On Friday, United States President Donald Trump ordered ByteDance, the Chinese company that owns TikTok, to sell all of its US assets that support that video app off within 90 days.
The president's executive order states the government has sufficient evidence to prove that the parent company is threatening the country's national security.
Fight against TikTok
According to AP News, last week, Trump ordered extensive but vague bans on making deals with ByteDance, who owns both TikTok and WeChat. The US president said the apps present a threat to the country's national security, foreign policy, and the economy.
Despite Trump's continuous crackdown on the video app, it remains unclear how the orders against TikTok affect its more than 100 million US users, the majority of whom are teenagers and young adults who post short videos.
On Friday, Trump also ordered the Chinese parent company to divest itself of data or information it has gathered from all of its users from the United States. Trump's order also comes amid Microsoft's talks of its intention of buying parts of TikTok.
Kayleigh McEnany, the White House press secretary, supported the US president's previous orders against TikTok and WeChat on Thursday, saying Trump was using his emergency authority stated under the 1977 legislation that gives the US president the power to fight against unusual threats by regulating international commerce.
The press secretary said Trump's administration is fully intent on protecting the security of citizens of the United States from all cyber threats and stated apps such as TikTok and WeChat collected significant amounts of its users' private data and information. McEnany added that the data TikTok acquires can be sent and accessed by the Chinese government.
Officials from TikTok said they had spent the past year trying to engage in better relations with the United States government and have coordinated to address the security concerns, as reported by ABC News.
A statement by the company said that instead of a mutual relationship, what it encountered was Trump's administration ignoring facts, forced terms of an agreement without going through normal legal processes, and attempted to interfere in negotiations of private businesses.
Bringing people together
In a Friday interview, a spokesperson for TikTok said in response to Trump's latest order that the video app was meant to be used for home entertainment, self-expression, and connecting with other people through the internet.
The spokesperson noted that the company was committed to bringing joy and relaxation to families and individuals and providing meaningful careers to its users for several more years.
The video app has become increasingly popular amid the coronavirus pandemic. People around the world are kept inside their homes and have lost their normal means of communication with other people.
However, United States officials have become increasingly worried that the app's Chinese owner could be in league with the Chinese Communist Party and provide Beijing with sensitive information it has gathered from its millions of users from the United States.
According to The Hill, US lawmakers' concerns are even more compounded with the threat that the Chinese government is attempting to interfere with the November elections of the United States.
