The White House has said it will allow TikTok to continue operations in the US for another 90 days, extending a deadline for the popular Chinese-owned social media app to divest a stake in the platform to satisfy American law.
“President [Donald] Trump will sign an additional executive order this week to keep TikTok up and running,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said on Tuesday. “As he has said many times, president Trump does not want TikTok to go dark.
“This extension will last 90 days, which the administration will spend working to ensure this deal is closed so that the American people can continue to use TikTok with the assurance that their data is safe and secure.”
Last year, Congress passed legislation to force ByteDance, TikTok’s Chinese owner, to sell the app or face a ban in the US.
Trump has promised to “save” the app and has twice extended the deadline — first from January to April, and then from April to June 19 — after failing to deliver a deal, which requires sign-off from China.
Ahead of the April deadline, the White House was closing in on an agreement that would spin off TikTok from ByteDance and create a US company to receive new investment, diluting the stakes of Chinese investors.
Under the terms of that deal, investors, including Andreessen Horowitz and Blackstone, would have owned about half of TikTok’s US business, while large existing investors, including General Atlantic, Susquehanna and KKR, would have held about 30 per cent of the new entity.
The Financial Times has previously reported that the White House had considered other potential outside investors, including rightwing media star Tucker Carlson.
ByteDance told the White House and investors that Beijing was willing to approve the deal, according to one person familiar with the matter. But after Trump announced tariffs on China and other countries on April 2, ByteDance informed the investors that Beijing had rescinded its approval. The White House was waiting for the US-China trade tensions to ease before trying to resurrect the deal, according to the person.
In 2020, during his first term as president, Trump moved to block TikTok, writing in an executive order that its data collection “threatens to allow the Chinese Communist party access to Americans’ personal and proprietary information”.
Trump changed his approach to the platform, however, after he used it to reach younger voters in the 2024 election. In May, Trump told NBC that he had “a little warm spot in my heart for TikTok”.