President Donald Trump of US has given popular Chinese-owned video app TikTok six weeks to sell its US operations to an American company. Trump gave the company’s Chinese parent ByteDance until mid-September to strike a deal.
The pressure for a sale of TikTok’s US and international business, based in Los Angeles, left the company and ByteDance facing tough decisions. Trump has made TikTok the latest front in the ongoing political and trade battles between Washington and Beijing
“I set a date of around September 15, at which point it’s going to be out of business in the United States. Trump further threw a surprise new condition in any deal, saying the sale of TikTok’s US business would have to result in a significant payout to the US Treasury for initiating it. “Whatever the price is, the United States should get a very large percentage of that price because we’re making it possible. A very substantial portion of that price is going to have to come into the Treasury of the United States, because we’re making it possible for this deal to happen. They don’t have any rights unless we give it to them,” He said.
“It’s got to be an American company. It’s got to be owned here because we don’t want to have any problem with security. Sell or shut down”
Trump said that Microsoft was in talks to buy TikTok, which has as many as one billion worldwide users who make quirky 60-second videos with its smartphone app.
The President compared the demand for a piece of the pie to a landlord demanding under-the-table “key money” from a new tenant, a practice widely illegal including in New York, where the billionaire president built his real estate empire.
But US officials say the app constitutes a national security risk because it could share millions of Americans’ personal data with Chinese intelligence. The app has been under formal investigation on US national security grounds because it collects large amounts of personal data on all its users and is legally bound to share that with authorities in Beijing if they demand it.
