The United States President Donald Trump on Friday signed an executive order mandating the Chinese owned company TikTok to sell its assets to them citing privacy concerns.
The Chinese video-sharing social media network TikTok which is owed by ByteDance has up to 90 days to allow a US company to acquire the ownership of the video sharing company or risk being thrown out from the country.
It also ordered ByteDance to delete any data obtained from US TikTok orders.
The President in his executive order insists that there is evidence that makes him believe that the video sharing app might take action that will be putting the United States national security in great Jeopardy.
This is the second time in two weeks that U.S. president is issuing an executive order on Tikto, just last week Trump signed an executive order calling the wide use of Chinese apps a “national emergency.”
“The spread in the United States of mobile applications developed and owned by companies in the People’s Republic of China continues to threaten the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States,” the executive order reads. “At this time, action must be taken to address the threat posed by one mobile application in particular, TikTok.”
Trump’s latest action comes amid the heightened tensions between the world’s two largest economies.
TikTok owner ByteDance has in the past disassociated themselves from the communist nation China, assuring that its user data is safe.
“We have made clear that TikTok has never shared user data with the Chinese government, nor censored content at its request,” TikTok says.
In another act of transparency, in effort to address the US government’s privacy concerns over its app, the video sharing company in June 2020 appointed an American businessman Kevin Mayer as the CEO of TikTok and COO of parent company ByteDance.
Currently TikTok has over one hundred million users in the US. It has more than 2.3 billion all-time downloads in US alone.
US is not the first country to take action against TikTok, India government banned TikTok after the border clash with China which left dozens of Indian soldiers dead.
