Trump to Sign Order Demanding China's ByteDance to Divest TikTok -- Update
July 31 2020 - 3:01PM
Dow Jones News
By Katy Stech Ferek
WASHINGTON -- President Trump will require Beijing-based
Bytedance Ltd. to sell its ownership in TikTok, the popular
video-sharing app that U.S. officials have deemed a national
security risk, according to a person familiar with the matter.
U.S. officials have been concerned that TikTok could pass on the
data it collects from Americans streaming videos to China's
authoritarian government. TikTok has said it would never do so.
An order to divest would be the seventh time a U.S. president
has either blocked a deal or ordered a corporate selloff since
Congress authorized the power to intervene in 1988.
Mr. Trump has used that authority three times. In 2017, he
blocked a private-equity firm with ties to the Chinese government
from buying the U.S. chip maker Lattice Semiconductor Corp. for
$1.3 billion. In 2018, he stopped the Singaporean chip maker
Broadcom Ltd. from taking over its U.S. competitor Qualcomm
Inc.
In March, Mr. Trump ordered a Chinese company to sell its
ownership in StayNTouch Inc., a hotel-property management-software
firm, saying he had "credible evidence" it "threatens to impair the
national security of the United States."
The order to divest was earlier reported by Bloomberg News.
In addition to concerns that TikTok could collect data on
Americans, U.S. officials have been concerned that the app could be
used to spread Chinese propaganda and that the platform's
moderators could be censoring content to appease Beijing.
The review of TikTok has centered around ByteDance's 2017
acquisition of a similar video-sharing platform called Musical.ly,
a Shanghai-based platform that had built a strong U.S. user base.
After the acquisition, Musical.ly's platform was discontinued, and
users who wanted to share videos could continue to do so on
TikTok's platform.
Write to Katy Stech Ferek at katherine.stech@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
July 31, 2020 14:46 ET (18:46 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2020 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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