Trump Administration Grants ByteDance TikTok Sale Extension

The protracted sale of the short video-sharing app TikTok to new owners has become a little more protracted this week.

The Trump administration on Wednesday granted TikTok’s Chinese owners (ByteDance) a new seven day extension of the order to sell the company.

On 15 November the US Commerce Department had delayed enforcement of its ban on TikTok. It gave ByteDance a 15 day extension of an order directing it to sell its TikTok, which was due to expire on Friday.

Legal challenge

ByteDance earlier this month had filed a challenge to the order in a US appeals court.

This came after US President Donald Trump signed an executive order in August that would ban TikTok if the company did not divest its US operations within 90 days.

The move forced ByteDance to consider offers from several companies, before settling on an arrangement that would shift its US operations into a new company called TikTok Global, in which US firms Oracle and Walmart would have a stake.

With the new extension, ByteDance now has a new deadline of 4 December.

TikTok declined to comment beyond the filing.

New proposal

In the meantime, ByteDance has made a new proposal aimed at addressing the US government’s concerns, a person briefed on the matter who declined to detail that proposal, told Reuters.

A US Treasury representative said the extension was granted to review a recently received “revised submission”.

The executive order against TikTok (and WeChat owner Tencent) was because the US believes they pose a national security risk because the app collects data on users, which “threatens to allow the Chinese Communist Party access to Americans’ personal and proprietary information.”

ByteDance bought Shanghai-based Musical.ly in 2017 and used it as the basis for TikTok, which became the first Chinese social media app to become broadly popular in the US.