Donald Trump said he will move as soon as Saturday to ban TikTok from the U.S., several weeks after the administration first said it was considering taking such an action against the popular Chinese-owned social video app over concerns that it’s a threat to national security.
“As far as TikTok is concerned, we’re banning them from the United States,” Trump said Friday, speaking to reporters on Air Force One. Microsoft was said to be in talks to acquire TikTok from ByteDance, the Beijing-based internet company, but Trump said he opposed such a deal, per NBC News.
Regarding banning TikTok, “I have that authority,” Trump claimed, saying he could use emergency economic powers or an executive order to enforce the decision.
But it’s not clear how a Trump order to “ban” TikTok would work — or if it would stand up in court. The Trump administration might try to threaten to punish Apple and Google if they carry TikTok in their U.S. app stores, by adding TikTok to the Commerce Department’s list of foreign entities that “present a greater risk of diversion to weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs, terrorism, or other activities contrary to U.S. national security and/or foreign policy interests.”
The U.S. government last year added Chinese telecom equipment manufacturer Huawei to the “entity list,” prompting Google and others to cut off their business with Huawei. But putting TikTok on that list would be unusual and legally dubious, James Lewis, director of technology policy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), recently told The Verge. There’s no evidence TikTok has engaged in criminal activity threatening U.S. national security, although TikTok was fined for alleged violations of the U.S.’s child data-privacy law (which the FTC is reinvestigating).
The ACLU slammed Trump’s threat to ban TikTok as harmful to free expression and pointed out that it’s technically “impractical.”
“Banning an app like TikTok, which millions of Americans use to communicate with each other, is a danger to free expression and technologically impractical,” the ACLU tweeted.
The U.S. does not have a nationwide, network-level ability to block internet content or apps, which is how China’s Great Firewall enforces censorship. India has a similar national-scale blocking capability, under which it banned TikTok along with dozens of other apps from Chinese companies in late June.
In a statement, TikTok said, “TikTok U.S. user data is stored in the U.S., with strict controls on employee access. TikTok’s biggest investors come from the U.S. We are committed to protecting our users’ privacy and safety as we continue working to bring joy to families and meaningful careers to those who create on our platform.”
TikTok also said it has hired “nearly 1,000 people” in the U.S. in 2020 alone — and that it plans to hire an additional 10,000 workers. The app has surged in popularity, particularly among teens and young adults, for creating and sharing lip-syncing music videos and other short clips. ByteDance bought Musical.ly, the predecessor app to TikTok, in 2017.
Trump’s claims he would issue some kind of ban on TikTok followed reports Friday that his administration was planning to order ByteDance to divest TikTok, under the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS).
This week, TikTok CEO Kevin Mayer responded to the U.S. government’s concerns over security and its Chinese ownership, announcing that TikTok will provide greater transparency into its operations by publicly disclosing the app’s algorithms, moderation policies and data flows. He also said the newly established $200 million TikTok Creator Fund to fund American creators on the platform will grow to over $1 billion in the U.S. in the next three years, and more twice that globally.
Some of ByteDance’s American investors, who have been seeking to acquire TikTok, have valued the app provider at $50 billion, according to a Reuters report.