Donald Trump to delay ban on TikTok for third time with 90-day extension
President Trump plans to extend a ban on TikTok for the third time, giving parent company, ByteDance, another 90 days to divest its U.S. assets.
WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump plans to again delay a ban on TikTok, allowing the wildly popular video app to continue operating in the United States for another 90 days.
Trump will sign an executive order for the 90-day extension later this week, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a June 17 statement.
"As he has said many times, President Trump does not want TikTok to go dark," Leavitt said, adding that the administration will continue to work during the 90-day period to secure a deal with TikTok so Americans "can continue to use TikTok with the assurance that their data is safe and secure."
Trump's action, which was widely expected, will mark the third time since returning to the White House that he's delayed a TikTok sell-or-ban law from going into effect after it was passed by Congress in 2024 and signed by former President Joe Biden.
The law requires TikTok's Beijing-based parent company, ByteDance, to divest TikTok's U.S. holdings or be banned from U.S. app stores and web hosting companies. The next deadline was set for Thursday, June 19.
Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have raised national security concerns with TikTok, arguing that ByteDance may be sharing U.S. user data with the Chinese government. ByteDance has denied these claims and Trump has downplayed such concerns.
TikTok, especially popular among young Americans, has 170 million users in the United States. Trump has credited his 2024 presidential campaign's use of TikTok for helping him improve his performance with young voters from his previous two elections.
Parties that have expressed interest in purchasing Tiktok include the tech company Oracle, billionaire businessman Frank McCourt's Project Liberty and Andreessen Horowitz, a California-based venture founded by billionaire investor Marc Andreessen.
During TikTok's initial Jan. 19 sell-or-ban deadline – the final full day of the Biden administration ‒ TikTok went dark for a little more than 12 hours in the United States when the ban went into effect. U.S. internet hosting services made TikTok unavailable to access, and app stores removed the app for download.
But the outage was short-lived. On his first day of office, Trump signed an executive order delaying the TikTok ban by 75 days.
Complicating the sale of TikTok had been Trump's trade war with China. Ahead of an April 5 sell-or-ban TikTok deadline, Reuters reported that a deal was in place to spin off TikTok's U.S. operations into a new company based in America. The company would have been owned and operated by a majority of U.S. investors.
But China refused to sign off on the deal when Trump imposed sweeping tariffs on Chinese imports along with goods from other countries. As a result, Trump on April 4 delayed the TikTok ban for 75 days.
After months of negotiations, Trump and Chinese officials last week announced a framework for a trade deal between the two nations in which the United States would collect 55% tariffs on Chinese imports and China would collect 10% on U.S. imports.
Contributing: Reuters and Greta Cross of Paste BN.
Reach Joey Garrison on X @joeygarrison.