If you’ve been keeping a close eye on all the TikTok news, then you would have realized that the deadline for the video-sharing app given by the U.S. government has come and gone with nothing really happening. They were supposed to have divested their American assets by November 12 but nothing really happened on that day so Tiktok and its users were left wondering what comes next. Now it looks like there are some new developments as TikTok informed a federal judge that they were given a 15-day extension by the U.S. government.
The social network owned by Chinese company Bytedance informed a federal judge on Friday that they have been given until November 27, or 15 days after the last deadline, to finalize the sale of their American assets to Oracle and Walmart. It still doesn’t resolve all the questions they’re currently facing, as well as the lawsuits they have filed against the federal government, but it does give them a bit of a leeway to settle these matters.
Originally, the US Commerce Department tried to enforce an executive order by President Trump to make it illegal to have any business dealings with TikTok and essentially forbidding US citizens to download the app. They would also eventually prevent internet companies from carrying any TikTok traffic. But both the company and some of its content creators filed separate cases to block these orders.
While that executive order was put on hold, the other one required TikTok to sell its American operations to an American company by November 12. They were in talks and had a provisional deal with Oracle and Walmart, which Trump has reportedly and tentatively approved. Still, the deal hasn’t been finalized and no update has been released regarding this agreement.
So for now, we still have 15 days to wait and see what fate awaits TikTok and its millions of users in the U.S. And with the Trump administration set to end in January (whether he concedes or not), Bytedance may be hoping for a more understanding Biden presidency, or at least one that doesn’t think they’re spying for the Chinese government.
