President Donald Trump said he expects to obtain a briefing on Oracle ‘s offer for the Chinese-owned TikTok video-sharing app on Thursday and acknowledged that there is no legal way to allow the US Treasury to cut the deal — a move that was criticised by experts as unprecedented and probably illegal. Some in the United States also raised questions about the agreement, worrying that ByteDance Ltd., the Chinese company owned by TikTok, will retain access to data on the United States’ 100 million users of TikTok.
Earlier, the president said he would ban TikTok unless it was sold to an American company. In an order released on August 6, Trump said TikTok “reportedly censors material that the Chinese Communist Party considers to be politically sensitive,” is potentially a source of misinformation campaigns and “threatens to give the Chinese Communist Party access to personal and proprietary information from Americans.”
TikTok insists that it has not shared and does not share U.S. user data with the Chinese government, says it does not censor videos at the behest of the Chinese authorities and states that U.S. operations moderators are led by a U.S. team. A Trump executive order has set a deadline of September 20, but what will happen on that day is not clear. TikTok has sued for stopping the ban, which also affects WeChat, a separately operated Chinese messaging app that is used by several million in the US.
