President Donald Trump on Thursday, August 6, 2020, issued an executive order to ban the social media app, TikTok, from operating in the United States from the next 45 days if it is not sold by its Chinese parent company ByteDance, CNN reported.
The order does not state that a certain amount of money from the sale needs to be sent to the U.S. Treasury Department, which the president has been insisting on for several days.
According to CNN, the order alleges that TikTok “automatically captures vast swaths of information from its users, including Internet and other network activity information such as location data and browsing and search histories. This data collection threatens to allow the Chinese Communist Party access to Americans’ personal and proprietary information — potentially allowing China to track the locations of Federal employees and contractors, build dossiers of personal information for blackmail, and conduct corporate espionage.”
It also claims that the platform censors “content that the Chinese Communist Party deems politically sensitive” and “may also be used for disinformation campaigns that benefit the Chinese Communist Party, such as when TikTok videos spread debunked conspiracy theories about the origins of the 2019 Novel Coronavirus.”
The order states, “The following actions shall be prohibited beginning 45 days after the date of this order, to the extent permitted under applicable law: any transaction by any person, or with respect to any property, subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, with ByteDance Ltd. (a.k.a. Zìjié Tiàodòng), Beijing, China, or its subsidiaries, in which any such company has any interest, as identified by the Secretary of Commerce (Secretary) under section 1(c) of this order.”
Source: CNN
