US President Donald Trump signed an executive order extending by another 75 days the deadline for Chinese technology company ByteDance to sell US assets to short video app TikTok to a non-Chinese buyer or face a ban that was due to take effect in January.
“The agreement requires additional work to ensure that all necessary approvals are signed,” Trump said, explaining why he was extending the January deadline he set for the agreement, which was set to expire on Saturday.
In January, US President Donald Trump had already signed an executive order extending the operation in the United States of the short video app TikTok for 75 days, the ban on which was upheld by the United States Supreme Court.
During this time, he said, the US will not enforce the law passed by Congress last year and signed by former President Joe Biden.
Speaking to reporters in the Oval Office on 20 January, Trump responded to why he changed his mind after trying to ban TikTok in 2020, saying he was “forced to use it”.
In the spring of 2024, the US House of Representatives approved legislation that allows the social network TikTok to be banned in the country unless it is spun off from Chinese company ByteDance, which owns it. Congressmen believed TikTok posed a threat to national security because the Chinese government could force ByteDance to hand over US users’ data to it. In April 2024, US President Joe Biden signed the document, and in January 2025, days before Trump’s inauguration, the US Supreme Court upheld the law.
After the inauguration on 20 January, Trump issued an executive order directing the US attorney general to delay the law’s entry into force for 75 days. He said that TikTok would be able to continue operating in the US provided that 50 per cent of its shares were transferred to US companies.
On 2 April, The New York Times, citing sources, reported that Amazon had submitted a last-minute bid to acquire the US division of TikTok from China’s ByteDance.
The bid was sent by letter to US Vice President J.D. Vance and the country’s Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick. The newspaper’s interlocutors note that the various parties involved in negotiations to change TikTok’s ownership structure are not taking Amazon’s offer seriously. Amazon declined to comment.