then-escalating tariff war between the United States and China.
ByteDance, which rarely comments to reporters, said at the time that there were “key matters to be resolved” and that “any agreement will be subject to approval under Chinese law.”
Despite the overhang of the federal law, TikTok has been working hard to show advertisers and the American public that it’s operating as usual. The company promoted its ad tools in a splashy pitch to marketers in New York last month, which was hosted by the comedian Hasan Minhaj, and has been presenting to advertisers again this week on the French Riviera at the annual Cannes Lions advertising festival.
Khartoon Weiss, the company’s vice president of global business solutions, said Tuesday that TikTok was “absolutely confident in a resolution.”
“We are just very confident where we’re going, and so are over one billion users with us,” Ms. Weiss said at a press briefing in Cannes.
TikTok is also dealing with the more typical issues that face modern social media platforms, like accusations that the app fuels eating disorders among young people. That was highlighted this month when it banned search results for the hashtag #SkinnyTok after pressure from European regulators.
Some lawmakers have urged Mr. Trump to enforce the law in recent months, though those efforts have been somewhat tepid.
Representative John Moolenaar, a Michigan Republican who heads a House committee focused on China, was asked about rumors of another TikTok extension at a conference this month.
“The strongest way for us to negotiate would be to let it go dark and see if China comes to the table,” he said.
Separately, a group of Democratic lawmakers, including Representatives Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey and Ritchie Torres of New York, wrote a letter to Mr. Trump this month seeking clarity on his plans for TikTok and DeepSeek, the Chinese artificial intelligence start-up. The lawmakers said TikTok and DeepSeek “raise legitimate and well-documented security concerns,” and sought more information on what they called “the advantageous treatment of foreign technology with ties to the Chinese Communist Party.”
Chris Cameron contributed reporting.
Sapna Maheshwari reports on TikTok, technology and emerging media companies. She has been a business reporter for more than a decade. Contact her at [email protected].
The post Trump to Again Extend TikTok’s Reprieve From U.S. Ban appeared first on New York Times.
