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President-elect Donald Trump said he would issue an executive order on Monday that would ensure companies that helped TikTok stay on the service would not be held liable for violating the ban passed by Congress.
TikTok the service was suspended this weekend ahead of a Sunday deadline that required ByteDance, a Chinese app owner, to sell video apps to avoid a shutdown of app stores that allow downloads.
“I'm asking companies not to let TikTok stay dark!” Trump said on his Social Truth platform on Sunday.
“I will issue an executive order on Monday to extend the time before the curfew goes into effect, so that we can make an agreement to protect our national security,” the president-elect said.
Trump added that his order would ensure that the companies that helped TikTok stay on the service would face “accountability”.
Earlier on Sunday, Mike Waltz, a Florida lawmaker who will be Trump's national security adviser when he is inaugurated on Monday, told CNN that the president-elect would consider allowing continued Chinese ownership but with a “wall” to ensure that the app's data is “protected here”. US Land”.
Trump said in his Social Truth post that he would like the US to “have a 50% ownership stake in the partnership”.
By doing this, we save TikTok, keep it in good hands and allow it to say (sic) up,” Trump said. “Without American consent, there is no TikTok. With our consent, it is worth hundreds of billions of dollars – maybe trillions.”
“My first thought is a joint venture between the current owners and/or new owners where the US gets 50% ownership of the joint venture between the US and whatever we choose to buy.”
Lawmakers and security officials in the US believe that the Chinese government could use TikTok to obtain personal information of Americans to conduct espionage. TikTok denies that China has any control over the app.
The Supreme Court on Friday upheld the ban, which came into effect on Sunday. Trump on Saturday said he is “very likely” to extend the deadline for selling TikTok, which has been downloaded by 170 million Americans in 90 days.
But some Republican lawmakers, including Tom Cotton, who is the chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, and Nebraska Senator Pete Ricketts, in a statement that “there is no legal basis for any kind of 'extension'”.
One person involved in drafting the TikTok law said there is no provision in the law to be extended once the January 19 deadline has passed.
The law allowed an extension of 90 days if certain conditions were met – including evidence of “significant progress” regarding the divestiture and “binding agreements” in order to proceed – but only if they came before the deadline.
In a separate interview with CBS television, Waltz said Trump needed time to evaluate potential deals to save the utility.
“What we need between now and Monday is to buy the president some time to evaluate those deals and if it goes dark it will be very problematic,” he said.
Mike Johnson, the Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives, told NBC that he believed that when Trump said “save TikTok” the president-elect was referring to ways to “try to force real separation”.
In his first term, Trump issued an executive order to stop TikTok from operating in the US, but it was blocked by the courts. His administration also tried to engineer a deal that would ensure China would not have access to the data. China's national security laws require Chinese companies to hand over data when ordered by the government.
Trump last year voiced opposition to Congress' divest-or-ban legislation, saying it would help Facebook, which banned him from its platform for two years. Facebook competes with TikTok with its Instagram app.