Trump extends TikTok shutdown deadline for fourth time after reaching framework deal with China
Washington – President Donald Trump officially extended the deadline to keep the application on Tiktok social networks available in the United States until December 16, giving time to finish the agreement announced Monday after the interviews between US and Chinese government officials.
The executive decree signed Tuesday by Trump was the fourth time that he has circumvented the federal law to extend the deadline for the Tiktok associated with China to sell its assets to an American company or face a ban. The initial deadline established by the Congress took place on January 19 of this year, one day before Trump took the oath for his second term.
Trump was asked Tuesday on the framework agreement he announced a day earlier and repeated that he would discuss Tiktok with Chinese President Xi Jinping on Friday. He said that there are companies who wish to buy the application of social media belonging to Bytedance and that the details of his potential contenders would be announced soon.
“I hate to see a value like the one thrown out the window,” said Trump when leaving the White House, with his wife, First Lady Melania Trump, for a state visit to the United Kingdom.
The framework came out of a meeting in Madrid which ended on Monday between the US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Chinese Deputy Prime Minister He Lifeng, among other officials.
Bessent told journalists that the objective was to change Tiktok’s assets to the American property of his operations in America, although he refused to discuss the details of the framework.
Li Chenggang, representative of Chinese international trade, told journalists that the parties had reached a basic “basic consensus” to resolve cooperation problems related to Tiktok, reduce obstacles to investments and promote related economic and commercial cooperation.
The American president has warmed up in Tiktok and the prospect of keeping him alive under the conviction that this helped him gain younger voters during the 2024 presidential election. However, the law forcing his sale in the United States was based on the possible security risks that the application sets in his data collection.
Prolonged negotiations between the United States and China above Tiktok could finally mean little because its novelty has “slowly disappeared,” said political science professor at the University of Syracuse, Dimitar Gueorguiev, in a statement.
“The American-China Agreement on Tiktok can look like a breakthrough, but it may be a pyrrhic victory,” said Gueorguev. “His famous algorithm, formerly considered only powerful, has lost a large part of his mysticism – Copycat’s efforts show that the secret was not the code itself, but the advantageous effects and the effects of the Tiktok network. Any American buyer buys a market share and a user base, not transformative technology. ”
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