The president of the United States, Donald Trump, has granted a 75-day extension for the Chinese short video social network TikTok to continue operating, despite the law that prohibits it from operating as of this Sunday because it is still under the control of the Chinese company. ByteDance. The extension is included in one of the executive orders that the new head of state signed just hours after his inauguration this Monday at the Capitol in Washington, and in which he asks the Department of Justice not to take any action during that period on the social network. The executive order “gives me the right to close it or sell it,” the president said when signing the document in a ceremony in the Oval Office, “and we will make that decision.”
The president reiterated the proposal to solve the platform situation that he had raised in recent days, creating a joint venture company in which the United States has half of the ownership. “There are a lot of American people who would be interested” in participating in that company, Trump said.
The Chinese social network abruptly stopped working this weekend in the United States for 13 hours, until Trump issued a statement announcing his intention to issue this order and reach an agreement on control of the platform. When announcing this interruption in its service, TikTok had thanked the president for his willingness to find a solution, in a message to its 170 million users in the United States.
The law passed in May with bipartisan support requires TikTok to put itself up for sale and separate from the Beijing-based company ByteDance by Sunday, January 19, or be banned in the United States, over concerns that its ties with China could harm national security. The Supreme Court endorsed the measure last Friday in a ruling in which it accepted these arguments, after the platform had filed a lawsuit against the law.
TikTok claimed that the rule violates the right to freedom of expression of the 170 million Americans who use the platform to obtain information, create content or communicate with the rest of the world, something that the Supreme Court rejected.
The Department of Justice had argued in that hearing that the risk to national security posed by TikTok is twofold. On the one hand, its massive collection of user data means that this type of information could end up in the hands of the Chinese Government, something that the platform’s CEO, Singaporean Shou Zi Chew, flatly denied last year in a hearing in Congress. On the other hand, there is fear that the social network could disseminate propaganda content in favor of China.
In his remarks this Monday in the Oval Office, Trump downplayed those fears. Regarding data collection, he maintained that “the majority of TikTok users in the United States are young” and the interest in the information that China can obtain from them is limited.
During his first term, Trump had been very critical of the platform and had even threatened to ban it. But during last year’s election campaign he made a 180-degree turn to begin defending it. The reason for the change, according to him: “I started using” the application, one of the tools his team used to capture the interest of younger voters.
Shou was one of the guests this Monday at Trump’s inauguration ceremony, held this Monday in the small space of the Capitol Rotunda and not outside the building, as usual, due to the wave of intense cold that Washington is suffering. this week. Along with Shou, other leaders in the technology sector also featured prominently, such as the CEO of Meta, Mark Zuckerberg, and the founder of Amazon, Jeff Bezos, among the limited number of attendees.
At the time the Supreme Court issued its ruling on Friday, Trump had spoken with Chinese President Xi Jinping in a friendly telephone conversation, according to both parties, and in which the TikTok situation occupied a prominent place. The new American president had invited his counterpart to the inauguration ceremony. Although Xi did not attend, Beijing sent Vice President Han Zheng, in a sign of deference.
