TikTok handed 15-day reprieve on sale deadline by Trump administration

ByteDance, the Chinese parent company of TikTok, has been granted a 15-day extension to a divestment order directing it to sell off the video-sharing app’s assets in the US by Thursday amid security fears in Washington.

On Friday, the US Treasury confirmed that its Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) has given TikTok a new deadline of November 27 to come to an agreement on the sale.

ByteDance had been in negotiations with retailer Walmart and tech company Oracle to relocate TikTok’s US assets. 

On August 14, Trump ordered ByteDance to sell TikTok’s assets in the US, where the app has over 100 million users. 

The US president designated TikTok and WeChat, another Chinese-owned app, a threat, claiming that they allowed Beijing to potentially harvest users’ data and conduct surveillance in the US. ByteDance has repeatedly denied the accusation.

A federal government order prohibiting new downloads of TikTok had also been issued, but was blocked by a US district judge in late September. 

This latest extension to the deadline for TikTok to restructure comes after the initial date of September 20, and then November 12. 

ByteDance had asked for a 30-day extension to the deadline earlier this week, claiming on Tuesday that it had not received “substantive feedback” from the Trump administration. 

The company said on Friday it had put forward proposals to create “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.”

Think your friends would be interested? Share this story!