New executive order gives TikTok parent ByteDance 90 days to rid itself of assets used to support its short-form video app
Last week, Trump issued executive orders that banned U.S. companies from doing business with ByteDance and super-app WeChat after a particular date in the middle of next month. The president said at the time that both firms were threats to U.S. foreign policy, national security, and the economy. WeChat is used by over one billion people as an email app, a browser, a messaging app, a shopping app, and an app that makes mobile payments. Should U.S. companies get banned from having transactions with WeChat, Apple would no longer be allowed to distribute it from its App Store which could seriously demolish iPhone sales in China. To show you just how much the Chinese depend on WeChat, a recent survey on Weibo asked 1.2 million people whether they would give up WeChat or their iPhone if forced to choose one. 95% of those surveyed said that they would rather give up their iPhone.
TikTok responded by saying that it spent a full year trying to talk to the U.S. government in good faith. “What we encountered instead was that the Administration paid no attention to facts, dictated terms of an agreement without going through standard legal processes, and tried to insert itself into negotiations between private businesses.”