Is it for real this time?
It has been 510 days since President Joe Biden signed a bill—passed with bipartisan support—to ban TikTok unless it was sold to an American company within 90 days. It has been 242 days since the Supreme Court upheld that law by a 9–0 vote three days before Donald Trump was sworn in as president.
TikTok, of course, has yet to be sold. ByteDance, the big Chinese technology conglomerate that owns TikTok, has made no apparent moves to divest it. It still retains control of the algorithm that has made the social media platform so addictive to America’s youth. The threat that caused Congress to pass the law in the first place—that TikTok might be scooping up user data and then funneling it to the Chinese government—has hardly gone away. The prospect that China could use TikTok to feed propaganda to American users hasn’t gone away either.
And yet, every time the deadline has approached since Trump took office, he has extended it—in utter disregard of the law—giving ByteDance more time to complete a deal. In April, with the deadline approaching, a deal was supposedly oh-so close, but then fell apart when Trump imposed tariffs of 54 percent on Chinese goods and China pulled out of it. Another deadline in June saw another extension.
And now, here we are again.
