Donald Trump orders the company that owns TikTok to sell its assets in the United States

Washington – President Donald Trump gave the Chinese company ByteDance 90 days on Friday to sell all its assets used to support the popular application TikTok in United States.

Trump said in his decree that there is “credible evidence that leads me to believe that ByteDance … could take actions that threaten to harm the national security of the United States.”

The president last week ordered broad but vague bans on deals with the Chinese owners of TikTok and the messaging app. WeChat, which he described as a threat to national security, foreign policy and the economy of the United States.

The implications of the TikTok-related decrees for the app’s 100 million US users, many of them teens or young adults, who use it to post and view short videos are unknown. Trump also ordered ByteDance on Friday to dispose of “all information obtained or derived” from TikTok users in the United States.

Microsoft holds talks to buy parts of TikTok.

White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany defended Trump’s previous decrees on TikTok and WeChat on Thursday when she told reporters that the president was exercising his emergency authority under a 1977 law allowing the president to regulate. international trade to face unusual threats.

“The government is committed to protecting the American people from all cyber threats, and these applications collect significant amounts of private information from users,” McEnany said, adding that the Chinese government can access and use that data.

TikTok said that for nearly a year it tried to reach out in “good faith” to the US government to address these concerns.

“What we found instead was that the government did not pay attention to the facts, dictated the conditions of an agreement without going through the ordinary legal process and tried to insert itself in the negotiations between private companies,” the company said in a statement.

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