The Trump administration has decided that starting next Sunday it will no longer be possible to download the TikTok and WeChat apps for national security reasons. The decision, announced by US Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross, however, provides that TikTok has until November 12 to avoid a tougher sanction that would result in a ban on any US company from providing its Internet services to TikTok.
The decision comes after Trump signed two executive orders, specifically targeting TikTok, one of the most popular social networks in the world, and the company that controls it, ByteDance. Trump has long argued that TikTok is a threat to the United States due to the close and opaque ties the ByteDance company has with the Chinese government and the large amount of data the app collects on its American users.
The first executive order, signed on August 6, banned any US person or company from doing business with ByteDance. In the second, on August 15, he gave ByteDance 90 days to give up control of the social network in the United States. The Trump administration's decision comes while discussions are still underway to divest TikTok's operations in the United States: Oracle is expected to become the new technology partner for the app's operations in the United States, after an offer from Microsoft was been rejected, but the official status is not yet.
