The Trump administration on Wednesday extended the deadline for Chinese company ByteDance to sell its video-sharing app TikTok by another week to December 4, in a sign that the outgoing president is letting one of his high-profile moves on China slide. According to a court filing, ByteDance said the US government entity the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) has granted the company the extension to sell TikTok to American buyers Oracle and Walmart. US President Donald Trump signed an executive order in August to compel the sale of the ultra popular Chinese app, which has more than 100 million American users, claiming the platform’s Chinese owner could be forced to hand over a massive amount of US user data to Beijing and posed a national security threat. Trump’s order set the deadline for TikTok to be sold by November 12, which was extended by CFIUS to November 27. A representative for TikTok did not immediately comment. TikTok was caught in the middle of the worsening US China tech war that began with Huawei Technologies and ZTE getting on the blacklist as national security threats. In August, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo unveiled a five-pronged Clean Network initiative aimed at blocking Chinese cloud service providers, telecommunications carriers and social media platforms like TikTok and another tech giant Tencent’s WeChat. Pompeo called the providers owned by China “malign actors” on ideological grounds. Under pressure from the US government, ByteDance – which has repeatedly denied wrongdoing – has been in talks for months to finalise a deal to sell a minority stake to Oracle and Walmart in the hopes of assuaging US national security concerns. Since the presidential election on November 3, ByteDance said it had not heard back from the government. The company requested a 30-day extension in court and was granted 15 days. ByteDance launches a cloud documents app as TikTok struggles overseas The deadline to sell TikTok’s US operations is linked to a broader set of restrictions that would ban American service providers from doing business with TikTok, essentially preventing the social media platform from operating normally in the US. ByteDance has been seeking reprieves from federal judges. At least four lawsuits are attempting to overturn the ban and the forced sale. TikTok argued that the ban, if implemented, would cause “irreparable damage” to its business. The Chinese tech company also said in court that the forced sale itself was illegal and violated the US Constitution. In a separate lawsuit, ByteDance also sued President Trump, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross and the Commerce Department for proposing the bans, calling them unconstitutional and a violation of TikTok’s rights to due process. TikTok maker ByteDance refocuses on casual and indie gaming Federal Judge Carl Nichols in Washington blocked the phase one restriction in September that would have stopped new downloads of the app in the US. In late October, Judge Wendy Beetlestone in Philadelphia prohibited the November ban in a separate case filed by three TikTok users. In the rulings, Judge Nichols said the president had overstepped his authority in invoking a national emergency in the case of TikTok. ByteDance has made a new proposal aimed at addressing the US government’s concerns, said a person briefed on the matter who declined to give details. A US Treasury representative said the extension was granted to review a recently received “revised submission”. Trump’s WeChat, TikTok bans will go through, White House aide says ByteDance made the proposal after disclosing on November 10 that it had submitted four prior proposals including one in November that sought to address US concerns by “creating a new entity, wholly owned by Oracle, Walmart and existing US investors in ByteDance, that would be responsible for handling TikTok’s US user data and content moderation”. Separate restrictions on TikTok from the US Commerce Department have been blocked by federal courts, including transaction curbs that TikTok said could effectively ban the app’s use in the United States. A Commerce Department ban on Apple and Alphabet’s Google offering TikTok for download for new US users that had been set to take effect on September 27 has also been blocked.
